A billionaire hedge fund investor and GOP donor who publicly mocked Hillary Clinton this year for being married to “a liar and a cheat” had an account on the cheating site Ashley Madison, according to data released by hackers calling themselves the Impact Team. The name and email address of Dan Loeb, founder of hedge fund Third Point LLC and prominent contributor to the Romney campaign, appear in the company’s database of users, and Loeb confirmed in a statement to Gawker that the account is authentic.

Once an Obama supporter, Loeb has since turned into a very generous supporter of Republican candidates and conservative Super PACs—he gifted $1,000,000 to the right-wing American Unity PAC and a quarter million to the Ending Spending Action Fund just last fall, along with tens of thousands of dollars straight to the Republican Party.

More recently he’s become a vocal detractor of presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In June, he posted a joke to his Facebook page that described Clinton as a put-upon spouse trapped in a loveless marriage with a cheating husband who thinks she’s a lesbian.

Dear Abby,

My husband is a liar and a cheat. He has cheated on me from the beginning, and when I confront him, he denies everything. What’s worse, everyone knows that he cheats on me. It is so humiliating. Also, since he lost his job 14 years ago, he hasn’t even look for a new one. All he does all day is smoke cigars, cruise around and shoot the bull with his buddies, while I have to work to pay the bills. Since our daughter went away to college he doesn’t even pretend to like me, and even hints that I may be a lesbian. What should I do?

Signed Clueless.

Dear Clueless,

Grow up and dump him. Good grief woman! You don’t need him anymore! You’re running for President of the United States. Act like one.

Loeb quickly removed the post, and told Politico at the time that it was an “old meme [that] ended up on my Facebook page inadvertently.”

One year before that Facebook post (and a decade after his wedding), Loeb signed up for Ashley Madison, the now-notorious website designed to make it easy for people to cheat on their spouses. The profile in question is tied to Loeb’s private Gmail address, and includes his correct zip code and a birthday that matches Loeb’s but makes him six years younger.

I asked Loeb about this account, and received this statement via public relations rep Steven Rubenstein:

“As my family, friends and business colleagues know, I am a prolific web surfer. Did I visit this site to see what it was all about? Absolutely – years ago, at the time I was invested in Yahoo and IAC and was endlessly curious about apps and websites. Did I ever engage or meet with anyone through this site? Never. That was never my intention — as evidenced by the fact that I never provided a credit card to set up an account.”

That’s an entirely plausible excuse for being on Ashley Madison, but doesn’t explain why someone who had no intention of engaging with other adulterers described himself as looking for “discreet fun with 9 or 10,” as indicated in his profile data.

I asked Loeb why he’d entered his desire for “discreet fun” into a website he had no intention of using. He replied: “That field was part of going on the site and I gave a brief line that sounded plausible.”

Loeb’s statement also doesn’t explain why he checked his private messages on an account he never used to “engage” with anyone. The profile data shows that the last time he did so was on December 9, 2013—eight months after he joined Ashley Madison.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7