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Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings once said that the streamer’s biggest competitor isn’t Prime Video or Disney+, it’s sleep. In Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal — a title befitting the show’s sleaziness — a former employee of the controversial website makes a similarly bold declaration. He says that their biggest competition wasn’t another dating platform like Tinder or Bumble, but the Holy Bible. In 2015, a major data breach resulted in the personal information of 37 million paying Ashley Madison customers — many of whom were devout Christians — being leaked onto the dark web.
Overnight, marriages crumbled, reputations were destroyed, and in one shocking case, a man lost his life. There’s a sobering story about hubris, hamartia, and the human desire for hanky-panky in there somewhere, but Netflix’s three-episode series — about the rise and fall of the website through which married people could exercise their adulterous urges — is unable to locate it. It settles, instead, for the standard shock-doc template — bold graphics, fast cutting, and zero insight, all to mask its own inadequacies. In that regard, Ashley Madison: Sex Lies & Scandal is sometimes as duplicitous as the people it covers.
It approaches the case through various perspectives; we have a Christian YouTuber who appears to be on the perpetual verge of bursting a vein; then there are multiple former employees, all middle management or below; there’s also a grieving widow. All of them were negatively impacted by the leak. It’s perhaps telling that the only person with the healthiest relationship of anybody featured on the show is a dominatrix clearly enjoying their open marriage. To her, Ashley Madison was an avenue through which she and her husband could express their deepest desires, live their wildest fantasies. No harm, no foul. But to the others, the website was no different than a drug dealer.
Ashley Madison began operations at the peak of the Dotcom boom at the turn of the century. The novice founders went with what they thought was a rather catchy tagline: “When monogamy becomes monotony.” It didn’t exactly move the needle. They realised, much to their surprise, that the average user was confusing them for wood merchants because they were misreading ‘monogamy’ as ‘mahogany’. It wasn’t until a brash new CEO named Noel Biderman was roped in that the website’s fortunes changed. Along with his boundary-pushing attitude, Biderman also brought a new tagline, one that would become synonymous with the site and contribute massively to its growth and infamy: “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Biderman isn’t featured in the series — he’s one of the many key figures that are conspicuously absent from the story — but he’s mentioned frequently, and seen often in archival footage. The filmmakers also use rudimentary re-enactments to underline the high drama that was felt inside the Ashley Madison headquarters in Toronto when the cyber attack was launched. Biderman brought in a couple of Swedish cybersecurity experts — read, hackers — to fix the mess. But for some reason, the series doesn’t exactly portray them as entirely competent. Nor does it attempt to figure out who carried out the attack, or what their motivations were.
And this is exactly the sort of indecision that leaves you with a show that can alternatively feel like an indictment of corporate greed, a vague takedown of media ethics, and a half-hearted examination of modern relationships. Nor does it ever try to set foot outside the United States, even though Ashley Madison had customers across the globe. Indeed, a significant portion of them were from India; the website even had a localised tagline: “Your parents arranged your marriage, let us arrange your affair.” Including International voices would’ve only brought fresh perspective to the series; not everybody might have reacted to the fallout like white Americans did.
The middle-aged lady whose husband took his life because his name was outed in the leak — this is by far the biggest tragedy of this whole fiasco — frequently points fingers at the ‘witch hunt’ that unfolded following the hack. A devout Christian herself, she quotes from scripture: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Her comments appear to be directed at the journalists who hungrily sifted through the leaked data for names they recognised, and subsequently published them on their respective portals.
Nobody is willing to address the dubious ethics of acquiring and then examining what was essentially stolen data. One journalist brushes it aside by saying that this wasn’t a concern back in 2015, without doing nearly enough to identify the perpetrators of the cyber attack. Another reporter can’t seem to stop cackling at the company’s downfall, which would be difficult to excuse even if the downfall hadn’t explicitly caused human collateral damage. “It was like Ted Bundy died in a car accident,” one former employee says about the public’s reaction to the Ashley Madison hack. But the collective schadenfreude that the self-righteous celebrated cannot erase the damage caused by the website. While one man lost his life, countless others were scammed out of their hard-earned cash. Some were thrown out of their jobs. Karma isn’t a good enough excuse for what happened to them. It absolves the real culprits of accountability. If only Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal prioritised sensitivity over shock value.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal
Director – Toby Paton
Rating – 1.5/5
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