Original subtitles

[♪ bright music playing]

What caused me to join Ashley Madison?

Stupidity.

I had been married for 12 years.

And I joined because I was a journalist

working on a report on why women cheat.

I had already been on two dates.

On my third date, going to that restaurant,

I was driving faster.

I had music on loud.

I was excited to get to know this person.

[♪ upbeat music playing]

I see this woman, and we sit down,

and we have a fantastic talk.

We order food, and we were drinking wine.

And she's super smart, and we have this connection.

She leaned in to kiss me, and it was there

that I realized that I had no out,

like I hadn't planned to go as far as I had.

Shh.

[exciting music]

[female anchor 1] Controversial dating website--

Ashley Madison has been hacked.

Exposing would-be cheaters.

[female anchor 2] Disturbing new developments following

the exposure of customers on the infidelity website,

Ashley Madison.

They are going to expose millions of dirty secrets.

[female anchor 3] It's a great time to be a divorce lawyer.

[female anchor 4] A significant percentage of the population

is about to have a very bad day.

[♪ instrumental music]

[♪ upbeat music]

[Noel] Long before I launched Ashley Madison,

there were affairs,

and long after I'm gone, there'll be affairs.

And so what I'm just trying to do

is help people have the more perfect affair.

[Eric] What Ashley Madison were able to do successfully

was to become part of the cultural zeitgeist.

[gasping]

[male announcer 1] Sassymadison.com.

It's not cheating if you don't know the person well.

They became the bad boys of love.

Nobody's going to have an affair

because they saw a 30-second TV commercial.

They have affairs because their life isn't working for them.

Why advertise then?

Because I'm in the business of making money.

[cheers and applause]

In 2009, Ashley Madison claimed

to have 2.7 million users,

and they were active in three territories,

Canada, the US, and Ireland.

And then they wanted to do what every tech company

wants to do, which is scale.

[Sunny] And so they decide to look at Asia

for expansion of their brand, and they go to Japan.

And within eight months, they have a million subscribers.

And now the thought is bingo.

Where else in Asia do we go?

[Claire] South Korea was the first market

that Ashley Madison entered

where what they were selling was actually illegal.

That infidelity was against the law there.

[Paul] When we launched in South Korea,

we put up a campaign basically saying even if you look like

Kim Jong-un,

dictator of North Korea, you would still have

a chance of having an affair on our site.

I think on our first day we had 40,000 people join

solely from South Korea.

And in two weeks, they shut us down.

[Sunny] And what Noel masterminds this time

is to sue the government of South Korea

for anti-business practices.

Within a few months, the website is back up,

and they repeal the law.

[Noel] Infidelity, it turns out, is pretty global.

Even in cultures where it's prohibited by law,

people still do it.

And there's really no marketplace that we

can't see us expanding into.

[Sunny] And it's around this time that Noel Biderman

starts to call himself Noel Winnerman,

and rightfully so, because he's winning,

winning, and winning.

In 2009, they claimed to have

2.7 million members.

Fast forward to 2014,

they claimed to have 22 million members.

I mean, that type of growth

I don't know is seen in any industry

other than perhaps his.

[Claire] Once tech companies have grown to a certain point,

the next logical thing to do is to go public,

do something called an initial public offering,

where you offer shares of your company on a stock exchange.

And this is also the point at which

the founders and their initial investors

cash in, make a lot of money.

There is great interest at the investor level

for institutions and individuals.

I think they just want to keep it quiet.

They want to be able to lie down in their bed at night,

look over at their spouse, and if their spouse says,

"Oh, what'd you invest in today?"

They know they invested in Ashley Madison,

but they don't want to tell them

why they think that's a good investment thesis.

[Claire] Banks have to underwrite the IPO,

and banks didn't necessarily want

to be associated with a company that was dealing in adultery.

[Paul] We were looking at whether or not

it would be viable in a European market,

specifically the London Stock Exchange because the morals

around business there weren't as puritanical

as the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ,

or the Toronto Stock Exchange.

[Claire] London, on the other hand,

might be a little bit more open

to Ashley Madison as a sin stock.

Sin stocks are stocks in something

that people have some moral questions about,

things like tobacco, weapons, gambling,

that often can outperform the broader stock market.

[Sunny] At the time, people are thinking ashleymadison.com

is a tech unicorn.

Maybe it is a company that's valued at $1,000,000,000.

Maybe he hit the jackpot.

[female interviewer 1] What's the revenue like for the site?

[Noel] We're on a quick race to about $200 million

in annual sales, and I think once we hit that,

with our profit margins,

that makes us an extremely valuable property.

It's a great internet success story.

[♪ upbeat music playing]

[Claire] Avid Life Media was going into

this IPO attempt in 2015,

making some big claims.

[Paul] You know with money markets,

people throw out numbers all over the case.

We never put a number out there.

But I saw $500 million to, you know,

upwards of $1,000,000,000.

I saw some numbers related to that.

[female anchor 5] He built $1,000,000,000 business

betting on infidelity,

25 million members in 37 countries.

We're the second biggest dating service on the planet.

This is not a kid's game.

This is an enterprise of significance.

[Charles] We were there for, I don't know, about 90 minutes.

And I moved into a place of--

of wanting to seduce her,

to go across the street to the hotel,

and she agreed,

which I did not expect.

But I froze.

I couldn't do it.

I told her, like, very quickly, it just came tripping out,

that I was a writer working on an article,

investigating the real world reasons why women cheat.

And this was a part of it.

It took her a minute to process it,

and I'll never forget the look on her face

because I'm such a garbage human being.

She threw a drink on me very melodramatically, but I'll--

so I left and went home to face wrath,

as I should have.

As I should have.

[♪ soft dramatic music]

We walked into the office.

It's only 9:00 in the morning, haven't even had a coffee yet.

If I recall, it was business as usual.

[Paul] Some of our teams opened up their--

their laptops, and there was a message.

[♪ foreboding music]

[laptop chimes]

[♪ dramatic music playing]

[music continues]

It was then kind of a full panic mode

at that point for the majority of the executives

at the very least.

And that there was a lot of worry at that point.

There wasn't a panic.

There wasn't a sense of chaos or confusion.

It was very orderly, very serious.

Somebody wanted us to shut our business down.

There was no ransom, so it was a moral play.

Shut down your business, or in essence,

I'm going to shut it down for you.

[Eric] Noel definitely looked somber and awakened,

for lack of a better way.

He was-he was certainly feeling pressure.

It became very quickly a sense of not knowing

what was up, what was down,

you know, were our futures secure,

what was going to happen.

[Claire] Impact team was essentially

blackmailing Avid Life Media

and saying that if they didn't take down Ashley Madison,

they were going to release all of this data

on all of their users,

basically the most embarrassing possible thing

that could happen for a company that marketed

itself as being discreet.

There was no way we were shutting down our business.

[male announcer 1] Isn't it time for ashleymadison.com?

That wasn't going to happen.

[♪ suspenseful music]

[Paul] The individual or individuals responsible

communicated with one journalist,

and that was Brian Krebs.

At the time, I think that there were two main

security blogger experts that everyone was turning to,

and that was Brian Krebs and Troy Hunt.

Brian Krebs is-is the guy that finds the bad guys.

Like, he is the one that is always able to like,

track down interesting stories and getting detail out of them

that no one else does.

I would say he is the most respected

cybersecurity reporter in the world.

[♪ instrumental music playing]

[Brian] I'm an independent investigative reporter.

I worked at The Washington Post for about 14 years

before I launched the blog krebsonsecurity.com.

And I write mainly about cybercrime.

You work as a reporter long enough,

you start to get a sense for when something might be,

A, exclusive, at least for the time being

and, B, might not be so if you sit on it for very long.

I got that feeling immediately.

It was a Sunday evening,

and I was getting ready to just call it a night.

And I got a notification through the contact form

on my site

that said Ashley Madison had been breached,

and it had links to a number of files

that could be downloaded.

And so I grabbed those and looked at them.

It was a few dozen people's information.

So it was just a matter of being able to verify it,

using information in there

that I can independently confirm.

Helpfully, one of the documents that the hackers leaked

was a spreadsheet of every employee's

cell phone number and email address.

And so I just looked at the top of the list.

Noel Biderman was at the top.

I called his cell phone, and he answered the first ring,

and I said, "Hi, it looks like you're having a bad day."

And he said, "Yeah, we're having a bad day."

He was very rushed.

We only talked for three or four minutes,

and he said they had strong suspicions

of who might have been behind it.

They thought it was possibly, if not a former employee,

then somebody who had had some kind of access

to their systems before.

And he even said they were on the cusp

of figuring out who it was.

That was the easiest verification I think

I've ever had to do for a breach because, you know,

it's not often you get the CEO's cell phone number,

and he answers on a Sunday.

I put up a story about an hour after that.

And nobody likes to put up big stories on a Sunday night,

but that's the way it goes.

The first time I heard about the website Ashley Madison

was when Brian Krebs broke the news

of this data breach of this company.

Immediately, this breach seemed significant.

The Impact Team was threatening to release the user data

after 30 days, and if this data became public,

it could mean some significant consequences.

It spread slowly at first, right?

And then it exploded.

Security breach making news

for a lot of reasons this morning.

Hackers have attacked the dating website Ashley Madison.

This is not the kind of going public they wanted.

[notifications chiming]

[Brian] The next couple of days we got more traffic

to the site than we get normally

in a couple of months.

It was pretty ridiculous.

Probably to this day, the biggest scoop I've ever had.

Thousands of Australians could be feeling

a little uneasy tonight.

There might be a few nervous people out there this morning.

37 million users.

News story after news story came out about it,

so massive, massive

international media attention.

[♪ instrumental music playing]

[Brian] There was a month between when they announced

the hack and when they threatened

to release the data.

Clock's ticking.

[clock ticking]

Are they really going to

release it on the internet just...

It just seemed like a bad threat from a movie.

We weren't just talking about

bits of user data,

like email addresses or profile information.

We were potentially talking dick pics.

[Tom] These hackers are threatening to make public

some embarrassing very personal details.

[female anchor 6] Customers' sexual fantasies.

This is not a site to share recipes.

[clock ticking]

[♪ instrumental music playing]

I remember my friend told me about the hack.

And I was like, "What?"

People were laughing at it, right?

Like they were thinking like,

"Oh, well, you know, those people,

they're getting what they deserve."

My spouse actually mentioned it,

and she had no idea.

I mean, if she confronted me about it,

yeah, I'd probably admit it.

But well, that would be the end of the relationship, but--

but I would never tell her.

[♪ instrumental music playing]

[Marvin] I turned on the news and heard that

the site was hacked.

And that's when it dawned on me,

oh, my God, you know, I've got my address,

my phone number,

my profile with my fantasies, desires.

And my life style is a swinger.

I joined Ashley Madison.

I was hoping to meet people

that were in the swingers lifestyle.

The last thing I ever thought about

was potentially being hacked.

[Charles] The hack was surreal.

[bell ringing]

Waking up, it's a normal morning.

You go in, you brush your teeth, you come out,

you make coffee, you open up your laptop,

and there are 20, 30 emails from producers

and news stations and radio stations

that wanted my take on what had happened.

Can you just give me some details

on who exactly you found on the site?

Uh, sure. I went in with a simple hypothesis,

which is why women are cheating.

Women are there to feel like women,

desired, wanted, and needed beyond just housework

and work and finances and all the things

that go with cohabitation.

I know that the woman I took to the restaurant

didn't deserve what she got.

Like, it just tumbled out of my mouth,

where I was like, I'm a journalist

working on a report on why women cheat.

She didn't know what to do.

So the only thing she said was, you know,

"So this was all bullshit?"

And I had no answer.

Well, and by the way, I didn't cheat,

so just to kill the conclusion of the article.

You can read it at yourtango.com, but I didn't--

I didn't cheat.

Just because I didn't follow through with it

doesn't mean that I didn't do something.

And that's what infidelity is really all about, isn't it?

It's not just a sexual act.

This was emotional infidelity.

So in retrospect, the entire activity

of writing the article brought out

all the cracks in my marriage.

Then the hack happened two and a half years

after my article went out.

I had been in marriage counseling,

trying to figure out

if we were going to save our marriage,

and this thing that I had done

came back up again

when we didn't plan on it coming back up again.

It was-it was very

exciting and terrible in my house during that time.

[clock ticking]

[male anchor 1] The American blogger

who broke this story says

the hackers targeted Ashley Madison

because the company lied to its customers.

[Claire] Ashley Madison had a feature called full delete.

You would pay a $19.99 fee and that the site would totally

pull every trace of you ever having used

the site from the servers.

[Joseph] And they were making, you know, 1.7 million a year

or something like that from just

selling something that nowadays would

just be an ordinary feature.

[Claire] People who had paid for the paid delete feature

still had, you know, many personally identifying details

that were kept in those databases on the servers.

[anchor] Ashley Madison yesterday suspended fees

for users who want to delete their accounts

after hackers threatened to expose millions of users.

[Paul] We recognized immediately that we had

let down our members, even if it was just a threat

to release the data that they said they had.

And we did everything within our power to minimize it,

but there is a notion once the pee is in the pool,

you can't get it out.

[♪ instrumental music]

[clock ticking]

[♪ soft suspenseful music]

[Joseph] You have different sorts of hackers, right?

You have the ones that are financially motivated,

and they clearly want to get a ransom.

And then you may have hacktivists,

you know, a combination of activist and hacker.

And they will target a company

for what they see is a moral reason.

[Brian] If they're not asking for money,

that you have to assume they're motivated

by a set of beliefs that you probably don't understand.

That's enough to strike the fear of God

into a lot of people.

But if you believe the Impact Team hackers,

they claim to have been inside their networks

for months or years.

And it's fair to say that the tension and the anxiety,

I think, for a lot of users was really ramping up

the closer to that date that we got.

You have a website catering to cheaters

that promised to safeguard everybody's information.

Turns out, they break that vow.

And now the adulterers are all upset.

So it turns out that-- - Exactly.

Karma is about as much of a bitch

as your soon to be ex-wife.

It's not often that a big company,

irrespective of what they do...

gets hacked that completely.

And everybody's kind of like, "Yes."

[clock ticking]

[♪ instrumental music]

On August 18, the Impact Team finally followed through,

and they released this cache of data on the dark web.

They wrote a very nice little press release.

They included a convenient link to a Torrent file.

Torrent's just like...

Just broadcast as much as we can as fast as we can.

[Joseph] Because it will automatically

start to share the data with others,

so not only have you downloaded it,

you are now helping distribute it.

[♪ dramatic music]

[Troy] It's torrented really extensively,

so it didn't take very long to get hold of it.

And it was very clear, very, very quickly

that it was legitimate.

[♪ instrumental music]

Hackers have been leaking large chunks of user data

from the website Ashley Madison.

They've put the information online,

including the names of one million people in the UK.

It immediately just grabbed international attention,

just headlines across the entire world.

There's 250,000 email addresses

from people in Sydney who signed up.

Every media outlet was trying to find names

of politicians and celebrities.

[female anchor 7] Among the high-profile victims

of the Ashley Madison hack...

[male anchor 2] At least two dozen of them

allegedly Vatican addresses.

[female anchor 8] At least two assistant US attorneys.

A lot of federal employees apparently

had a lot of extra time on their hands.

19 Kids and Counting star Josh Duggar

is leading a total double life.

[female anchor 9] Why would a man who helped build

a multimillion dollar TV empire play so fast and loose

with family values?

[Sunny] He's the star of a show called "19 Kids and Counting"

based on family values

and what a good father and husband he is.

And he's anything but that.

[female anchor 10] According to Gawker,

Duggar paid almost $1,000 to maintain

two Ashley Madison accounts under the handles Josh the Man

and Ready for this D.C., and yet all the while,

Josh was lobbying for the Family Research Council,

an advocacy group promoting conservative Christian values,

all this just months after a decade-old police report

revealed Josh was investigated for multiple sex offenses,

including forcibly fondling five girls in 2002 and 2003.

Now you've got this disgraced reality show person.

Who else is on the list?

[♪ dramatic music]

[male anchor 3] Around 15,000 of the emails traced

to U.S. government accounts,

including the State Department and Justice Department

and to top secret defense contractors,

including Raytheon.

[male anchor 4] Adultery is actually a crime

in the military.

[male anchor 5] Secretary of Defense Ash Carter

was asked whether he was aware of the breach

and whether the Pentagon is investigating.

I'm aware. Of course, it's an issue.

[♪ instrumental music]

[Brian] I started hearing from people via the contact forum

or email or Skype or every which way.

You know, "What do we do? What do I do?

I'm on there."

[♪ instrumental music]

[Per] Lots of people reached out to me

from all over the world.

And some of them were asking

can you help me delete my data?

I can't. Nobody can.

If it's out, it's out.

There were even more people contacting me and like,

could you look up my husband

to see if he was in the data leak?

[Troy] I run a data breach notification service

called Have I Been Pwned?

Pwned simply means owned or compromised,

and I'd been doing a lot of analysis of different

data breaches at the time and trying to help people

who've been impacted understand that their data

is out there floating around.

In the situation with Ashley Madison,

there are some themes.

And one of the themes I thought was really interesting

is I had multiple people, usually women,

contact me and say,

"I'm in the Ashley Madison data breach.

"The reason is I thought my husband was having an affair.

"I went to the website, I signed up,

"I caught him, marriage broke up,

"got on with my life.

And now I'm in the data breach, and I look like an adulteress."

So jeez, OK.

That's, uh... That's beyond my expertise.

[chuckling] I have no idea how to advise you on that.

[female anchor 11] Okay, so when we chatted last time,

you were thinking you would be part of the hack.

Have you looked? Have you found your name out there?

I have gone through some of the data.

It's very complicated.

[Charles] Over the next few weeks, I ended up

spending a lot of time on TV and with interviews.

And of course, it just hemorrhaged the whole thing.

When my marriage ended,

I was traumatized and devastated.

When you get married, you don't plan on it ending.

You end up not separating or divorcing a spouse.

You end up excommunicating yourself

from the only family you've ever had.

On top of it, now that your kids are a little bit older,

the responsibilities and the notions of father, husband,

those vaporize as well.

So you end up, at least for me,

I ended up trying to figure out like, "Who am I?"

Do I regret how my wife was treated

or how she felt during that time?

Yeah, 150%.

I would never ever do it again because the price is too high.

Sometimes I think you think, well,

if you want to be on a cheating website,

cheating on your wife, then you get what you deserve.

But families broken up, there's a real human toll.

[Troy] The impact on families was one of the things

that-that sort of struck me.

And I sort of looked at this,

moral judgment aside, like what is this doing to people.

The one that really got me, and I remember I read this

just before I went to bed one night,

which was probably not the best time.

But this guy says, "Tell your wife and kids

"you love them tonight.

"I shall do the same as I really don't know

if I'll have many more chances to do so."

[♪ instrumental music]

[female anchor 12] A number of websites have also emerged

to search who's in the Ashley Madison data dump.

Information spreads fast,

but it's not just like how fast the data spread,

but how fast all these other things appeared

around the periphery.

I mean, I remember, even in Australia,

there're like radio programs where people were calling up,

and they're like, we'll check the data for you

on a search site.

[Fitzy] You've rung us. You're a little bit

suspicious about your partner.

[Jo] Yeah, his hours have changed and things like this.

And when that little thing came on the news

about the Ashley Madison hack, he sort of went a bit funny.

[Fitzy] I feel like we're on "Jerry Springer," man,

because this is weird because we're putting him

into this website right now,

and his details have revealed

that he's actually on the website, Jo.

[Jo] Are you-are you serious?

[Fitzy] Yeah, I'm sorry.

[Jo] Are you freaking kidding me?

[Fitzy] Yeah, no, no.

We... Yeah...

[Jo] These websites are disgusting,

and that girl that called before,

she should be ashamed of herself.

[Fitzy] Yeah... Oh, Jo's gone.

That hasn't left me with a good feeling.

And it's just sensationalist news

at the expense of someone's privacy.

I think part of why the data

spread the way it did so fast,

so many people creating searchable databases,

the reason that happened is because people

felt like they could cast judgment on people, right?

Like, we're exposing the cheaters.

Look at them.

Feast your eyes upon these people who screwed up.

Is there sympathy you think for the victims here?

Maybe a little bit, but not that much

because I think people feel like,

well, they had it coming, these are cheaters.

They deserve to be outed.

So these hackers had a point.

[Danielle] As soon as it became searchable and accessible,

you heard that, you know,

people who are included in that release of information

had, you know, lost jobs, were hurting themselves,

devastated relationships.

But also, it made them vulnerable

to blackmail and extortion.

[female anchor 13] This morning, victims of the Ashley Madison

cheating website hack say first, they were exposed,

and now, they're being extorted.

There are cases of criminals attempting to extort

Ashley Madison's clients by threatening

to expose that they're on the list

unless payment is received.

[Troy] It's very easy to do technically.

And there's always this sort of like bottom scum of the Earth

sector of society, who will sink

to any level necessary to extract money from you.

[Marvin] It was weird. I came home from work.

I was checking my email, and I had this email

from a guy named David Jones, and never heard of him.

He said that he had my address.

He had my profile and other details

and that, "if you would like

"to prevent me from sharing this dirt,

"then you need to send exactly 2 Bitcoins

to the following address."

I was married at the time, but I was definitely afraid

that my lifestyle would be exposed to my co-workers,

my clients, people that I worked with.

I felt that, you know, if they really wanted to,

they could damage my life.

It never crossed my mind to pay them.

And, um, after speaking with my attorney,

he told me not to pay them.

So I kind of went by, you know, having faith in them.

[Kristen] I do remember there was this one guy,

who he had used the site.

He had met up with women three times.

But he had never gone further than like a lunch.

And somebody wanted Bitcoin.

Like saying, you know, I know about this.

I'm going to tell your loved ones.

Give me Bitcoin.

I just remember thinking, "Oh, buddy, like...

[inhales] don't go down this road.

But he was so fearful that his wife would find out,

because in his mind, he is like this could take my marriage,

and it was just lunch, right?

But he still gave him the money.

[♪ instrumental music]

[Joseph] So a few days later, I thought,

wouldn't it be good to actually speak

to these hackers as well?

So I reached out to somebody on the dark web,

who I believe may have a way to contact them.

They provided me with an email address.

I then wrote an encrypted email

and didn't really think much of it.

And I think about a day later, I get a reply.

When you're speaking to criminal sources

and especially hackers, as a journalist,

you kind of have to jump on the moment.

Otherwise, they are going to evaporate

into the digital ether,

and you'll never hear from them ever again.

The answers from the Impact Team are very snappy.

The tone that came across was aggressive,

triumphant, and indignant.

I'm reading out the interview

that I had with the Impact Team.

"How did you hack Avid Life Media?

Was it hard?"

"We worked hard to make fully-undetectable attack.

They got in and found nothing to bypass."

"What was their security like?"

"Bad. Nobody was watching.

No security."

"When did you start hacking them?"

"A long time ago."

"What do you think about Avid Life Media

and CEO Noel Biderman's reaction?"

"They make $100 million in fraud a year.

"Not very surprised they didn't shut down.

Maybe lawyers can shut them down now."

Obviously, there is dissonance between the idea

of the Impact Team saying

they're fighting the good fight

while also harming 37 million people.

That is something that often comes up

with hackers or hacktivists.

They can have one overriding goal,

but there is going to be collateral.

[♪ instrumental music]

[Kristen] There was this newspaper in Alabama,

an online newspaper, like a local thing,

called The Henry County Report,

that published the names of every local person,

by zip code, I think.

But then they also included nude images

of a local doctor and attorney who were in the leak.

They wrote, "Yes, Wiregrass adulterers,

"Armageddon is officially here,

and we will be updating it as more is made available."

I mean, you don't even have to read between the lines.

They were really trying

to hold these people up as sinners.

[Troy] One of these here says,

"So I got a call from our church leaders yesterday

saying my husband's work email was on..."

and I've redacted the name of the search service they used.

"Oh, my."

And I'm like, see...

So your church is not only going through

looking at their constituency

and then trying to figure out who is on there,

going through their email addresses,

plugging them on this other website,

but then has the gall to call you up

in this massive invasion of privacy

and say your husband is having an affair?

That's-that's appalling.

[Per] The problem with rumors, the problem with gossip

is that you can't really fight them.

[♪ instrumental music]

Somebody says that you've been cheating,

and how am I going to prove that

I haven't cheated on anyone?

You cannot assume that because they were registered

with a service like Ashley Madison

that they have been cheating.

There's-there's no proof of that at all.

[female anchor 14] The hacking of a website

for extramarital affairs has led to embarrassment,

concerns about blackmail, and now reports of suicides.

[male anchor 6] As of this morning,

we have two unconfirmed reports of suicides.

[male anchor 7] There are new reports this morning

that suicides, a number of them,

could be linked to the hack.

[female anchor 15] New Orleans pastor John Gibson

committed suicide after he was outed

as a user of the site for married people

seeking affairs.

[female anchor 16] Reverend John Gibson, a pastor,

a seminary professor, happily married,

two children, and no evidence he ever cheated.

[Christie] John had been called in and confronted

by his employer that his name

had been found on Ashley Madison.

A note that he had left

talked about the Ashley Madison thing.

And so we began to associate that

and realize that that was

was why he had taken his own life.

[Danielle] He wasn't alone.

There were others,

taking the most profound choice,

which is my life is not worth living at all.

I knew human wreckage was to come, and we saw it.

And it didn't take very long.

[Per] This story, again, it still haunts me after,

you know, more than seven years now, um...

because people died.

People lost their jobs all over the world.

There are many reports about it.

A Norwegian man contacted me

after I had been blogging about this,

and he said,

"I had an account with Ashley Madison."

And he said, "I'm nobody.

"I'm just a guy somewhere in Norway.

I'm married. I've got kids."

Um...

"Now I'm terrified about the fact

"that these data will become available, uh,

"to my colleagues, friends, family.

[♪ somber music]

"I can tell this to you, but-but I--

"I don't know if this helps or not,

"but I haven't cheated on my wife.

"I've been on this service for a couple of months.

I paid them with my credit card."

And he ended up committing suicide,

uh, six, seven, eight months

after the story broke.

[♪ instrumental music]

This man didn't deserve this.

His family, his wife, his kids didn't deserve this.

For all we know, he didn't do anything wrong.

[♪ instrumental music]

[♪ tense music]

[♪ instrumental music]

So as it turns out, the revelations are not over.

[male anchor 8] A third message was received

this past Thursday,

wherein the Impact Team taunts the CEO of Avid Life Media

by stating, "Hey, Noel, you can admit it's real now."

This was accompanied by the release of his emails

from Avid Life Media.

[engine roars]

It's all there, everything,

all of his secrets, all of his strategy,

all of his plotting.

It's an absolute treasure trove.

[♪ dramatic music]

This time, the information threatens to ruin Noel's life,

personally and professionally.

[♪ instrumental music]