Ashley Madison was a website where men could sign up anonymously to cheat on their wives. It was also a scam. The site was unscrupulous at its core, which makes this CNN report that Ashley Madison customer service reps essentially blackmailed its customers surprising only for its baldfaced audacity.
A little over two months ago, former conservative reality star, former executive director of FRC action, and current sex rehab resident Josh Duggar was one of the first major celebrities exposed in Ashley Madison’s unprecedented data dump. At the time, we were able to confirm his two paid accounts using the associated credit card info. But now, thanks to tipster Nathan Turner, we also have his profile pictures. [See updates below.]
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.
After the Ashley Madison hack spooked moralizing hypocrites and millions of would-be adulterers, the Associated Press conducted an investigation into the data that turned up “workers at more than two dozen Obama administration agencies” who had been using the cheating site from their government desks. The AP tracked down the offending bureaucrats by tracing the Internet Protocol Addresses—a unique number assigned to every internet-connected device, called an IP address for short—associated with the hacked accounts to government computers.
Earlier this week, 37 million profiles registered with adultery website AshleyMadison.com were made public. The hack, if nothing else, proved one thing: Everywhere you look, there are aspiring adulterers willing to pay a monthly fee for the option of cheating on their spouse. Everywhere you look, unless, of course, you live in one of the three zip codes in America that have zero Ashley Madison users.
At least two people in a pool of 37 million Ashley Madison users outed as potential adulterers this week have committed suicide, police say, though it’s reportedly still unclear whether their deaths were a direct result of the hack.
A gigantic online list of people who’ve cheated (or tried to cheat) on their wives is an internet worst case scenario. If you’re one of those people, you’re probably wondering, How fucked am I? Here’s a guided tour of what hackers just made public.
In response to a small item we posted two months ago wondering about whether there was any connection between adultery-facilitating dating site AshleyMadison.com and the early-twentysomething Ashley Madison sometimes romantically linked to father-figure/actor James Woods, a helpful publicist has just informed us of the site's new campaign to retain the real-life Madison's endorsement services, hoping that attaching the name of such a well-known celebrity to their product will cause millions of new fornicators to subscribe.
Something we've been wondering to ourselves ever since we first heard one of their radio ads: Does adultery-positive dating site AshleyMadison.com have any association with James Woods' much younger girlfriend, or is the name just a happy coincidence? We're honestly curious. That is all. [LA Observed]
The breakup of James Woods and Ashley Madison (his kicky girlfriend 1/3 his age) is more in the sphere of our westward ho, and rightly so. Madison's naked opportunism and Woods's tendency to photograph like a naked mole rat are par for the course in traditional Hollywood couples that celebrate the gap of several generations. However, we happened to spot Woods and Madison near the very beginning of their romance in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in New York.
