Life is Short. Have an Affair. So reads the tag line of Ashley Madison, the now-notorious online dating site for married individuals that boasts 85 million members. The site, which has been around since 2001, has for decades been the go-to for men and women seeking extramarital relationships for “when monogamy becomes monotony”, a phrase the company has trademarked. 

However, in 2015 the website was implicated in large-scale hack and the lives of more than 32 million users came crashing down. 

Now, almost a decade on and across three jaw-dropping episodes filled with tears, confessions and betrayal, Netflix’s latest documentary Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal explores the aftermath of the hack, including interviews with former members of the site, who appear on camera to talk about their experiences. 

In July 2015, an unknown group calling itself The Impact Team infiltrated the website of extra-marital dating site Ashley Madison, threatening to release the personal identifying information of users if Ashley Madison did not immediately shut down. When the site continued to operate, the group exposed the sensitive data of millions, including names, email addresses, credit card information and other sensitive data. The leak led to lawsuits and even incidents of blackmail, along with a trail of wrecked marriages and destroyed lives.

It was a scandal that broke the internet. In the gripping two-minute trailer, the leak is referred to as a “witch hunt”, the “biggest hack of all time” and a “giant whodunnit”. And while a number of public figures from reality TV stars to US government officials were exposed or said to be involved, the series centres the ordinary people affected. 

Toby Paton, the series director revealed in a statement, per Variety, that the aim of the documentary was to explore users’ attraction to the site instead of shaming them.

He shared: “Rather than berating people who joined Ashley Madison, we were much more interested in exploring why they were drawn to the site — what were they looking for? What was going on in their relationships? And crucially — what was their partner’s side of the story?”

One such couple was Sam and Nia Raden, who became famous on YouTube for sharing their Christian beliefs and seemingly perfect marriage. But when the usernames from Ashley Madison were leaked, Sam was named as one of its customers. As Rader explains in the documentary, he made an Ashley Madison account because “[He] didn’t want to leave [his] family but [he] wanted something exciting in [his] life.” His wife Nia admits on camera how she felt “betrayed’ and “infuriated”, but decided to forgive him immediately because he had not met with any women in person.

Elsewhere in the docuseries, the focus turns to the mental health impact of the scandal. Many spouses affected by the hack were not as understanding as Nia. Unsurprisingly, countless marriages ended and the episodes focus on one New Orleans teacher named John, who died by suicide after his name was included in the leak.

John’s widow, Christi, also appears in the documentary, which director Paton says was because she felt it important to “tell her story”. “She was drawn to the fact that we weren’t making a series that was all about how awful people who cheat are,” he told Variety. “The thing I think she wanted to more talk about was the importance of forgiveness and how we should try and understand the struggles and difficulties that people are going through. Because she feels that the reason why John tragically took his life wasn’t because he was cheating, per se, but it was because he was exposed as someone on Ashley Madison in an extremely toxic, moralising, judgmental environment where people were really keen to expose and shame anyone who was exposed in the hack without really knowing anything about them or the wider context of their lives.

“That was a point she wanted to make: how toxic and damaging that kind of public moralising can be.”

Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal is currently available to stream on Netflix.

Images: Netflix