A sobering insight into the cost of adultery
If you’re bored in your marriage or if there are disagreements between you and your spouse, you have options ahead of you.
You could talk things through and work together to improve the relationship. Alternatively, you could seek marriage counselling or enlist a trusted friend or pastor to enable honest conversations between you and your partner.
Or you could come to the decision that the marriage simply isn’t working and call it a day, as difficult as that might be.
These options are all perfectly reasonable. But some people don’t consider these. For their own reasons, they decide to pursue affairs instead. They might justify what they’re doing, perhaps by telling themselves it’s for the good of their marriage. But at the end of the day, it’s still cheating. Should they be found out, it could spell the end of their marriage. It could even wreck their lives forever.
This is something the participants of the Netflix docuseries, Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, discovered for themselves. They signed up to Ashley Madison, a dating site for married people, under the illusion that their privacy was protected.
The company’s CEO at the time, Noel Biderman, had publically advocated the security measures that were enabled on the site. But when it was hacked in 2015, not only did the security flaws inherent at Ashley Madison come to light, but the identities of the website’s many users were also brought out into the open.
It’s not hard to imagine the carnage that followed. While Biderman and his team desperately tried to locate the hacker(s), lives were being ruined globally when the names and other identifying factors of those who had cheated were made public. Marriages ended, families were broken up, and in at least two cases, lives were lost to suicide.
The Netflix documentary sheds a spotlight on the hack, telling the stories of select individuals whose lives were affected by the data breach. One person who signed up to the site was Sam Rader, a Christian vlogger, who seemed to have a very happy marriage to his wife Nia.
Sam was known publically for being a loving husband and father but he lived a clandestine life where he did things he later regretted. When his name was outed in the data breach, he was forced to own up to what he had done to Nia. Thankfully, their story ended positively but that wasn’t the case for everybody featured in the documentary. We also hear from a woman named Christi whose husband John killed himself after being included in the Ashley Madison leak.
The stories shared are undoubtedly sad. These are real people whose lives were wrecked by the 2015 hack. But what about the people who worked at Ashley Madison? How did they feel about what happened? Well, we hear from some of them too, including Evan Back, the site’s former vice president for sales.
Back talks about his friendship with the site’s ex-CEO, Noel Biderman, and how they worked together on the adultery site that (surprisingly) is still online today. He discusses the hack and the impact that had on the people who worked for Ashley Madison, and he discloses the fact that the site wasn’t as secure as Biderman made it out to be.
One person we don’t hear from is Biderman himself. There are archival interviews of him justifying the site’s existence on national TV. But he doesn’t give any new interviews on this documentary. Perhaps he’s trying to move on with his life so as to put the hacking scandal behind him. But what about the people whose lives he ruined? Have they been able to move on? In the case of many, we’re sure the answer is “no.”
What we hear in the Netflix documentary isn’t particularly fresh and original. There have been documentaries about the Ashley Madison hack before, and there is plenty of online media coverage on it too. But it’s still a worthwhile watch, if only to stress the point that nothing good can come from cheating on your spouse.
So, think twice before signing up to Ashley Madison. And consider another course of action if your marriage is stale or on the rocks. No matter how safe we think we are when living a double life, there’s always the chance that our deception will one day be found out. In 2015, the users of Ashley Madison discovered this in the worst way possible.
Read More: Who hacked Ashley Madison?
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Verdict - 7/10
7/10