One of the interview subjects in the three-part Hulu documentary series “The Ashley Madison Affair” says on multiple occasions that certain details regarding the subject matter made him want to take a shower, and you might feel the same way after experiencing this journalistically sound but — what’s the technical term? — icky deep-dive into the rise and scandal-ridden fall of the notorious website that aggressively embraced sleaziness while serving as an online conduit for thousands if not millions of married people looking to have an affair.
“The Ashley Madison Affair” has a bit of a low-rent look and perhaps that’s a deliberate choice given the material. Director Johanna Hamilton utilizes archival footage, interviews with tech journalists and ABC News contributor Sunny Hostin and Ashley Madison Chief Strategy Officer Paul Keable, conversations with real-life folks whose lives were deeply impacted by the site, and also sprinkles in “interviews” with actors who quote actual Ashley Madison users. (That latter technique could have come across as cheesy, but the actors are actually quite good and natural.)
Working in mostly chronological order, “The Ashley Madison Affair” also makes good use of graphics as it details the meteoric rise in the number of subscribers to the web site, which was launched in 2001 and eventually counted a membership in the tens of millions, spanning more than 50 countries.
“Life is Short. Have an Affair.” So proclaimed the billboards for Ashley Madison, which charged men for subscriptions but allowed women to join for free. (Men reportedly far outnumbered women on the site, and as the documentary outlines, it was eventually reported that a good number of the “female accounts” were actually bots.) With most mainstream media outlets refusing to take advertising dollars from Ashley Madison, then-CEO Noel Biderman became a one-man publicity machine, gleefully accepting the role of the hiss-worthy cad as he appeared on countless talk shows, always making the argument that Ashley Madison wasn’t causing people to have affairs, it was merely the conduit for people who WANTED to have affairs.
With the company thriving and on the verge of offering a London IPO in 2015, an individual or group calling itself the “Impact Team” hacked the website and stole its data. Employees at Ashley Madison headquarters in Toronto logged on to their computers and saw a flashing message: “Shut down Ashley Madison immediately, [or] we will release all customer records, profiles, sexual fantasies … real names and addresses.”
This is when the series takes a sobering turn, as we hear stories of users who were publicly shamed and. in some cases, even committed suicide because they feared the repercussions of being exposed. (It’s important to note that merely joining Ashley Madison doesn’t mean one carried out an affair. Some users might have been curious, but never took it beyond that. Others joined because they suspected their partners were on the site.)
To this day, the hacker(s) have never been found out. Biderman resigned in 2015 after the third wave of leaks, but AshleyMadison.com is still a thing, still using that slogan: “Life is short. Have an affair.”
