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With as much as two weeks to kill before nuclear winter sets in, many of you will be looking to road-test your new fallout suits. In which case: can I interest you in the sensational unmasking of the founder of Tattle Life? It turns out the guy who operates the radioactively toxic gossip forum is a “vegan influencer” – I think it’s one of those new types of job, dear – and his name is Sebastian Bond. From that professional description, Sebastian would never hurt a living creature – unless it’s a mummy blogger, in which case he would gut her like a pig. Metaphorically, of course! Sorry, but that is simply the price you pay for not declaring the nappies you’re unboxing on Instagram are actually sponsored.
But I’m racing ahead. If you’re not familiar with Tattle Life, it’s an online forum that claims to be “a commentary website on public business social media accounts” – much in the way the torpedoing of the Lusitania was a commentary on the commercial cruise business. At one point Tattle Life was said to have 12 million monthly visitors. Which, to put it into context, is more than the Times and Sunday Times website gets, and considerably surpasses the visitor numbers of something like GB News. The other thing Tattle Life says about itself on its homepage is: “We have a zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful.” This is a little bit like the Racing Post saying it has a zero-tolerance policy for stories about horses, greyhounds or sports betting.
In effect, Tattle Life comprises a pulsating collection of live threads, in which anonymous users spend their lengthy wine time ignoring their own kids in order to obsessively tear down Stacey Solomon for some infinitesimal perceived mistake she’s made with hers that day. That’s it, Tattlers – you crack open another chilled box of rosé and remorselessly slag off, dox or expose this or that influencer/Instagrammer/minor rando for infringements of a code of which you’re the self-appointed enforcers. And if you don’t like that description of yourselves, boohoo. What, NOW you want accuracy and restraint?
Anyway, the site has been positively thriving like this for some years, despite regular petitions to take it down and frequent outpourings of distress from celebrities, sublebrities and whatever the class of recognition below even that is, many of whom believe it has either destroyed their professional lives and/or mental health, or had an incredibly good go at trying. Two such victims were Neil and Donna Sands, a Northern Irish couple with a clothing line and various other small businesses. Donna discovered she had been targeted by site users in 2021, when a friend alerted her to the fact that people in her office were laughing over a 45-page thread about her. Forty-five pages! I guess no snowflake in an avalanche feels responsible.
The deranged interest/abuse continued, to the point of posting her whereabouts at any given time, and drove Donna almost to the point of nervous breakdown. The pair sued Tattle Life for defamation and, after a long and complex battle, won. They were awarded a combined £300,000 in damages as well as costs – now estimated to total about £2m. But who was to pay? Tattle Life was run anonymously, and it was only a week ago that the high court of justice in Northern Ireland lifted various reporting restrictions and orders, leading to one Sebastian Bond being exposed as the operator of the site.
Many think the floodgates to further legal action will now open, but whatever Tattle Life’s fate, it’s interesting as a period piece. The site sprang up in an era when fame came to be regarded as a grasping business decision and not as a cultural accolade. Anyone who made money in the public eye was fair game for anything. And look, no one likes a grift, we can all have sympathy for people who feel they’re being missold something or other, and most of us would fear the Faustian bargain of explicitly monetising our personal lives, let alone our children. But the elevation of even tiny bits of poetic licence by individuals most people have never heard of to the level of massive consumer fraud is mad – and says so much more about the self-styled cops of our age than the robbers.
In the end, investigators got Bond via his own site’s preferred methods – obsessively tracking his public digital footprint, piecing together bits of often contradictory information, searching for chinks in his armour. The biter was bit. And, would you believe, Sebastian had pretended to be a woman on Tattle. Went by the name of Helen McDougal. “I was just not surprised that it was a man pretending to be a woman,” Donna Sands told the Mail this week, “and pitting these women against each other – driving them to their darkest places.”
So where is Sebastian Bond now? Some reports place him in Thailand, while others ran pictures of his parents’ nice house in Somerset. As for who he is … he’s a man posing as a woman in the course of drawing profit, an individual dedicated to exposure who didn’t have the nuts to reveal himself, a grifter who’d rather vanish than face his own music. In fact, so vast is the disconnect between who Sebastian really is and who he presented as for his moneymaking activities that there really ought to be hundreds of skin-flayingly vicious threads about him on Tattle Life. And yet, needless to say, there aren’t.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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