The boss of the adultery dating website Ashley Madison appears to have conducted a string of affairs, according to leaked emails that question his insistence that, unlike his customers, he never cheated.
The revelation threatened to undermine Noel Biderman’s personal credibility at the same time that scrutiny of millions of intimate customer records dumped online suggested that the business itself was selling a lie.
Ashley Madison, whose slogan is “Life is short — have an affair”, fell victim last month to what Toronto police called “one of the largest data breaches in the world”.
Last week the mystery team or individual behind the hack released two massive tranches of private information, including extensive customer profiles and what appears to be Mr Biderman’s personal email records. Avid Life Media, the Canada-based parent company of Ashley Madison, has not verified the information but numerous people have verified their personal details among those published online.
Before the hack, Avid Life estimated its value at $1 billion and was planning to float on the London Stock Exchange this year.
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Ashley Madison claimed to have 5.5 million female members among its 37 million customers across the globe. However, analysis by the technology blog Gizmodo this week painted a very different picture and concluded that “there’s a good chance that [only] about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison . . . We’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat and spend money for women who aren’t there.”
Reporting by Buzzfeed suggests that Mr Biderman had no such difficulty in cheating on his own wife. The leaked emails purport to show that he had flings with several women and suggested that he might have paid for sex.
In an email from September 8, 2014, a woman called Melisa emailed him to say: “I booked the novotel again at 3pm today, but I’m going to have to cancel it. I feel extremely guilt-ridden because of my boyfriend . . . I don’t want to lose him. As much as I need the money.”
In May 2014 Mr Biderman wrote to another woman that he was “fantasising about later this evening :)”.
Mr Biderman and Avid Life Media declined to comment.