Last week, the creator of anonymous trolling website Tattle Lifewas unmasked. After Neil and Donna Sands from Northern Ireland won a landmark £300,000 defamation case against the forum, the courts named the owner as vegan food blogger Sebastian Bond, 43, also known as Bastian Durward.
Tattle Life was set up seven years ago as ‘a commentary website on public business social media accounts’. The site says that they ‘allow commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain’.
But it’s also been described by The Guardian as 'the most hate-filled corner of the web'. As someone who has got a thread dedicated to myself on Tattle Life, I have to agree.
It was back in 2019 when I discovered people discussing me on the site. Having worked on women’s magazines for a decade, in 2011 I set up a mummy blog while on maternity leave from my job at More! magazine.
Instagram soon followed and my audience grew modestly over the years. Lots of us bloggers would quietly read the threads on Mumsnet dedicated to us. I was rarely mentioned by the anonymous posters and I viewed it as a free focus group – a way of knowing what rubbed my followers up the wrong way.
But when Tattle Life launched and became the preferred forum for blogger and influencer bashing, I realised that in comparison, Mumsnet was like a Vicarage tea party. People on Tattle seemed particularly vicious and without the Mumsnet moderators keeping people in line, anything was fair game.
Reading my Tattle thread became impossible to resist. It was like overhearing colleagues slag me off in the office kitchen, and being unable to stop listening in. ‘Tattlers’ criticised my body, said I’d piled on the pounds, called me ‘try-hard’ and ‘desperate’, and said unkind things about my kids.
One day in 2021, I was at home with my twin toddlers when I realised that looking at Tattle had become a form of self-harm. As the site loaded up on my phone, I’d get a rush of adrenaline, as I waited to see if my name appeared near the top of the threads list indicating my thread had new comments. My heart would pound as I tapped on my name. Reading what was being said about me would usually make me feel sick and panicky. The comments would stick in my mind, with my inner critic reminding me of them regularly.
But that day, playing in the garden with my daughters, it dawned on me that what was happening in front of me was what really mattered. This was my real life and these were the people who were important to me. Not anonymous people on the internet who seemed to relish in gossiping about others. Reading it wasn’t serving me in any way. Since that day, I haven’t looked at a single word that's been written about me on Tattle Life.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m open to feedback and happy to get into a conversation about lots of things, but this anonymous forum isn’t there to give helpful, constructive criticism, it’s there to tear people down.
I’ve got off lightly on Tattle Life compared with many. Others have been stalked, had their children targeted, been visited by social services, developed PTSD and even had suicidal thoughts.
Rachel Hambleton, who posts online as @parttimeworkingmummy wrote online this week: ‘In 2019 when I was heavily pregnant I was directed to that website and spent months reading the most horrific, devastating lies about my family, friends and I.
‘My children were ripped apart & my whole world felt like it was spiralling and there was nothing I could do to stop it. [I had] A newborn baby and I no longer wanted to be alive.’
Well-known faces like Stacey Solomon, Ashley James, Luisa Zissman and Mrs Hinch have all spoken about being targeted by the anonymous trolls on Tattle. This week, beauty creator Caroline Hirons called it ‘hate-filled’ and ‘demonic’, describing it as ‘systemic persistent, consistent abuse… death threats, if you didn’t see it with your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe it existed’.
But rather than dismissing the conversation on this site as ‘just gossip’ or seeing it as a valid space for highlighting online injustice, Jennifer Cox, author of Women Are Angry has a different view. She says that most women are dealing with silent rage, simmering beneath the surface and that trolling can be a way of them venting this anger in a socially acceptable way.
‘There are lots of reasons that I think it happens,’ she told me. ‘I think envy and loneliness are key contributors. But I think there is real violence and there is real aggression.’
Jennifer points out that in a world where patience is a virtue and being a good girl is the goal, women are never allowed to truly express their anger. ‘We’re taught not to have it out, not to just say the thing in front of the person. We've learned to do it behind their backs and Tattle feels like a specifically-designed platform or tool to continue doing that.’
Nicky Denson-Elliott, founder of The Wilder Collective, says that internalised misogyny is a big part of the problem. ‘This isn’t just about one man with a website,’ she wrote this week. ‘It’s about the systems that taught us it’s normal – even entertaining – to deconstruct women in public. To make gossip feel like some twisted form of justice.
‘A man created a forum to profit from women attacking women,’ she continued. ‘He monetised female insecurity.’ And he’s monetised it in a big way – it’s thought Tattle owner Bond has made millions from the site.
So does this spell the end of Tattle, and the kind of conversations that take place on it? There’s talk of more legal action mounting against Bond and the individual people posting comments, with psychologist and women’s trauma expert, Dr Jessica Taylor, organising affected people to take government and criminal action. ‘This isn’t gossip,’ she said online this week, ‘this is stalking.’
I will be watching with great interest to see if anonymous individuals are unmasked by the courts and whether this has any impact on this culture of picking apart lives for entertainment.