Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal—a new Netflix docuseries—recalls the events surrounding the earth-shattering hack of the cheating website in 2015 and the subsequent fallout as millions of customers’ supposedly secure private data became public.
Debuting on the streaming service Tuesday, Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal features interviews with different people that had a connection to the original Ashley Madison site, which sold itself on the promise of “secrecy and discretion.”
The Ashley Madison site never made a secret about it being a landing spot for extramarital affairs when it launched in 2001 as its homepage read, “Life is short. Have an affair.” According to the docuseries, the name of the site Ashley Madison was derived from two popular female names—Ashley and Madison—at the time of the platform’s inception.
The three-episode docuseries features interviews with former Ashley Madison employees to couples whose marriages were destroyed when, per Wired, hackers released the personal data of Ashley Madison users in August 2015.
According to the docuseries, the hackers breached the site and threatened to expose the data—including names, addresses and photos of its users—unless Ashley Madison closed down. When the site didn’t, the hackers began their data dump.
At the time of the hack, the documentary reveals, Ashley Madison online had 37 million users.
Docuseries Examines Ashley Madison’s Site Security Before The Hack
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal also features archived interview footage with then-Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman.
The Canadian tech entrepreneur stepped down from his post at the site’s parent company, Avid Life Media, in August 2015 following the catastrophic hack and release of personal information of customers who used the site.
Among the former Ashley Madison executives interviewed in the docuseries is Evan Back, who was the company’s top sales representative.
Commenting on the massive data breach Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, Back says, “The promise of security and anonymity and guarantee was just something we did. It wasn’t something we did.”
Despite the hack and exposure of customer data, Ashley Madison still operates as a dating site for extramarital affairs to this day. The site still bears the trademarked tagline, “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Per Cosmopolitan, Hulu featured a similar documentary titled The Ashley Madison Affair, which began streaming in July 2023.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal begins streaming Tuesday on Netflix.
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