A couple from Massachusetts is suing the online auction website eBay Inc. after the Department of Justice (DOJ) fined it $3 million for a targeted campaign of harassment, stalking, and emotional abuse orchestrated by seven employees of the company.
David and Ina Steiner operate the blog and newsletter EcommerceBytes which publishes news about eBay, a buying-and-selling service based in San Jose, California, and other retailers.
Authorities say several eBay executives began formalizing a plan to scare and intimidate the Steiners after they published two articles in 2019 that were critical of eBay leadership.
One article detailed a relatively unknown plan from eBay executives to build a “NYC pub-style lounge” on its corporate campus while the other discussed a lawsuit accusing Amazon of poaching eBay’s sellers.
Frustrated by the Steiners’ articles, a group of eBay employees conspired to retaliate, court records show.
They sent the couple threatening messages online and mailed unsettling items to their home—including a box of live spiders and fly larvae, a box of cockroaches, a blood-stained pig mask, a funeral wreath, and a book about surviving the death of a spouse.
“EBay’s actions against us had a damaging and permanent impact on us—emotionally, psychologically, physically, reputationally, and financially—and we strongly pushed federal prosecutors for further indictments to deter corporate executives and board members from creating a culture where stalking and harassment is tolerated or encouraged.
“We launched our news site in 1999 to help regular people and small businesses succeed in selling online—when sellers succeed, so do the platforms on which they sell,” they wrote.
“We were targeted because we gave eBay sellers a voice and because we reported facts that top executives didn’t like publicly laid bare.”
The Epoch Times reached out to the Steiners and their attorneys but did not receive a response before publication.
The monitor would supervise eBay to guarantee the company had taken remedial steps to “prevent the recurrence of misconduct.”
The felonies were witness tampering, two counts of stalking the two victims through interstate travel, two counts of stalking the victims through electronic communications, and obstruction of justice.
The court cases were filed in the District of Massachusetts.
‘Truly Deranged Behavior’
“This case really stands out as one of a kind where they really took the kind of censorship effort off platform,” Jake Denton, a research assistant in the Tech Policy Center at The Heritage Foundation told The Epoch Times.“It stands out as an extreme case.
“It’s truly deranged behavior.
“I think what this shows you is that these people who work at these flashy companies are not ... moral high ground type folks. They’re not above us, they’re really in some cases the lowest of the low.”
Attorney Larry Walters, an expert on constitutional rights and the First Amendment, told The Epoch Times that eBay’s actions in this case far exceed what other similarly-sized companies have done in the past to quash their critics.
“More often, we see companies using defamation actions to silence critics in the hopes that the expense of defending the defamation action will cause those critics to take down the comments or retract unfavorable statements,” he said.
“We have not seen any similar actions by large, publicly traded companies designed to punish individuals for expressing their views or publishing information about the businesses,” Mr. Walters added.
“The company’s employees and contractors involved in this campaign put the victims through pure hell, in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting and protecting the eBay brand,” Mr. Levy said.
“We left no stone unturned in our mission to hold accountable every individual who turned the victims’ world upside-down through a never-ending nightmare of menacing and criminal acts.”
The lead executive, James Baugh, charged as the “mastermind” of the operation, was sentenced in 2022 to 57 months in prison. He left eBay in September 2019.
David Harville, former director of global resiliency, left eBay in 2019 and was sentenced in 2022 to two years in prison.
EBay’s then-CEO, Devin Wenig, resigned in September 2019 but said it was unrelated to the harassment campaign and the investigation that followed.
Mr. Wenig was not charged with any crimes.
Executive Misconduct
The harassment of the Steiners started in August 2019.Mr. Wenig was angry with the couple about their coverage of the company, court records show. He sent a message to former eBay Chief Communications Officer Steve Wymer that said: “If you are ever going to take her down ... now is the time,” according to court records.
Mr. Wymer forwarded Mr. Wenig’s message to the company’s senior director of safety and security, Mr. Baugh. In that communication, documents show Mr. Wymer called Ms. Steiner a “biased troll who needs to get burned down.”
EBay initially hired an outside PR team that recommended promoting company-friendly content to counteract EcommerceBytes by lowering its internet search ranking, court records show. That plan was seemingly rejected by company executives.
In addition to the threatening packages sent to the Steiners’ home, the co-conspirators published their address and phone number online and encouraged strangers to knock on their door for sexual encounters and non-existent yard sales and parties.
Employees sent an emergency plumber to their home in the middle of the night, ordered multiple pizza deliveries, and even scrawled messages on the fence outside their home.
Mr. Baugh eventually traveled to Boston with Mr. Harville to spy on the couple and put a GPS tracker on their car, according to authorities.
The Steiners’ garage was locked when Mr. Baugh and Mr. Harville arrived, prosecutors said. So they purchased tools to break into the garage but left after their activity was discovered and reported by local police scanners, which were being monitored in real-time by several eBay employees in California.
Company employees created fake social media accounts on other platforms, such as X—then known as Twitter—to harass the couple.
They used the Steiners’ email address to sign up for newsletters from organizations including an irritable bowel syndrome patient support group, the Satanic Temple, and the Communist Party of the United States, court documents allege.
They also mailed pornographic magazines to their neighbor’s home with Mr. Steiner’s name on them.
These employees initiated the harassment campaign to “distract the Steiners from publishing EcommerceBytes, to alter the website’s coverage of eBay, and to gather information that the [eBay employees] could use to discredit the Steiners and EcommerceBytes,” according to court documents.
They used extensive steps to conceal this harassment campaign from authorities and investigators from their company, including the use of prepaid debit cards, anonymous email accounts, virtual private networks, and prepaid cell phones.
They also ran expenses related to their efforts through an outside contractor to hide them. They forged records, destroyed evidence, monitored law enforcement communications to avoid detection, and lied to investigators, court records show.
“This was a determined, systematic effort by senior employees of a major company to destroy the lives of a couple in Natick [Massachusetts] all because they published content that company executives didn’t like.
“For a while, they succeeded, psychologically devastating these victims for weeks as they desperately tried to figure out what was going on and stop it,” Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling told reporters in 2020 after the eBay employees were charged.
“The company’s employees and contractors involved in this campaign put the victims through pure hell, in a petrifying campaign aimed at silencing their reporting and protecting the eBay brand,” Mr. Levy said.
“We left no stone unturned in our mission to hold accountable every individual who turned the victims’ world upside-down through a never-ending nightmare of menacing and criminal acts.”
Authorities say the eBay employees lied to police about the company’s involvement in the stalking and harassment while simultaneously lying to company lawyers about their actions.
Mr. Baugh showed his co-conspirators a picture of a “Samoan gang.”
He told them that if the harassment campaign failed to achieve its intended purpose, he would send the gang to the Steiners’ home.
EBay’s Response
Current eBay CEO Jamie Iannone denounced the company’s and the former employees’ actions in 2019, calling them “wrong and reprehensible.”“EBay remains committed to upholding high standards of conduct and ethics and to making things right with the Steiners,” he added.
The $3 million fine was the highest possible criminal penalty for the listed charges.
In their statement on Jan. 11, the Steiners emphasized the importance of fighting back against companies trying to engage in unlawful censorship.
“After today’s announcement, we remain determined to push for answers and do whatever we possibly can to ensure that no corporation ever feels that the option exists for them to squash a person’s First Amendment rights. It’s that important.”
