The unravelling of 'trolls' paradise' Tattle Life

"It has become known as one of the nastiest corners of the internet", an online forum that became a "breeding ground for abuse, harassment and threats" aimed at celebrities and influencers from Katie Price to Mrs Hinch, said The Observer.

Tattle Life – founded in 2018 as a platform for "commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetise their personal life as a business" – is a "trolls' paradise", said The Guardian.

But, to the shock of its millions of mainly UK-based users, a lengthy defamation case has exposed its pseudonymous female founder "Helen McDougal" as a 41-year-old man called Sebastian Bond – who is a (vegan food) influencer himself.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

'Pitting women against each other'

Katie Price is one of many public figures who has been subject to "relentless trolling" on Tattle Life, said the BBC. The glamour model is the topic of hundreds of threads attacking her looks and relationships, and her disabled son Harvey. Price told the broadcaster that the "constant and disgusting abuse" on the platform took a toll on her mental health and contributed to a suicide attempt.

The defamation and harassment lawsuit that eventually unmasked Bond was brought by County Antrim couple Neil and Donna Sands, following years of abuse and trolling on the site about their businesses and their personal life. In 2023, the couple were awarded £300,000 in damages in Belfast's high court but it was only this month that reporting restrictions were lifted, and the real identity of Tattle Life's founder was unmasked.

Many celebrities and influencers were "shocked" to discover the "woman" running the site was a 41-year-old man with a vegan influencer Instagram account called Nest and Glow. Donna Sands, however, told the Daily Mail that she was "not surprised that it was a man pretending to be a woman and pitting these women against each other – driving them to their darkest places".

Investigators exposed Bond using "his own site's preferred methods", said Marina Hyde in The Guardian: "obsessively tracking his public digital footprint" and "searching for chinks in his armour". Bond has opted to "vanish", rather than "face his own music", and is rumoured to be lying low somewhere in Thailand.

'Scrambling' to delete accounts

Tattle Life boasts 12 million visitors a month and hosts more than 22 million threads tearing apart "mostly female and mostly British" influencers and celebrities, said The Independent. The Sands are not the first of those targeted to fight back. Beauty writer Sali Hughes, who had been the subject of "malicious threads" for years, took part in a Radio 4 documentary back in 2022, describing the site's users as "scuttling back to their sewer to mock and belittle me".

But why would anyone "take the time to create a false identity to attack" celebrities in this way? According to one Tattle user, it felt "cathartic" to scroll through negative comments about influencers who get told every day how "wonderful" their lives are. Having an anonymous user account creates a disconnect between the user and the person they are posting about, making it easier for "intense and abusive" comments to spiral, psychologist Tara Quinn-Cirillo told The Independent.

If other celebrities and influencers take legal action, Tattle Life will have to "hand over the personal details of users" who have made defamatory comments about them, said The Times – and that means Tattle Life trolls are now "scrambling to protect their identities" and delete their accounts, said the Daily Mail. Many have taken to Reddit, lamenting their contributions as "Tattlers" or sharing their fears of being "outed".

After setting out to write an investigative piece about the site a few years ago, I became a "lurker" on Tattle Life, said Saoirse Hanley in the Irish Independent. I didn't make any posts but it quickly became "such a compulsion to check for updates". I saw "harmless gossip" cross into viciousness where certain celebrities can "do nothing right" in the eyes of thousands of "anonymous strangers". No one is "outlawing gossip" but the downfall of Tattle Life can only be seen as positive: if you're desperate to dish the dirt on an influencer you dislike, "get a journal or make the most of your group chats" instead.