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Every Company That’s Dropped Kanye Westw

WHERE DOES YE GO FROM HERE?

Ye. Photo: Rachpoot/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

The Yecosystem grows lonelier by the hour. Following a spate of antisemitic and anti-Black comments made by Ye on multipleTV shows, podcasts, and social-media platforms, several companies have publicly cut ties with the rapper in an effort to distance themselves from his harmful rhetoric. Many of the swift disavowals come after an antisemitic group hung banners in support of Ye and his antisemitism over Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, prompting a flood of social-media users, celebrities, and brands to denounce antisemitism and mount pressure on companies to hold Ye accountable. His previous anti-Black statements about Lizzo, family planning, and George Floyd, along with a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt worn at his Paris fashion show, fueled the growing call to condemn Ye, though it was the Los Angeles incident that proved to be the final straw for companies.



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“I can say antisemitic shit, and Adidas can’t drop me,” Ye said on the Drink Champs Podcast on October 16 — days before the banner was hung over the 405. But drop him it did. Adidas terminated its relationship with Ye on October 24, expecting a projected Q4 loss of €250 million ($246 million). While the decision hit Adidas hard, Ye lost far more in the breakup — his billionaire status turned to dust without Adidas, per Forbes, leaving him with a $400 million estimated net worth (down from $1.9 billion). Plus Adidas owns the design rights to Yeezy products so … yeah. It all falls down. Below, the companies — from Balenciaga to Gap to his own talent agency, CAA — that have parted ways with Ye.


Madame Tussauds

Madame Tussauds told the BBC that they have removed the wax figure of Ye from their London location. “Ye’s figure has been retired from the attraction floor to our archive,” the waxwork company said in a statement. “Each profile earns their place at Madame Tussauds London and we listen to our guests and the public on who they expect to see at the attraction.”
Peloton

Sketchers

Sketchers issued a press release stating that Ye is not the S, nor will he ever be. Apparently, Ye came to the Los Angeles Sketchers offices “unannounced and without invitation,” as well as filming without permission. He was escorted out. “Skechers is not considering and has no intention of working with West,” the release read. “We condemn his recent divisive remarks and do not tolerate antisemitism or any other form of hate speech.”
TJ Maxx

TJX — the company that runs TJ Maxx, Home Goods, and Marshalls — will no longer be purchasing Yeezy merchandise for their stores. “At TJX we do not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or hate of any kind. We have instructed our buying teams not to purchase this merchandise for sale in any of our stores globally,” the company told CNN Business.
Christie’s

The same CNN Business article reported that Christie’s auction house will no longer be going forward with the private sale of the Nike Air Yeezy 1 prototypes that Ye wore to the 2008 Grammys.
Foot Locker

Foot Locker sent an internal message to its stores October 25, requesting that stores remove all Yeezy-branded footwear from sales floors. Stores were to hold them in back rooms, awaiting further instructions. “Foot Locker, Inc. does not tolerate any form of antisemitism, or hateful and discriminatory behavior,” a Foot Locker, Inc. spokesperson said in a statement obtained by Complex. “While we remain a partner with Adidas and carry a wide assortment of their collections—we will not be supporting any future Yeezy product drops, and we have instructed our retail operators to pull any existing product from our shelves and digital sites.”
Adidas

The activewear giant formally terminated its partnership with Ye on October 25, releasing a full statement denouncing his harmful remarks and outlining the impact on its bottom line. “adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech,” the press release said, calling his comments “unacceptable, hateful and dangerous” and a violation of the “company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”



After a thorough review, the company has taken the decision to terminate the partnership with Ye immediately, end production of Yeezy branded products and stop all payments to Ye and his companies. adidas will stop the adidas Yeezy business with immediate effect.


This is expected to have a short-term negative impact of up to €250 million on the company’s net income in 2022 given the high seasonality of the fourth quarter.


adidas is the sole owner of all design rights to existing products as well as previous and new colorways under the partnership. More information will be given as part of the company’s upcoming Q3 earnings announcement on November 9, 2022.
Gap

Suburban-mall mainstay Gap shut down YeezyGap.com, the website that sold the rapper’s capsule collection with the brand. Though the partnership ended in September after Ye said the company didn’t fulfill its contractual obligations, the website remained active until its deactivation on October 25 hours after Adidas cut ties with Ye.

“In September, Gap announced ending its Yeezy Gap partnership,” the company stated. “Our former partner’s recent remarks and behavior further underscore why. We are taking immediate steps to remove Yeezy Gap product from our stores and we have shut down YeezyGap.com.”

“Antisemitism, racism and hate in any form are inexcusable and not tolerated in accordance with our values. On behalf of our customers, employees and shareholders, we are partnering with organizations that combat hate and discrimination,” the statement concluded.
Def Jam Records

“Def Jam’s relationship with Ye as a recording artist, Def Jam’s partnership with the GOOD Music label venture and Ye’s merchandise agreement with Bravado all ended in 2021,” Universal Music Group, the label’s parent company, said in a statement on October 25. “There is no place for antisemitism in our society. We are deeply committed to combating antisemitism and every other form of prejudice.” GOOD Music is no longer affiliated with Def Jam, the New York Times reported on October 24.
Balenciaga

“Balenciaga has no longer any relationship nor any plans for future projects related to this artist,” parent company Kering told Women’s Wear Daily on October 21, declining to elaborate further, according to the site.
Donda Sports

Ye’s sports-marketing agency lost multiple clients in the fallout of his hate-speech controversy. L.A. Rams defensive tackle Aaron Donald ended his contract with Donda Sports on October 25. “Our family has made the decision to part ways with Donda Sports,” Donald and his wife, Erica, wrote in a tweet. “The recent comments and displays of hate and antisemitism are the exact opposite of how we choose to live our lives and raise our children. We find them to be irresponsible and go against everything we believe in as a family.”


Boston Celtics shooting guard Jaylen Brown, who said earlier this week that he would remain with the agency, joined Donald in terminating his business relationship with Donda Sports. “In the past 24 hours, I’ve been able to reflect and better understand how my previous statements lack clarity in expressing my stance against recent insensitive public remarks and actions,” Brown tweeted in a statement on October 25. “For that, I apologize. And in this, I seek to be as clear as possible. I have always, and will always, continue to stand strongly against any antisemitism, hate speech, misrepresentation, and oppressive rhetoric of any kind.” Both Donald and Brown had signed with the marketing agency in May.


Ye still has allies, though. Former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown — who was dropped by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers last year after he stripped on the field during a game — said he would remain president of Donda Sports. “Over the past few weeks the world’s reactionary and selective outrage at comments in the media made by my brother, Ye, have inflamed and sparked rampant conversation and reflection,” Brown tweeted on October 25. “I too have been able to reflect on statements that I and others in my circle have made that lack clarity in expressing my stance. The people and brands that have relentlessly profited from Black ideas and Black culture chose to distance themselves at a very specific time: a time that demonstrated their prioritization of certain groups over others.” He said he remains dedicated to “freedom of speech, thought, and opinion,” and will continue to “clarify statements taken out of proportion by the media.”

MRC Entertainment

The company behind a finished Ye documentary scrapped the project on October 24, saying it “cannot support any content that amplifies his platform.” The (bizarre) statement said Ye is “a producer and sampler of music” who “sampled and remixed a classic tune that has charted for over 3000 years — the lie that Jews are evil and conspire to control the world for their own gain” before making it clear that MRC supports both Palestine and Israel’s right to exist. Read the full statement here.
Vogue

A spokesperson told “Page Six” on October 21 that the magazine and its editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, will no longer work with the rapper. Condé Nast, Vogue’s publisher, has yet to release a full statement. Earlier this month, Ye bullied global fashion editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson online during Paris Fashion Week and publicly mocked her after she criticized the “White Lives Matter” T-shirts worn at the Yeezy presentation.

“Vogue stands with Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, our global fashion editor at large and longtime contributor,” read an October 4 statement posted on social media. “She was personally targeted and bullied. It is unacceptable. Now more than ever, voices like hers are needed and in a private meeting with Ye today she once again spoke her truth in a way she felt best, on her terms.”

JPMorgan Chase

The financial giant broke up with Ye before the repeated anti-Black and antisemitic comments, choosing to end its relationship with the rapper on September 20. The decision was made after Ye publicly said he was going to drop the bank. “It’s time for me to go it alone,” he told Bloomberg News on September 12. The letter ending Ye’s partnership with JPMorgan Chase was shared on Twitter by conservative Candace Owens in mid-October.

UTA

Jeremy Zimmer, CEO and co-founder of the talent agency UTA, asked his staff to “support the boycott of Kanye West.” The memo, sent to employees on October 23, was titled “Rise of Anti Semitism and Hate,” according to a Variety report. The rapper was a UTA client for a year before returning to CAA in 2016. Read the full memo here.
CAA

The rapper’s own agency, CAA, cut ties with Ye, Deadline confirmed on October 24.

This is a developing story.

Inside eBay’s Cockroach Cult: The Ghastly Story of a Stalking Scandal

 

“People are basically good” was eBay’s founding principle. But in the deranged summer of 2019, prosecutors say, a campaign to terrorize a blogger crawled out of a dark place in the corporate soul.

Credit...Kako

By David Streitfeld
Sept. 26, 2020

1. Dad stabs a chair

Veronica Zea is pretty sure that before showing up to work at eBay in the spring of 2017, she used the site only once. She bought a surfing poster. It ended up in her closet.

Although Ms. Zea grew up in Santa Clara, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, she cared little for the dazzlements of technology. In college, she studied criminology. After graduating, and a year spent recovering from knee surgery, she surprised herself by answering a classified ad and ending up at the e-commerce pioneer.

Ms. Zea’s first job at eBay was intelligence operator. In a windowless room at corporate headquarters in San Jose, she watched closed-circuit cameras and helped people who were locked out of their offices. Ms. Zea (pronounced ZAY) was 23, with no special skills, but she worked hard. Soon she was promoted to intelligence analyst, charged with staying ahead of geopolitical and individual threats.

Her division, Global Security and Resiliency, consisted of dozens of people, including retired police captains and former security consultants. But it was surprisingly intimate. “We’re a family,” James Baugh, the boss, and Stephanie Popp, her immediate supervisor, would say to the analysts. “We’re Mom and Dad.”


True, Dad could be kind of scary. Mr. Baugh was a stocky, middle-aged guy with thinning hair who loved to talk and did not like to be questioned. He would often say he used to work for the C.I.A. Sometimes he said his wife was working for the C.I.A. right now. Once, he found a knife on a barbecue grill on campus. A deranged person could have used it to hurt someone, he told the analysts, and proceeded to stab a chair. It was never removed, a warning for the timid. (Through his lawyer, Mr. Baugh declined to comment.)

Ms. Zea had never worked in an office. Her only real job before this was on the Grizzly roller coaster at California’s Great America amusement park. So she just accepted things. Like the way eBay was a regular film festival. Mr. Baugh would bring the analysts into a conference room and show the scene from “American Gangster” where Denzel Washington coolly executes a man in front of a crowd to make a point. Or a clip from “The Wolf of Wall Street,” where the feds are investigating shady deeds but none of the perpetrators can recall a thing. Or the bit from “Meet the Fockers” about a retired C.I.A. agent’s “circle of trust.”


That one came up frequently. “No one is supposed to know this,” Mr. Baugh would tell the analysts about some piece of office gossip. “We’ll keep it in the circle of trust.”

 

Credit...Kako

Like the other analysts, Ms. Zea was a contract worker. Her ambition was to be hired by eBay itself. One mistake could crush that hope, and even risk lives. It was her responsibility to track “persons of interest” — individuals who might pose a danger to eBay — and rank them in a threat matrix. The woman who shot three people at YouTube in April 2018 proved there were people out there with a grudge against tech.


“We need to be ready,” Mr. Baugh would say. “We are the only ones who can prevent it from being really bad.” Drills happened when the analysts least expected. “There’s an active shooter in Building Two!” they would suddenly be told. Everyone would scramble.

There were usually six analysts, but turnover was high. Ms. Zea noticed that the men were becoming scarce. By May 2018 the group was entirely female. Mr. Baugh had a video for that too: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg explaining “why we have too few women leaders.”

Ms. Sandberg did not say these women should all be young and blonde — “Charlie’s Angels” and “Jim’s Angels” were their nicknames in the executive suite — but Ms. Zea wasn’t about to point that out. Women got fired, too, and afterward the survivors would whisper about why. One departed analyst had been reprimanded for not smiling in front of executives. Another was let go because she sang to keep herself awake during the night shift. A third because she chewed on her pen.

In January 2019, the temperature in Global Security and Resiliency went up even further. Elliott Management, a hedge fund considered merciless even by Wall Street standards, bought a chunk of eBay and asked for changes. Nobody was safe — especially the chief executive, Devin Wenig. The co-founder of another company that had earlier drawn the attention of Elliott said the experience of looking up the fund online was like “Googling this thing on your arm and it says, ‘You’re going to die.’”

As Mr. Wenig and other eBay executives tried to make nice with the hedge fund, they did not want to hear criticism of the company. That could cause trouble. And if some critic persisted? They needed to shut up. If necessary, they needed to be scared speechless.

Another mandatory video was from “Billions,” the TV drama about Wall Street ruthlessness. At least five times, Ms. Zea was compelled to watch a scene in which a billionaire toys with a subordinate he has caught considering a job with a competitor. “You don’t try to be loyal,” the billionaire sneers. “You just are.”


Loyalty. That was one of the tenets of Global Security and Resiliency. In the summer of 2019, Ms. Zea did what her boss, and her boss’s boss, and the chief executive of the $28 billion company wanted — even as those things got more and more deranged, and as they were all drawn into the most lurid scandal in the history of Silicon Valley.

 

Veronica Zea says she will plead guilty. “It’s easy to say, ‘Why didn’t I leave?’” she says. “But in the moment, I was terrified and stuck. I am so sorry. I regret playing even a small role here.”Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times

One year later, on June 15, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice charged six former eBay employees, all part of the corporate security team, with conspiring to commit cyberstalking and tamper with witnesses. Their alleged targets were almost comically obscure — a mom-and-pop blogging duo from a suburb of Boston and a Twitter gadfly who wrote often in their comments section. According to the government, their methods were juvenile and grotesque, featuring cockroaches, pornography, barely veiled threats of violence and death, physical surveillance and the weaponization of late-night pizza.

“This was a determined, systematic effort by senior employees of a major company to destroy the lives of a couple in Natick,” said the U.S. attorney in Boston, Andrew Lelling, at a news conference, “all because they published content the company executives didn’t like.”

Each charge carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. Mr. Baugh, whose age was given as 45, and his deputy, David Harville, 48, were arrested. The other defendants are Ms. Zea, who is now 26; Ms. Popp, 32; Stephanie Stockwell, 26; and Brian Gilbert, 51. A seventh employee, Philip Cooke, 55, was charged in July. Contacted through their lawyers, none would comment except Ms. Zea, who said she would plead guilty. Ms. Popp, Ms. Stockwell, Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Cooke are expected to do the same. The case is still open.

This account is based on court documents and dozens of interviews with people who followed the stalking scandal closely, including six who worked in Global Security and Resilience. The scheme they describe was both completely malevolent and remarkably inept — full of daft assumptions on the part of eBay about a plot that did not exist. It stands as a warning about how easily tech companies can feel aggrieved, and the mayhem that can ensue when they do. And it vividly shows how the internet makes people crazy, often without them ever realizing it.

Paul Florence was the chief executive of Concentric Advisors, the staffing agency that placed Ms. Zea at eBay. “It felt like eBay was breaking the analysts down psychologically — making them doubt themselves, isolating them, turning them against each other,” he said. In 18 months, eBay fired at least a dozen analysts. When Mr. Florence protested, his firm was fired, too.

“I was relieved,” he said. “It seemed like a cult.”
2. ‘We are going to crush this lady’

Like many people during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Ina and David Steiner took a hobby and turned it into a business. Ina worked at a publishing company and collected books. David, a video producer, had been going to yard sales since he was a kid. He liked advertising collectibles, antique tools — anything that caught his eye. In 1999, four years after eBay was founded, when the notion of transacting with strangers online was still for the bold, they started a modest website offering advice to buyers.

They called it AuctionBytes, which later morphed into EcommerceBytes. Eventually, by tracking trends and policy updates across the industry, it became a resource for sellers on a number of platforms, from Etsy to Amazon — a kind of trade publication for anyone whose business is auctioning items out of a garage or storage unit. Today, Ina is in her late 50s and does the writing. David is in his early 60s and is the publisher. Neither has spoken to the press since eBay’s alleged plot against them came to light.

 

Ina and David Steiner at home in 2002.Credit...Jodi Hilton for The New York Times

EcommerceBytes may not have been well-known, but it was required reading at the highest levels of eBay. In early 2019, Ms. Steiner shared the news that eBay had hired a new communications chief, Steve Wymer, who would report directly to Mr. Wenig.

The two men shared an aggressive streak. Mr. Wenig had spent most of his career in East Coast financial media, as a lawyer and executive at Thomson Reuters, and he maintained a certain New York alpha quality. Before working as a technology spokesman, Mr. Wymer had spun for three Republican senators in Washington, and he kept up an interest in politics. When Representative John Lewis tweeted about the civic importance of getting in “good trouble, necessary trouble,” for instance, Mr. Wymer replied that he had “another view on how the USA should be governed. My view is equal to your view.”

Publicly, Mr. Wenig celebrated eBay’s five community values — among them, “People are basically good” and “We encourage you to treat others the way you want to be treated.” But together, he and Mr. Wymer worked to forge a more combative eBay, one that drew less inspiration from the Golden Rule and more from “The Sopranos.” (They did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and eBay would not make any executives available for interviews.)

While neither Mr. Wenig nor Mr. Wymer have been charged — both have denied involvement in the intimidation campaign — they clearly loathed Ms. Steiner. In April 2019, she wrote about the chief executive’s compensation, noting that his haul of $18 million was 152 times what the average worker got, and mildly suggested it was coming at the expense of eBay sellers. After her post was published, Mr. Wymer texted a link to Mr. Wenig, adding: “We are going to crush this lady.”

 

Devin Wenig, who made $18 million as C.E.O. of eBay in 2018, was infuriated by Ms. Steiner’s writing. “Take her down,” he told a subordinate.Credit...Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

 

Steve Wymer, eBay’s communications chief, shared Mr. Wenig’s vitriol toward Ms. Steiner. “I want to see ashes,” he said at one point. “Whatever it takes.”Credit...Mike Coppola/Getty Images for eBay

Whether Ms. Steiner was breaking news about questionable expenditures, such as a pub eBay built on its campus, or marking more innocuous developments, Mr. Wenig seemed to find her existence infuriating. On May 31, 2019, she wrote that he had “promised to give sellers greater protection” from fraudulent buyers.

“Shockingly reasonable…” Mr. Wymer wrote to Mr. Wenig.

“I couldn’t care less what she says,” the C.E.O. responded, adding: “Take her down.”

If there was one person Mr. Wenig detested as much as the Steiners, it was a Twitter gadfly best known by the handle “Fidomaster.” His wife sold on eBay and he thought the site was often unfair to sellers, so he would tweet about it. Each message might get no more than a dozen likes, but the Global Security and Resiliency analysts kept a file on him, and it quickly grew fat.

Mr. Baugh was convinced that there was a sinister relationship between the Steiners and Fidomaster — that they were actively conspiring to damage eBay. (He even indulged a theory that Fidomaster was the Steiners’ secret alter ego.) Eight days after Mr. Wenig’s “take her down” message, a member of the security team flew across the country and drove to the Steiners’ home, a steeply roofed charmer on a quiet street. On their fence, prosecutors say, he scrawled the word “FIDOMASTER.”

It was both ridiculous and threatening, and a taste of just how weird things would get.

Ebay never learned Fidomaster’s real name. Neither have I, although we spoke extensively by phone, email and Twitter. Fidomaster shared a parallel story of eBay subterfuge that is only glancingly mentioned in the criminal complaint covering the harassment of the Steiners.

In mid-2019, Fidomaster received an unsolicited message from a new Twitter user calling herself Marissa. Her picture showed her to be about 25. Claiming to be a former eBay employee, she said she possessed “extremely damaging videos of executives misbehaving” — and wanted help passing them to the Steiners.

She was fishing for Fidomaster to acknowledge that he was in league with them. When Fidomaster pointed out the obvious ways one could reach Ms. Steiner, whose email address was public, Marissa suggested leaving the videos on a thumb drive at “a hotel in the city of your choice.” The wilder her suggestions got, the more Fidomaster resisted. Get a lawyer, he kept suggesting.


According to Ms. Zea, “Marissa” was two of her fellow analysts. Fidomaster’s reluctance to take the hotel bait could have suggested to eBay that perhaps its paranoia was out of control. Instead, leaders of the security team concluded that they needed to redouble their efforts.
3. ‘DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????’

On Aug. 1, 2019, Ina Steiner wrote a post about a lawsuit eBay had filed against Amazon. Although it was just a couple of paragraphs, and contained only a light note of skepticism about Mr. Wenig’s strategy, the chief executive was irate. Thirty-three minutes after the EcommerceBytes article went up, he texted Mr. Wymer: “If you are ever going to take her down..now is the time.”

“On it,” Mr. Wymer responded. He texted Mr. Baugh. “Hatred is a sin,” wrote Mr. Wymer, the son and grandson of Baptist pastors. “I am very sinful.”

Mr. Baugh signaled that he was ready to escalate. “Amen. I want her DONE,” Mr. Wymer wrote. “She is biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN.”

Mr. Wenig was going to Italy on sabbatical for August. EcommerceBytes needed to be taken care of before he returned.

Planning for the harassment campaign began, naturally, with a movie. Mr. Baugh showed the analysts a clip from “Johnny Be Good,” a 1988 teen comedy, in which a villainous football coach must deal with a host of pests arriving at his house simultaneously: a delivery guy with hundreds of dollars of unwanted pizza, singing and dancing Hare Krishnas and their elephant, a rodent exterminator, a male stripper. Mr. Baugh asked the analysts for inspiration. One of them suggested sending the Steiners a coffin.

The security chief made it clear that eBay’s leadership supported taking action, forwarding a message by Mr. Wymer in which he declared that Ms. Steiner and Fidomaster “have seemingly dedicated their lives to erroneously trashing us.” Mr. Wymer continued: “I genuinely believe these people are acting out of malice and ANYTHING we can do to solve it must be explored.” He signed off with: “Whatever. It. Takes.”

Credit...Kako

According to prosecutors, Mr. Baugh and members of the security team devised a convoluted and improbable strategy: to secretly harass the Steiners, and then offer eBay’s assistance in stopping the attacks — winning the Steiners’ confidence and manipulating them into favorable coverage of eBay. They called it “the White Knight strategy.” Inevitably, there was a movie screening: “Body of Lies,” a C.I.A. thriller about a fake plot that draws out a real terrorist.

Prosecutors say that on Aug. 7, Ms. Popp — the “Mom” to Mr. Baugh’s “Dad” — began sending Twitter messages to Ms. Steiner via a fake account, @Tui_Elei. The profile picture was a skull, and he seemed to be an eBay user from Samoa who believed that EcommerceBytes had harmed his sales. Ms. Steiner ignored the messages, even as the tone got angrier and more abusive. @Tui_Elei wrote: “I guess im goin to have to get ur attention another way bitch…”

A parade of disturbing deliveries began at 4 p.m. on Aug. 10, when a package containing a bloody pig mask arrived at the Steiners’ home. Fourteen minutes later, @Tui_Elei wrote: “DO I HAVE UR ATTENTION NOW????”

The Steiners received a book titled “Grief Diaries: Surviving the Loss of a Spouse” and a funeral wreath. They got fly larvae and live spiders and a box of cockroaches. Copies of the September issue of “Hustler: Barely Legal” touting “eye-popping 18-year-olds” arrived at the homes of neighbors with David Steiner’s name on them.

The Twitter bombardment continued, as @Tui_Elei began to hint at violence: “wen u hurt our bizness u hurt our familys… Ppl will do ANYTHING 2 protect family!!!!”

On his own Twitter account, Mr. Wymer evoked Fred Rogers — he said a movie about the inspirational TV personality made him cry, and he once retweeted Mr. Rogers’ line that “If there’s anything that bothers me, it’s one person demeaning another.” But inside eBay, Mr. Wymer was goading the harassment on.


“I want to see ashes,” he told Mr. Baugh on Aug. 11. “As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.”

Mr. Baugh shared the message with his deputy, David Harville, adding: “I’ve been ordered to find and destroy.”
4. Seeing ghosts

After the menacing deliveries and the Twitter attacks, the third phase of eBay’s campaign against the Steiners began: physical surveillance in Natick.

On Aug. 15, Mr. Baugh and Ms. Zea flew first class across the country. She had to go, she was told. Late that night, after checking into the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and joining with Mr. Harville, they drove to the Steiners’ home in a rented vehicle. Their mission was to install a GPS device on the couple’s Toyota, but they soon discovered that the car was locked in the garage. Mr. Harville went to a hardware store, prosecutors say, and bought a pry bar and nitrile gloves so he could break in. (That never came to pass.)

The Steiners were suffering. “It was psychologically devastating,” Mr. Lelling, the U.S. attorney, later said. The couple lost sleep, became anxious and worried about being followed. They turned for help to the local police, who agreed to keep an eye on them.

On the team’s second day in Massachusetts, Mr. Baugh, Ms. Zea and Mr. Harville returned to Natick and began following the Steiners’ car as it drove the streets. They tapped into an internet feed of the Natick police radio, and when they overheard that they’d been spotted, they abandoned their pursuit.

But the torments continued. At 4:30 a.m., a 24-hour pizzeria delivered to the Steiners $70 of pies — and a demand for payment. @Tui _Elei kept up his semiliterate invective, with graphic sexual references. More pizza. Craigslist ads appeared, announcing estate sales (“Everything must go!”) and nightly swingers parties at the Steiner home (“Come knock on the door/ring the doorbell anytime of day or night”). @Tui _Elei doxxed their home address.

Mr. Harville returned to California, and Ms. Popp took his place in Boston. The eBay team made another attempt at surveillance on Aug. 18, this time with a different rental car — which David Steiner managed to photograph. The fourth time they traveled to Natick to stalk the Steiners, a Jeep with tinted windows was parked outside the house, easily identified as an undercover cop. With satisfaction, Mr. Baugh wrote on WhatsApp: “They are seeing ghosts now. Lol.”


Laughing was a mistake — the Natick police were fast and efficient. A detective figured out that a payment had been made on some of the pizzas with a gift card bought in Silicon Valley, just a few miles from eBay headquarters, and the license plate of one of the rental cars was traced to Ms. Zea. It wasn’t hard to figure out where she worked. On Aug. 21, a detective showed up at the Ritz-Carlton to see her. After Ms. Zea dodged him, the detective called her phone as Mr. Baugh was hustling her to the airport. Mr. Baugh answered, pretended he was her husband, and played dumb.

Ms. Zea’s flight was not for hours, so they got a hotel room at the airport to hide out. Mr. Baugh sat on the couch and played a clip from the 2003 comedy “Old School,” in which a husband answers the door to a fellow who says, “I’m here for the gang bang.” He kept watching it over and over and laughing, telling Ms. Zea to lighten up.
5. Whatever it takes

The Natick police got the F.B.I. involved, as well as eBay’s lawyers, who began their own investigation. According to prosecutors, Mr. Baugh’s security team began a cover-up. To explain away why a gift card used in Natick had been purchased in eBay’s backyard, they combed their list of “persons of interest” — anybody who’d ever made a threat against the company — for locals, so that they could frame someone. They also considered creating a stalker from whole cloth, preferably a Samoan, to match the fake @Tui_Elei account.

Managers also ordered up fake dossiers on the Steiners as persons of interest themselves, for the purpose of sharing them with police — to “make them look crazy,” as one of them put it, and discredit their harassment complaints.

Meanwhile, members of the security team wrote emails to one another to create the appearance that they had just discovered the @Tui_Elei tweets, and one of them, Brian Gilbert, phoned the Steiners, ostensibly to offer eBay’s support — the final step of the “white knight” strategy. “Just made phone contact,” Mr. Gilbert informed the team afterward. “They are totally rattled and immediately referred me to Natick PD.”

For hours, prosecutors say, the team workshopped cover stories to mislead the Natick authorities, and at one point considered enlisting a “friendly” in a Bay Area police department to provide falsified security camera footage. The next day, Aug. 22, Mr. Gilbert met with Natick detectives. According to records produced by prosecutors, the confident tone of the security team’s communications changed almost immediately.

On Aug. 25, looking for some high-level support, Mr. Baugh wrote Mr. Wymer that his team had done an “Op” on “our friend in Boston.” Police had gotten wind, he said, and even eBay’s lawyers were asking questions. “If there is any way to get some top cover that would be great,” he wrote. Mr. Wymer’s response is unknown.


Mr. Baugh’s team tried to stonewall company investigators. When eBay’s legal department interviewed Ms. Zea the next day, over speakerphone, the lawyers did not know that Ms. Popp was coaching her in the background. Ms. Zea lied, saying she had been in Boston to attend a conference. Afterward, according to prosecutors, Mr. Baugh instructed the team to erase data from their phones. By the end of the month, eBay lawyers knew enough to place the first members of Global Security and Resiliency, including Mr. Baugh, on administrative leave.

On Sept. 18, Ms. Zea got a message from her placement agency: “We find it necessary to terminate your employment effective today.” She received no severance. Mr. Wymer was also fired. Mr. Wenig resigned later in the month, saying it was clear he “was not on the same page” as the eBay board. There was no hint of scandal. His exit package was $57 million.

In June 2020, when the F.B.I. completed its investigation and the charges became public, Mr. Wenig said in a statement that he had done nothing wrong. “There was no direction, no knowledge, no private understanding, no tacit approval. Ever,” he said. “I was just speaking off the cuff.” In a separate statement, Mr. Wymer said he would “never condone or participate in” any of the activities directed against the Steiners.

Ina Steiner continues to cover eBay news big and small. The company’s stock has nearly doubled since a March low, thanks to the coronavirus powering online sales. Elliott Management has booked a substantial profit.

Ms. Zea is faring less well. She got a job as an analyst at a big social media company last fall, but when the Steiner case became public, she was fired. She has moved back in with her parents. She used the people-tracking skills she acquired at eBay to wipe herself off the internet. Some days, she feels she barely exists at all.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Why didn’t I leave?’” she says. “But in the moment, I was terrified and stuck. I am so sorry. I regret playing even a small role here. If I could go back in time and prevent the Steiners from experiencing this in any way, I would do so in a heartbeat.”

She says she did little in Massachusetts except sometimes drive the rented cars around Natick and call her mother and cry about how much she hated her job. It had been truly sadistic: Once, a guard pulled all the analysts’ personal possessions out of their lockers and dumped them in trash bags, to teach them that they could not expect privacy at work. This was followed by a clip about locker discipline from the Vietnam film “Full Metal Jacket.”


Tech platforms are used to commit crimes all the time, but Ms. Zea’s experience is something new: being asked to commit a crime to protect the platform itself, or at least protect the executives running it. Balk — as one of her colleagues did — and you’re fired. Go along with the plan, trusting that the ex-police captains on your team know the difference between right and wrong, and your fate might be much worse.

“I don’t know when I’ll ever trust an employer again — or when an employer will ever trust me,” Ms. Zea said.

Mr. Wenig and Mr. Wymer have no such worries. In June, Mr. Wenig was re-elected to the board of General Motors, a position that pays $317,000 a year. Mary Barra, GM’s chief executive, called the cyberstalking scandal “regrettable” but noted “it didn’t involve any GM business.”

Mr. Wymer has a new job, as the chief executive of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. The chair of the board said the nonprofit was “aware” of what happened at eBay, but believes Mr. Wymer is “a leader with integrity” and was the unanimous choice for the job.

A tweet from the organization announcing his hiring included as a hashtag Mr. Wymer’s signature phrase: Whatever It Takes. For the children of Silicon Valley in the bleak year 2020, that’s the new Golden Rule.


David Streitfeld has written about technology and its effects for twenty years. In 2013, he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 27, 2020, Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Inside eBay’s Cockroach Cult: A Stalking Scandal. 

Minneapolis Announces Plan To Replace Police Officers With Thousands Of Heavily Armed Social Workers

MINNEAPOLIS—In an effort to regain the community’s trust and better allocate city resources, Mayor Jacob Frey announced Thursday that Minneapolis would dismantle its current police force and replace it with a new bureau of heavily armed social workers, effective immediately.

The mayor outlined a plan that dramatically restructured the municipality’s approach to public safety, replacing its nearly 850 police officers with a similar number of social workers, who would be dispatched to city streets and have at their disposal firearms, bulletproof vests, tear gas, armored vehicles with gun turrets, and other tools to enhance their service to the community.

“Minneapolis has demanded a new model of security, and so today we are reallocating the police department’s entire $193 million budget to clinical social workers, case managers, and crisis counselors,” said Frey, confirming members of the newly created bureau would be issued service weapons and assigned to one of several precincts, the heads of which would report to a chief of social work. “Why continue asking police to manage this city’s homelessness crisis, for example, when we can send in social workers—those actually trained in assisting housing-insecure people—to bulldoze our homeless camps and move the inhabitants out at gunpoint?”

“We have heard your call,” Frey added, “and rest-assured: The next time you contact the authorities, a licensed professional equipped with empathy, emotional intelligence, active listening skills, and a whole lot of firepower will be headed your way.”

Training for the new bureau reportedly includes instruction not only with Glock 20s and Colt M4 Carbines but also in takedown maneuvers, chokeholds, and baton techniques, all with the goal of enabling social workers to subdue any adversary encountered while conducting routine domestic checks, meeting with trauma survivors, or visiting a child welfare agency.

Recruits to the bureau acknowledged their work should be easier now that they have the capacity to immediately neutralize every potential threat in their path.

“As a substance abuse counselor, it’s nice to know that if one of my clients starts using again, I can just Taser them and confiscate their stash,” said 47-year-old Cindy Hughes, who holds a master of social work degree from the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth and, in addition to a stun gun and sidearm, carries a Remington 700 sniper rifle in the trunk of her squad car. “It’s so much easier than getting them to go to a meeting.”

“Usually, if I’m worried they’re trying to score, we discuss sober-living facilities and ways to avoid common relapse triggers,” Hughes continued. “Now I can make extra sure they stay off the streets by simply handcuffing them to their bunk at the halfway house.”

According to Mayor Frey, out-of-work former police officers would be eligible to join the social work bureau so long as they earned the appropriate credentials, which would allow them to bring their confrontational impulses and intimidation tactics into both outpatient behavioral health centers and foster care settings.

City officials said they also planned to disband the Minneapolis Police Canine Unit and replace it with a team of local therapy dogs, which would be trained extensively in clamping their jaws onto people’s legs and ripping apart their flesh.

Sheila Bickford, a family therapist in the city for the past 30 years, told reporters her words would carry more weight now that she could enter counseling sessions outfitted with body armor, a ballistic helmet, a riot shield, and a shotgun loaded with less-lethal rounds.

“You definitely get people’s attention when you touch down in front of their home in the Child and Family Services chopper,” said Bickford, referring to her division’s UH-60 Black Hawk military surplus helicopter. “They can either listen when I tell them codependency takes a toll on the well-being and quality of your relationships, or they can get knocked down and kicked in the head until they are completely unresponsive. It’s the easy way or the hard way.”

Added Bickford, “To anyone out there who’s struggling, let me say this: We see you, we hear you, and we are here for you, ready to compel your compliance with chemical agents or the butt of an M-16.”