When lifestyle influencer Em Sheldon heard about Tattle Life, a gossip forum on celebrities and influencers, from a prominent beauty journalist in 2019, she was “horrified” to discover there was an entire thread dedicated to her on the website.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she explains over the phone. “I had one day where I read everything about myself about six years ago, and it was the worst thing I've ever done.”
Sheldon’s experience on Tattle Life was particularly harrowing; as an influencer with nearly 300,000 followers across her channels. she’s grown a thick skin in order to deflect and ignore rude comments, be they about her personality or her appearance. However, it was the malicious and frenzied attempts to find out personal things about her family that left Sheldon unsettled – and the final straw came when she found out that someone on Tattle Life had paid the land registry to find the address of Sheldon’s estranged family member (at the time, not even she knew where they lived).
After receiving very worrying messages regarding her safety and her privacy, Sheldon knew she had to take further action. She had heard about other influencer friends being doxxed on the site, or being scared to attend events.
“I had to call the police,” she explains. “I was scared. The trolling had effectively become stalking.”
While she chose not to press charges in the end, Sheldon was far from the only one who had faced problems due to Tattle Life. The infamous online forum, once dubbed ‘the most hate-filled corner of the internet’, had harangued celebrities and influencers since its inception in 2018.
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It became infamous for its thousands of threads bitterly and forensically analysing people’s lives on social media, and while it claims to have a "zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful, harmful and a team of moderators online 24/7 to remove any content that breaks rules in minutes”, many reports suggest otherwise, with many claiming damaging and harmful content is left online for years. According to Sheldon, she knew of influencers asking the site to remove private information, but never received a reply.
It has been reported that the site draws in as many as 12 million visitors a month, while the Center for Countering Digital hate estimates that Tattle Life generated $371,347 (£276,770) in Google Ad revenue within just a six month period, as reported by The Guardian.
However, an investigation launched by Irish couple and entrepreneurs, Neil and Donna Sands, resulted in the pair winning a total of £300,000 of libel damages after they successfully sued Tattle Life – and after reporting restrictions were lifted at Belfast's High Court last week, Sebastian Bond was finally able to be named as the operator of the site.
It was Alan Kennedy and Finn Duggan of Nardello & Co, a global investigations firm brought into the case by Gateley Legal, who managed to uncover Bond. It was an impressive feat, with numerous other attempts to dig into who the real founder was leading nowhere.
“We knew we had a challenge on our hands,” Kennedy tells Cosmopolitan UK. “There’s a lot of satisfaction on both our parts when we succeeded.”
Despite being experienced operators in this field, it was by no means easy to uncover Bond. Nardello & Co were bought onto the case almost three years ago and spent hours poring over the digital footprints that eventually led to Bond – himself an influencer, boasting vegan cooking account Nest & Glow, with 135,000 followers. To be able to properly ensure they had the right man behind the forum (Bond also used the pseudonyms ‘Bastian Durward’ and 'Helen McDougal’), the pair established almost a 20 year timeframe for the 43-year-old – going as far back as his university days.
Kennedy describes the process as effectively being a jigsaw identification. “It was important to see what details were in the public domain – the architecture of Tattle Life itself, the content, social media accounts, domain registration records – and seeing what was anchored to reality and what was fiction.”
Duggan adds just how granular the level of detail is needed in order to certify an identity match; the pair looked at Bond’s use of grammar throughout his 20 year internet career and looked for incidents where the style of language would marry up.
“Although Bond was very careful about being anonymous, he just couldn't help himself from using names and codes that were significant to him,” he says. “There was a Tattle Life companion site called Lime Goss, and Bond had a UK-registered company called Yuzu Zest Limited, so he clearly had a thing for citrus fruits.
“It sounds silly but when you put these things together, it can be quite sophisticated.”
Worryingly, Kennedy and Duggan believe the trolling and dis-and-misinformation, like that found on Tattle Life, may merely be the tip of the iceberg. While they cannot discuss other cases for legal reasons, they can confirm they have seen an increase in what they dub ‘black PR campaigns’ with increasingly sophisticated operators.
However, the pair believe exposing Bond may be a warning shot to others out there who think they can get away with this kind of malicious online behaviour.
“Anonymity can breed maliciousness,” Duggan says. “I hope exposing Bond has a real effect.”
Tattle Life is still active and online at the time of reporting, but Sheldon hopes Bond’s name being out there may prove to be the catalyst that finally takes the website down. She has Tattle Life blocked on her phone and internet browsers to stop herself seeing harmful content.
“There’s still so much fear out there,” she says. “I know people who have been afraid to post. I’m surprised people haven’t killed themselves because of it.
“But now, I feel some relief that this has finally been taken seriously. It shows the internet is not an anonymous place, and this level of hatred won’t be tolerated.”
Kimberley Bond is a Multiplatform Writer for Harper’s Bazaar, focusing on the arts, culture, careers and lifestyle. She previously worked as a Features Writer for Cosmopolitan UK, and has bylines at The Telegraph, The Independent and British Vogue among countless others.
