> Zed Book Club / ‘Exposed’ Gives New Meaning to the Ashley Madison Website Hack
Photo: Guillaume Boucheris
> Bookshelf
‘Exposed’ Gives New Meaning to the Ashley Madison Website Hack
A new Canadian Audible audiobook lends a non-judgemental ear to the mostly male cheaters who are still reeling from the fallout / BY Rosemary Counter / January 29th, 2024
Though millions of people would rather forget it, anonymous hackers tossed a bomb into countless marriages in July 2015, exposing spouses who were harbouring secrets. They’d signed up with Ashley Madison, the Toronto-based “networking” service founded in 2001 with a slogan that says it all: “Life is short. Have an affair.” Whether they’d had affairs or not, the mostly male clientele was exposed when their full names, emails and home addresses – even their sexual preferences and proclivities – were released onto the dark web. “Welcome to your worst f-cking nightmare,” read the hacker(s) foreboding note.
Nine years later, despite a ton of effort by online sleuths, the anonymous hacker or hackers – they called themselves “The Impact Team” – remain unknown. But maybe that doesn’t matter much, as a new Canadian Audible Original audiobook proposes. Exposed: The Ashley Madison Hack instead explores the hack from the other side: the users themselves, outed and exposed, who are still facing the fallout. Spoiler alert – the controversial dating website is somehow still going strong. (More on that later.)
Audible.ca producer Katy Davis was charged with the monumental task of narrowing down thirty-seven million on-the-sly cheaters to just a handful of those willing to talk, while U.K. journalist and co-writer Sophie Elmhirst had the unique challenge of trying to suss out and understand their stories, however unseemly on the surface. “I inevitably went into this with some judgment, with a sense of who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong, but people are always more complicated than they seem,” Elmhirst says in a Zoom interview from London.
Some, like “Eric” and “Maddy,” whose clandestine affair turned to real love, end happily (unless you’re Eric’s ex-wife, I suppose). Others, not so much. There’s “Alice,” who was midway through a vacation when she checked the hacker’s leaked list as a joke, only to find her husband’s name and email among the philanderers. “Paul,” is a cheater, sure, but also lonely and sad, and the characters constantly challenge the listener’s notions of sympathy and blur easy distinctions between right and wrong.
However you interpret them, Exposed interviewees are surprisingly candid. Names are changed and sometimes actors are used, but the stories themselves spare no detail. “For so many of them, the experience had been so secretive and traumatic that people seemed almost relieved to finally let it out and be transparent and candid about difficult things,” says Elmhirst. Her chat with “Paul,” for example, was the first and only time he’d ever told anyone about his time on Ashley Madison.
This listener spent a few days having nightmares that my husband cheated on me (and then being mad at him in real-life, naturally). And my neuroses are not uncommon. “Working on this audiobook prompted my husband and I to have a lot of interesting and unexpected conversations, not just about marriage, intimacy and infidelity, but about who has the right to know about a person’s private behaviour,” says Brooklyn-based co-writer Maria Luisa Tucker.
Exposed producers chose French-Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse as their presenter, who, as young Shauna on Showtime’s Yellowjackets, is secretly pregnant with her best friend’s boyfriend’s baby. “This is my first audiobook,” 23-year-old Nélisse told me via Zoom from Los Angeles, “even though I’d never heard Ashley Madison. It was created when I was, like, born.”
She took to Google, obviously, where she found Ashley Madison still up and running, still attracting new users and still using its usual slogan. The lack of consequences is a kick in the face for former customers who had their lives ruined by the site’s lax privacy standards. Worse still was this big revelation: 90 to 95 per cent of the site’s users were men and, to make up for the lack of available women, Ashley Madison turned to AI chatbots.
While other dating sites try to combat bots from infiltrating their platforms, Ashley Madison actually created and encouraged them. Seventy thousand “fembots,” as Exposed calls them, used AI to appear human, with vague pre-programmed messages, like “so what brings you here?” and “free to chat?” Once a man responded, it got worse: “I used to sleep with my friend’s boyfriends. I guess old habits die hard.” The bots sent millions of messages to Ashely Madison users, who purchased credits that allowed them to respond.
In this context, maybe listeners will be forgiving of the men caught on Ashley Madison, or maybe not, but Exposed is going to try. “My job is to show empathy and understanding for these people, despite what they did,” says Nélisse. Like Elmhirst, Nélisse had to push past a knee-jerk reaction that “they got what they deserved, and that’s it. Once you hear their stories, not to say that it’s okay, but that it’s not black and white.”