In 2019, employees of a company then worth tens of billions of dollars sent live cockroaches to a house in Natick, Massachusetts. Also a preserved fetal pig. A bloody pig mask. A funeral wreath. A book about surviving the death of a spouse.
They sent pornography to the neighbours, addressed to the couple who lived there. They sent threatening messages on Twitter. They drove to Natick to watch the house, and they put a GPS tracker on the couple's car.
The couple were Ina and David Steiner. Their offence was publishing EcommerceBytes, a newsletter read by online sellers that was sometimes critical of eBay.
On Monday, seven years later, the civil case settled for about $55.7 million.
What is actually unusual here
Not the amount. Corporations settle for large sums routinely, and $55.7 million against eBay's balance sheet is not the story.
The unusual part is who is paying.
- eBay: $46.15 million to the Steiners
- Devin Wenig, eBay's chief executive at the time: $2 million personally, plus $1 million to a charity focused on protecting First Amendment rights, donated in Ina Steiner's name
- Two other former executives also contributing personally
- About $6 million total in charitable contributions
- Roughly $48.7 million in direct compensation to the couple
Companies indemnify their executives. That is the near-universal default — the corporate entity absorbs the liability, individuals are shielded, and the settlement is written so that nobody is named and nothing is admitted.
This settlement does the opposite. eBay issued a strongly-worded statement about the conduct of three of its own former top executives, and those executives are writing personal checks.
The $1 million donation is the detail worth sitting with: a former Fortune 500 chief executive funding First Amendment protection in the name of the journalist his company's employees terrorised. That is not a standard clause. Somebody negotiated for it.
Who already went to prison
The criminal cases resolved years ago:
- James Baugh, former senior director of safety and security — 57 months
- David Harville, former director of global resiliency — two years
- Philip Cooke — 18 months
- Stephanie Popp — a year and a day
Several other former employees pleaded guilty.
Devin Wenig was never criminally charged. Prosecutors said executives were urged to go after the Steiners over their coverage; Wenig left eBay in 2019. The civil settlement is the first time he has personally paid anything in connection with the campaign, and it carries no criminal finding.
That distinction matters and should not be blurred: paying to settle is not a conviction, and he has not been found guilty of anything.
Why it happened
This is the part that gets lost in the sheer strangeness of the details, and it is the only part with any lasting significance.
Nobody was stalked over a trade secret, a lawsuit or a competitor's product. The Steiners ran a small trade newsletter, and eBay's leadership did not like what it said.
The response was a campaign designed, according to prosecutors, to intimidate them into stopping — deliveries meant to frighten, surveillance meant to be noticed, messages meant to make two people in a suburban house feel that a large company knew exactly where they lived.
The charity named in the settlement protects First Amendment rights. That is the settlement's own characterisation of what the case was about.
What to take from it
Corporate speech-suppression usually looks like a defamation threat or an ad boycott. This was the same instinct, executed by a security department with a budget.
The reason it is worth the seven years and the headlines is not the cockroaches. It is that this time the individuals paid — and that the mechanism by which a company normally makes this kind of thing disappear did not work.
