Their 2021 civil lawsuit followed criminal charges against seven people who worked at eBay and had sent them threatening messages, bizarre deliveries including live spiders, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath, and tried to attach a tracking device to their car, in 2019. The campaign started after eBay’s then-chief executve, Devin Wenig, complained about coverage and comments on the Steiners’ website, Ecommercebytes.
In a new interview with the Globe, the Steiners urged Massachusetts lawmakers to adopt the reporter shield law recently approved by the Senate and enhance the penalties in the state’s antistalking laws.
“When we started this, we were just fighting for our lives and our livelihood,” David Steiner said. “And then as this case starts to reveal itself, you see that there are bigger issues at stake . . . so there is absolutely the sense of the greater responsibility for causes related to what we went through.”
In the settlement announced on July 27, eBay agreed to pay the Steiners $46.15 million; Wenig will pay $2 million; and two other former executives will pay a total of $550,000. Charities will get $6 million from eBay and $1 million from Wenig. And in an unusual twist for such a settlement, there is no confidentiality clause and the Steiners remain free to talk about the case.
“It’s too early to tell if we have closure,” Steiner said. “Just the fact that we’re still trying to recall certain instances in this case, means that it still haunts us. . . . It’s still very difficult to sleep.”
“If I learned anything over the past seven years, it is not to trust anything,” Ina Steiner said. “It’s still taking me time to process the fact that this is over.”
In 2021, the Steiners spoke to the Globe and Ina explained “the reason we’re suing is we don’t want it to happen to anybody else,” adding, “It has to be known what was done to us.”
“That was the overriding theme and it guided us in every decision that we made,” she said on Monday. “And for that, I think, mission accomplished.”
Now, she said, the couple is entering “a phase of healing,” satisfied at least that their story has been widely told, including through ongoing news coverage and a 2024 documentary available on Amazon Prime called “Whatever It Takes.”
”I feel that there’s closure when it comes to that,” she said. “The bottom line is with the documentary, with the coverage that this is getting this week, that this can be a deterrent.”
Two years ago, lawyers for eBay sought to have the Steiners disclose some of the confidential sources they relied on for reporting about the company; the Steiners’ lawyers pushed back against the challenge.
More than 40 states have shield laws protecting journalists from turning over confidential sources in court proceedings, but Massachusetts does not. Last month, the state Senate added a reporter shield law provision to a bill expanding public records availability.
“We absolutely want to advocate for that,” David Steiner said of the Senate proposal. “And if someone wants a source on that, we are absolutely ready to speak to it.”
“We lived it,” Ina Steiner said, explaining that potential sources began to fear tipping off the couple in recent years if eBay could find out their identity. “It’s a chilling effect. And that Massachusetts, of all the states in America, should be last when it comes to this is incredible to me.”
Massachusetts does have antistalking laws, but unlike laws in California, the local statute does not provide for punitive damages, which could be needed to deter criminal stalking by large corporations or wealthy individuals.
US Judge Patti Saris, overseeing the Steiners’ lawsuit, ruled in 2024 that the couple could rely on the California law’s punitive damages provision, but eBay had planned to appeal the novel ruling. Almost all of the nearly $500 million the Steiners had sought in damages during the litigation depended on Saris’s punitive damages ruling.
“The civil stalking laws in Massachusetts, I don’t believe are strong enough,” David Steiner said. “We want to see some sort of financial or economic obligation to the victim, because what better to keep this from happening again?”
The couple said they had hoped bringing the case to trial would expose more evidence of the culpability of high-level executives such as Wenig. One reason they settled, however, was that it became increasingly clear that much of the evidence uncovered in documents turned over by eBay would not be admissible in court after the company’s lawyers objected on multiple grounds.
“If we had gone to trial, I think a fraction of the discovery — and we’ve seen 68,000 documents, we can’t unsee those documents — many of them would not have been allowed,” Steiner said.
Wenig has said he did not know about the harassment campaign while he was CEO and would have stopped it if he had known. An outside law firm hired by eBay concluded that Wenig‘s “tone was improper and unacceptable,” but found no evidence “he directed or knew that criminal acts would occur.”
The documents produced in the civil lawsuit included evidence that corporate security departments around Silicon Valley were becoming larger and more intrusive, including tracking customers who made critical comments, the Steiners said.
The ring-leader of the harassment campaign against them, Jim Baugh, was a former CIA employee who said he assisted with recruiting foreign agents and conducting electronic surveillance of foreign leaders. The Justice Department successfully moved to have Baugh’s history as a clandestine operative barred from the case.
Amid the Steiners’ lawsuit, US Judge William Young was the first to publicly connect the harassment of journalists to the growth of corporate power. In a 2022 sentencing hearing for two of the criminal defendants in the case, Young said the case was one of the most important he had seen in 44 years on the bench because of the threat to the freedom of the press.
“We tolerate in this nation great aggregations of economic power,” Young said at the time. “That power, it has been the experience of this court, is sometimes abused. When it is abused, those who abuse it ought to be brought to account.”
David Steiner, present at the hearing, was reduced to tears by the judge’s comments. “I wasn’t sure if we were overblowing this,” he recalled this week. “And he finally gave voice to that and it helped us keep going. Ina and I have talked about that moment many times, how important Judge Young was to the way we proceeded.”
The Steiners hope their unusual agreement, with former executives paying part of the settlement and the absence of a confidentiality clause, will be a blueprint for future victims of corporate wrongdoing.
“People in similar types of cases could cite this,” Steiner said. “Out of everything that’s in that settlement agreement, the thing that we’re most proud of is sticking with the no nondisclosure.”
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
