eBay and three of its former executives have agreed to pay $55.7 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a Massachusetts couple who were targeted by a company-run harassment campaign after criticizing the e-commerce giant in an industry newsletter. The deal ends more than six years of civil and criminal proceedings stemming from a 2019 campaign that saw former eBay staff send live spiders and cockroaches, a bloody pig Halloween mask and a funeral wreath to the home of David and Ina Steiner, according to the Associated Press and the Financial Times.
The Steiners run EcommerceBytes, a trade newsletter covering online retail. Court documents show the harassment began after then-CEO Devin Wenig grew frustrated with the couple's critical coverage in 2018 and pushed his communications team to expose alleged bias and inaccuracies in Ina Steiner's reporting. What followed escalated well beyond a PR dispute: eBay employees created a fake social media account impersonating a seller, publicized the couple's home address, tailed them in rental vehicles, and attempted to fit a GPS tracker to their car, a step that eventually drew in local police and the FBI. Seven former employees pleaded guilty to related criminal charges, and eBay itself paid a $3 million fine in 2024 under a deferred prosecution agreement with federal authorities.
The settlement breaks down into $48.7 million in direct compensation, mostly funded by eBay ($46.15 million), alongside personal contributions from three former executives: $2 million from Wenig, $500,000 from former senior vice president Wendy Jones, and $50,000 from former chief communications officer Steve Wymer. A further $6 million goes to charity, including an additional $1 million from Wenig earmarked for a free-press nonprofit.
That breakdown is unusual. In most corporate scandals of this scale, the company absorbs the bulk of any settlement while directors' and officers' liability insurance quietly covers the individual defence costs and payouts behind the scenes. Here, three named executives are paying meaningfully out of pocket. Insurance Business has previously explained that D&O policies typically stop responding once there's an admission or finding of guilt, and most D&O wordings carry standard exclusions for dishonest, fraudulent or criminal conduct once it's established as such. With six former employees having already pleaded guilty and eBay itself accepting a deferred prosecution agreement, the conduct at the centre of this case sits close to the territory D&O cover is designed to exclude.
Wenig, for his part, maintains he had no knowledge of the campaign, telling the Boston Globe in a statement that the harassment was "deliberately done in secret and without my knowledge." Whether knowledge is the same thing as responsibility for the culture that produced the conduct is a question D&O underwriters wrestle with long after the headlines fade.
Unusually, the deal contains no confidentiality clause, meaning the Steiners are free to discuss it publicly, and eBay is required to issue what their attorney called a "strongly-worded" statement addressing the executives' conduct. Attorney Christopher Murphy framed this as a deliberate rejection of the standard playbook, in a system where "wrongdoers too often hide their misdeeds by dangling compensation... for confidentiality." Insurance Business has covered how rising personal liability exposure for directors is already reshaping how boards think about governance and insurance cover. A settlement built specifically to maximise public accountability, rather than bury it, is one version of that same pressure.
For risk managers and D&O underwriters, the case is a reminder that reputational and criminal exposure arising from internal culture, not just financial misstatement or regulatory breach, remains one of the harder risks to price, and one insurers are increasingly reluctant to backstop once matters escalate this far.
