eBay and Former CEO Devin Wenig to Pay $55.7 Million for Stalking Campaign Against Blogger Couple

eBay and a group of its former top executives have agreed to pay $55.7 million to settle a civil lawsuit brought by David and Ina Steiner, a Natick, Massachusetts couple who were targeted in a corporate harassment and stalking campaign that started in 2019, according to CNBC, Wired, CBS News, and Insurance Journal.

The Steiners run EcommerceBytes, a small trade newsletter that covers online sellers and e-commerce companies. Their coverage of eBay, not always flattering, reportedly infuriated company leadership, according to Insurance Journal, which reports the campaign traces back to 2018 when then-CEO Devin Wenig criticized Ina Steiner's reporting and pushed a strategy to expose alleged errors and bias in her coverage.

What followed went far beyond a PR pushback. eBay employees sent the Steiners live spiders and cockroaches, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, pornographic magazines addressed to David Steiner, and a book titled "Grief Diaries: Surviving Loss of a Spouse." Someone listed the couple's home address on Craigslist as a destination for "singles, couples and swingers," according to CBS News. Employees created a fake Twitter account posing as an eBay seller to threaten Ina Steiner directly.

Federal prosecutors say eBay staff physically surveilled the couple, tailed David Steiner in rental vans, and attempted to install a GPS tracker on the Steiners' car, according to Wired and Insurance Journal. That GPS attempt got reported to local police, which triggered an FBI investigation and ultimately federal criminal charges in 2020.

Six former eBay employees and one contractor pleaded guilty to criminal charges tied to the scheme. James Baugh, eBay's former senior director of safety and security, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison, according to CNBC. eBay itself paid a separate $3 million criminal penalty to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts in 2022.

Text messages made the motive clear. "Take her down," Wenig wrote, according to CBS News. Former chief communications officer Steve Wymer wrote, "I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes."

The Settlement Breakdown

The civil case, filed in 2021, just reached final settlement. The Steiners will receive $48.7 million total. eBay is paying roughly $46.1 million of that, Wenig is paying $2 million, former eBay executive Wendy Jones is paying $500,000, and former executive Steve Wymer is paying $50,000, according to CNBC and Wired.

eBay is also donating $6 million to nonprofits, and Wenig is kicking in an additional $1 million to a nonprofit that protects First Amendment rights, established in Ina Steiner's name, according to CBS News.

There's no confidentiality clause in the deal. Christopher Murphy, the Steiners' attorney at Scalli Murphy Law, told Wired that was non-negotiable from day one. "As journalists, and as victims, the Steiners were very clear that they wanted everyone to see and understand what eBay did to them," Murphy said. "And from day one, they were ready to go to trial over it."

eBay was also required to issue a public statement condemning its own former employees. "What the Steiners were subjected to by former eBay employees in 2019 was wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened," the company said, according to CBS News. "We condemn, in the strongest terms possible, the employees who perpetrated and pled guilty to criminal charges." eBay says it has since replaced leadership and overhauled its internal policies and controls.

Wenig's Defense

Wenig was never charged criminally and has consistently maintained he didn't know the details of the campaign. "The harassment was deliberately done in secret and without my knowledge, as established by an independent law firm review, a federal probe, and the sworn testimony of the security employee convicted as the 'ringleader,'" Wenig said in a statement to CBS News and Insurance Journal.

Wenig has said his "take her down" text referred to a communications strategy aimed at rebutting what he saw as inaccurate reporting, not a stalking operation. No criminal charges were ever filed against him, and multiple reviews reportedly support the idea that the physical surveillance and threatening deliveries were carried out and concealed by subordinates. Whether a CEO's blunt internal language set a tone that lower-level employees ran with, versus Wenig being genuinely blindsided by rogue staff, is something the settlement itself doesn't resolve.

Ina Steiner told Wired the couple pursued the civil case specifically to understand "the kind of culture that precipitated this harassment campaign." The lawsuit gave them access to 68,000 internal documents they never saw during the federal investigation. "We were often in the dark during the federal investigation, and we were told very little as victims," she said.

David Steiner told Wired the settlement brings "some finality" but that its full meaning, compared to what a trial might have exposed, will take time to sort out. Attorneys for the couple say separate settlements have also been reached with the remaining individual defendants named in the civil complaint, closing out six years of litigation over one of the more brazen corporate retaliation campaigns against journalists on record.