The couple who unmasked the creator of the brutal gossip forum Tattle Life have told of how they would ‘shake with fear’ every time they woke up and checked their phones at what was coming next.
Neil and Donna Sands won their libel case after suing the founder for ‘defamation and harassment’ in posts aimed at them on the site, winning £300,000 at the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland in 2023.
They unmasked the man behind it as British ‘business owner’ and vegan influencer Sebastian Bond, 41, after restrictions on identifying him were lifted last week.
The site, which attracts 12 million visitors a month, is supposedly aimed at exposing disingenuous influencers.
But it quickly became a paradise for trolls to hurl abuse at everyone from Mrs Hinch and Stacey Solomon to mummy bloggers with small followings.
Neil and Donna today appeared on Good Morning Britain and told hosts Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley about the ‘stalking’ and the ‘horrendous feeling’ of the ‘daily abuse’.
Donna, who runs fashion label Sylkie along with other brands and has a ‘modest’ 20,000 followers, said: ‘It impacted me on so many different levels.
‘Every morning I would wake up and I would think “ok what have they said now in the last 7 hours” when I would turn on my phone. My body would actually just shake.’
In an effort to ‘overcome’ it all, she joined Trinity College to do an MBA but when her fellow professionals in class asked her what her business was called she didn’t want to tell them.
Neil and Donna Sands won their historic libel case after suing the founder for ‘defamation and harassment’ in posts aimed at them on the site and were awarded £300,000 at the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland in 2023
In turn, they uncovered the man behind it all to be British ‘business owner’ and vegan influencer Sebastian Bond, 41, when restrictions on identifying him were lifted last week
The site, which attracts 12 million visitors a month, is supposedly aimed at exposing disingenuous influencers, but it quickly became a paradise for trolls to hurl abuse at them
‘Everyone is normally proud of their business and able to say it and the first thing I thought when I started an MBA was “they’re all going to google me and this thread will come up”,’ she said.
Her husband Neil, an AI founder, explained how they found ‘defamatory details’ of their businesses ‘that were completely untrue’.
The couple said the defamatory comments about their enterprises ‘completely misrepresented’ everything they do and accused Donna of selling ‘poor quality’ clothes and ‘over-representing’ her prices.
Neil said the trolls even went down to the ‘molecular level’ of finding information about their finances on Companies House and posting them on the site.
He said: ‘It got more menacing overtime and eventually it got into stalking. There was lots of commentary about where we were, who we were in restaurants with, “we are watching you” stuff like that.’
But the online stalkers soon turned to in person harassment with trolls telling the couple ‘we we can see you in this restaurant, we are looking at you right now’.
Obsessive ‘Tattlers’ even started driving back and fourth past their home and posted details of their house on Tattle Life threads dedicated to abusing them.
Donna, revealed how she went from ‘someone who has stood on the shop floor since I was 16 years of age meeting people all the time’ to being ‘completely withdrawn’.
The couple said the defamatory comments about their enterprises ‘completely misrepresented’ everything they do and accused Donna of selling ‘poor quality’ clothes and ‘over-representing’ her prices
Neil and Donna today appeared on Good Morning Britain and told hosts Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley about the ‘stalking’ and the ‘horrendous feeling’ of the ‘daily abuse’
Among the A-lister and influencer victims of scathing Tattle Life posts are Stacey Solomon (pictured)
‘It made me doubt what people were thinking of me,’ she said, adding that Bond ‘needed to be made accountable’ for the impact it had on them and others.
The pair explained many other people who were victimised by cruel posts and threads have attempted to take legal action in the past but were unsuccessful.
Neil said: ‘We didn’t do it for us , we never wanted to undertake this work.
‘I’m a technologist by trade and I think folks did try. This gentleman would open his inbox and see very many solicitors letters, I’m sure, from different entities that were affected by the site.
‘But you need both a legal fortitude to pursue something like this and also a technical understanding of how they are built and thankfully some of my friends who worked in Silicon Valley helped with the unpacking of who was behind the site.’
Donna added: ‘It’s quite amazing because so many people have got to a certain stage in the legal battle and when we undertook it we didn’t want to do it but we thought if we could do something, we should.
‘My mum said, “Donna, why are the police not stepping in at this stage?”.’
They are ‘just delighted that the judge took it so seriously’, with Donna adding: ‘It’s been a really difficult road and there has been so many twists and turns in the case to get where we are today.’
She explained how the 45 pages of abuse which were presented to the High Court ‘wasn’t that much’ in the context of the whole site.
Popular cleaning influencer Mrs Hinch, pictured, is another star that was targetted by Tattle Life users
A 41-year-old man called Sebastian Bond is now confirmed to be behind Tattle Life. Pictured, Bastian Durward – which is said to be one of his online aliases
Many will be now surprised to learn the creator is in fact a man, who is the author and foodie behind plant-based recipe Instagram page Nest and Glow, which boasts 135,000 followers
‘That it actually probably one of the smallest threads on there. Other people have huge amounts, it reaches people all across the world from Australia to America and even closer to home.’
Donna revealed how popular British influencer Mrs Hinch reached out to her on the weekend and told the couple how she had been ‘actively targeted’ on Tattle Life.
She added there may be a lot of ‘big personalities’ who have been abused on the gossip site but highlighted the ‘small business owners’ and lesser known micro-influencers who have also fallen victim.
‘I have a modest following of 20,000 which was a community I curated for years,’ she said, ‘We all thought we were anonymous and that you could write whatever you want, but maybe now we can move forward positively and know that that’s not the case.’
For nearly a decade, since the site was set up in 2017, no one knew who ran Tattle Life, with the site’s operator going under the fake name Helen McDougal.
Many will be now surprised to learn the creator is in fact a man, who is the author and foodie behind plant-based recipe Instagram page Nest and Glow, which boasts 135,000 followers.
For the past eight years, the vegan cookbook author he has secretly presided over the site, which makes an estimated £276,770 in Google Ad revenue every six months, according to figures from 2021.
Donna and Neil found a 45-page thread about them and reached out to the site operators in 2021 asking them to take down the commentary ‘or face legal action’.
Neil and Donna shared their update in an Instagram statement this weekend. The couple pictured
The Irish couple who unmasked him as Tattle Life, have shared the names of his alises on their social media – stating that he was masking under the false name as a site moderator, Helen McDougal
In 2023, they initiated the process. Neil and Donna got £150,000 each in damages, and the Court granted an injunctive relief to prevent Tattle Life from posting about the couple again.
It was also ordered that the Sands’ legal costs be paid, with ‘further costs and third-party compliance expenses’ amounting to £1.8 million.
The thread about them was removed in May this year, but thousands and thousands of others remain.
Awarding damages to the couple in December 2023, Mr Justice McAlinden hit out at Tattle Life, stating there was ‘clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit’.
‘It is the exercise of extreme cynicism – the calculated exercise of extreme cynicism,’ he continued.
‘Which in reality constitutes behaviour solely aimed at making profit out of people’s misery. People facilitating this are making money out of it… protecting their income streams by protecting the identity of the individual posters.’
Bond also had his assets frozen and must pay a cessation figure of £1,077,173 to have this order lifted.
It’s likely that deeply popular Tattle Life racked up a decent amount of money for Bond.
As reported by The Guardian in 2021, the blog had 43.2 million visits in just six months of that year. The figures are still in the millions this year. In May, as per Similarweb, there were 11.5 million visits on the site, mostly from British users.
It is also understood that Sebastian uses different names online – one of them being Bastian Durward – and owns a number of businesses across the world. Two of them, Mr Justice Colton confirmed, include UK-registered Yuzu Zest Limited and Hong Kong-registered Kumquat Tree Limited.
According to Companies House information, the former is currently in liquidation but alleged to offer ‘media representation services’.
At a hearing last Thursday, the court saw a letter from Sebastian’s legal team, sent to one of the plaintiffs, claiming he was the Tattle Life founder but was ‘unaware of any legal proceedings against him’.
The Sands legal representatives disputed that he was unaware.
