What "Whatever It Takes" Leaves Out of eBay’s Stalking Scandal
The new documentary Whatever It Takes: Inside The eBay Scandal brings long overdue attention to one of Silicon Valley’s most disturbing corporate retaliation campaigns.
In August 2019, eBay security personnel targeted journalists Ina and David Steiner of EcommerceBytes in an effort to influence their reporting and identify unsuckEBAY (also known as Fidomaster), an anonymous source and commenter who also drew the ire of top executives at the company.
The campaign, led by Senior Security Director Jim Baugh, included threatening messages over several months, doxxing, disturbing deliveries, in-person surveillance, and plans to break into the Steiners’ garage to install a GPS tracker on their car.
Seven former employees pleaded guilty and were sentenced. eBay later signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice, admitting to a statement of facts involving six felony offenses, paying a $3 million fine, and undergoing three years of enhanced compliance monitoring to avoid further criminal prosecution.
The Steiners filed a civil lawsuit in 2021, naming the criminal defendants plus eBay, ex-CEO Devin Wenig and ex-Communications Chief Steve Wymer, alleging the harassment was directed and supported from the top of eBay's C-suite.
Former SVP Global Operations Wendy Jones, to whom Jim Baugh directly reported, was later added to the suit, with the Steiners alleging her communications and failure to supervise Baugh’s security department were directly connected to the criminal activity.
Whatever It Takes is strongest when it shows the absurdity and terror of the harassment campaign through firsthand accounts from the Steiners and Veronica Zea, whose story makes her the film’s most sympathetic criminal defendant.
For viewers unfamiliar with the case, the film is an effective introduction to how far eBay employees went in pursuit of a corporate vendetta. But the most revealing thing about Whatever It Takes may be what it does not say.
The film leaves out people, facts, and context that would complicate the “few bad apples” narrative.
Without them, viewers are less likely to see the scandal as a corporate attack on journalists, an effort to identify an anonymous source, and a governance failure still raising serious questions about executive oversight and board accountability.
The Missing Executive
SVP Global Operations Wendy Jones is not named once, despite being Jim Baugh’s direct supervisor and overseeing the security organization in eBay’s org chart.
Whatever It Takes debuted at South by Southwest in March 2024, and some filming may have occurred before Jones was added to the Steiners’ civil suit in March 2023.
That timing may explain why Jones was not central to the storyline - but it's harder to explain why her addition as a named defendant was not noted at all, even in the closing sequence which provided written statements from the other executives.
Jones’ absence is even harder to square with the fact that Rosemary Scapicchio is credited in the streaming version of the film as "former attorney for Ina and David Steiner" - a development which did not occur until May 2024 when she was replaced by lawyers at Boston-based personal injury firm Diller Law.
At the time of the change, Scapicchio filed a lien on any eventual judgement or settlement to secure payment for the work she had already done on the case.
That lien remains one of several unresolved issues after a tentative settlement in principle fell apart, putting the litigation back on track for trial.
Liz Morton
The Second Target
Whatever It Takes also omits any mention of the other target of the eBay harassment campaign: Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY.
Through a broader corporate accountability project, unsuckEBAY interacted with both mainstream media reporters and independent journalists like the Steiners, submitting tips, providing data analysis, and offering industry context for coverage of eBay.
He also engaged with other readers in comments sections and forums and amplified important stories through Twitter to draw attention to systemic governance issues.
Liz Morton
Internally, eBay already had an adversarial posture toward EcommerceBytes, which had been covering both broader corporate and financial news and the experiences of sellers on eBay and other marketplaces since 1999.
That long-simmering frustration escalated when issues EcommerceBytes had been covering for years started gaining significant exposure to a wider financial audience that mattered to eBay.
Security personnel were tasked with monitoring and investigating Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY at various times throughout 2018-2019, with the goal of identifying the person behind the account.
Another sore spot for executives was a May 2019 EcommerceBytes article about CEO Devin Wenig turning a historic house on the eBay campus into a replica of his favorite NYC bar in 2017, which many viewed as a questionable use of corporate resources.
UnsuckEBAY/Fidomaster's amplification of the story on Twitter, and criticism of what he called Wenig's "self-indulgent vanity project" caught eBay's attention.
In a May 22, 2019 email, Global Intelligence Manager Stephanie Stockwell flagged the thread for Baugh.
The executive leadership team was so concerned about the optics of the story, Jones requested a "huddle" about the matter over lunch, where Baugh alleges she told him to deal with the issue "off the radar."
Jones denies those allegations, arguing Baugh's statements are inadmissible hearsay.
That focus was not limited to online monitoring. Court records show Brian Gilbert traveled to Massachusetts in June 2019 and wrote “Fidomaster” on the Steiners’ fence, an act of vandalism that foreshadowed the more aggressive campaign that followed.
By August 2019, the escalation had intensified, with Wenig (Executive 1) texting Wymer (Executive 2) that it was time to “take down” Ina Steiner.
In a later August 1 text exchange, Baugh told Wymer: "Regarding the unsuck idiot...I've been communicating with him every day. I told him I have an incriminating video that he needs to see. He bit on it hook line and sinker. I want to leave it at a hotel concierge for him. If I can get him to pick it up, his ass is mine...confidential obviously. Rest assured I will handle Ina."
Days later, Wenig expressed his desire to see the unsuckEBAY Twitter account shut down and assigned the task to Baugh, with Wymer and then Chief Legal Officer Marie Oh Huber copied on an email dated August 6, 2019.
Wymer said he had previously discussed the issue with Baugh and explored all angles with Twitter, but had been unable to get @unsuckEBAY killed.
Oh Huber echoed the frustration, but she and another member of eBay legal, Aaron Johnson (now eBay's Chief Ethics Officer) advised there wasn't a strong claim to appeal to Twitter.
Baugh responded that his team had been investigating for weeks and he was close to discovering the identity and location of unsuckEBAY.
Oh Huber accepted that answer with a smiley face emoji, saying she would hold off on pursuing further legal steps in light of Baugh's investigation.
The next day, Wymer escalated again, writing that he was ‘utterly vexed’ and that any effort to solve the problem should be explored: "Whatever. It. Takes."
Jones was not on the original email chain, but court excerpts show Baugh forwarded at least two of the emails to her.
The Press Freedom and Free Speech Story The Film Misses
The film never fully confronts the scandal as an attack on press freedom and protected speech.
The Steiners are journalists and publishers running a longstanding outlet that covered eBay and relied in part on confidential sources and anonymous commenters, not random private citizens.
Court records show eBay executives were enraged by EcommerceBytes coverage, fixated on critics, and sought to identify or retaliate against people involved in publishing and commenting on stories about the company.
eBay's later efforts to obtain source information in civil discovery only sharpened the First Amendment implications of the criminal conduct.
The US Attorney's Office dubbed Baugh's plan a "White Knight Strategy" - he and his team would anonymously harass and stalk the Steiners so eBay could later approach them officially to offer "assistance" in stopping the threats in hopes of creating goodwill and trust.
Liz Morton
Federal prosecutors said the explicit purpose of the White Knight Strategy was to influence the tone of EcommerceBytes reporting and gain the Steiners’ cooperation in revealing the identity of unsuckEBAY.
Kosto also called out the effort to doxx Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY as particularly egregious, abhorrent to First Amendment values and worthy of significant sanction in his sentencing memo in the criminal case against Security Manager Philip Cooke.
Baugh’s team put that plan into action in August 2019, with phases planned over several weeks.
Since Ina Steiner was the known target, the ‘unknown’ target appears to have been unsuckEBAY.
The crimes were designed to silence the Steiners, influence their reporting, and curtail unsuckEBAY’s protected speech.
That context makes Wenig’s public posture on press freedom especially striking, since he served as CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets before joining eBay and has often projected a pro-free speech image, even founding a charity supporting various organizations including the Prison Journalism Project.
At Recode’s 2016 Code Conference, Wenig was asked about the controversy then brewing between Gawker Media and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and came down clearly on the side of press freedom, saying: "I side with a free media & a free press...we've got to be really careful that powerful voices don't knock down what I call divergent points of view."
Wenig's answer took a very staunch position defending a free press, warning that rich and powerful people should not be allowed to “knock down” or “drive media companies from expressing divergent points of view.”
Sitting next to Wenig on that stage was reporter Jason Del Rey.
Del Rey interviewed Wenig shortly after news of the scandal broke in June 2020, but did not ask how Wenig's messages to "take down" a journalist or shut down a Twitter account fit with his previous comments.
Jason Del Rey
Court records show Wenig had considered exactly that kind of response to reporting he disliked, even going so far as to suggest (among other strategies) that eBay could work with friendly outlets to flood the internet with positive stories that would drive EcommerceBytes further down in search results.
While eBay says it did not act on the recommendation, Wenig reacted positively and asked whether the idea could move forward.
Wenig's frustration wasn't limited to the Steiners. According to FBI Special Agent Mark Wilson, in response to an article about eBay written by the Wall Street Journal, Wenig allegedly told Wymer "Fuck them. The journal is next on the list after [Ina Steiner]."
Yet the film’s recreation omits the Wall Street Journal context and presents the “Fuck them” message alongside a recreated EcommerceBytes article, creating the impression that the comment was aimed at the Steiners.
Special Agent Wilson's affidavit was included as part of the Steiners' initial complaint when the lawsuit was filed in 2021, so the full context of those messages was available to the documentary makers at the time of filming.
That makes the sequence worth scrutinizing, along with other recreations and narrative choices in the film.
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has long cultivated a public reputation as a proponent of press freedom, funding journalists and whistleblower groups through Omidyar Network, First Look Media, Luminate and more as part of Omidyar Network's vision to "Reimagine Capitalism".
Connie Matthiessen
Given that history, Omidyar’s silence is striking.
He does not appear to have made any public statements about the eBay scandal and mainstream coverage has rarely asked what responsibility, if any, attaches to the founder who still sat on eBay’s board when the crimes occurred.
The film minimizes or omits some of the clearest evidence that this was not merely a grotesque workplace vendetta.
That matters because once the story is understood as a corporate attack on journalism and anonymous speech, it becomes harder to separate the scandal from board oversight and founder legacy.
The Governance Story The Film Avoids
Those omissions also avoid the governance story Wendy Jones and unsuckEBAY would have forced open.
Omidyar stepped down in September 2020, three months after the scandal became public, but is still a major shareholder and retains the honorary title of Director Emeritus.
The emeritus title has no voting rights, but influence is not limited to formal votes.
Shripriya Mahesh, appointed to eBay’s board in 2023, previously worked at First Look Media and Omidyar Network and remains founding partner of Spero Ventures, a for-profit fund spun out of Omidyar Network with Omidyar as its original sole limited partner.
Four current eBay board members also served on the board when the crimes against the Steiners were committed in 2019:
- Paul Pressler: current Board Chair and Chair of the Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee.
- Adriane Brown: Chair of Compensation and Human Capital Committee
- Perry Traquina: Chair of Risk Committee
- Logan Green: retiring at the end of his term this year
With legacy scandal-era leadership still active on the board, that continuity keeps basic governance questions alive: oversight of the security function, Wenig and Jones’ overlapping sabbaticals, severance payments without clawbacks, and disclosure of potentially material litigation risk to investors.
eBay's internal investigation into the matter noted that Wenig and Wymer's tone and communications were "inappropriate" but the company believed their actions were not criminal.
Wymer was fired for cause in September 2019, yet court documents show he still negotiated $1.25 million in severance and $150,000 for counsel.
The company was far less transparent about the circumstances of Wenig’s departure.
Publicly, eBay described Wenig's exit as a resignation, with then-Board Chair Thomas Tierney saying Wenig was “stepping down” due to “a number of considerations,” while approving a compensation package worth roughly $57 million, $40 million of which was earmarked specifically as severance.
But the board and Wenig were already aware of the crimes committed by employees and the internal investigation underway, though none of that was disclosed until criminal charges were filed nine months later in June 2020 - leaving investors with the impression Wenig’s departure was simply fallout from activist pressure.
Wenig’s separation agreement itself reflects the ambiguity, referring to his exit both as a resignation and as a termination other than for cause - language that blurred the line between resignation and firing.
eBay's standard clawback policy for officers employed at the VP level or above states incentive compensation may be forfeited or required to be paid back in instances of "a material violation of the Company's Code of Business Conduct" or action that causes "material financial or reputational harm to the Company."
If this scandal did not qualify, it would be fair to ask what would.
Wenig's separation letter explicitly stated it did not prohibit eBay from seeking to enforce the clawback provisions, the right to recover would also apply to any payments set forth in the agreement, and nothing in the agreement restricted eBay's ability to seek enforcement of their clawback rights.
In response to allegations in the civil suit, eBay confirmed that Wenig's severance was subject to this clawback policy and the board had meetings to discuss whether to act on that provision, but ultimately decided not to proceed.
In a September 2024 deposition, Director Ethics Counsel Anagha Apte testified that Wenig’s departure was a firing, not a resignation, and that it was directly related to the scandal.
Wendy Jones was allowed to continue in her role as SVP Global Ops through December 2020, when she received an $11M+ severance package, in addition to the $11M bonus Wenig had granted her in 2018.
The same standard clawback policy appears to have applied to Jones, though it is not known whether the board considered using it.
Devin Wenig and Wendy Jones were also both on overlapping sabbaticals when the crimes occurred - a business-continuity red flag, especially because eBay was in the middle of a strategic review forced by activist investors Elliott Management and Starboard Value at the time.
The day after the tentative settlement in principle was reached, before that deal later fell apart, eBay updated its Board Committee Charters, raising fresh governance and compliance questions.
Liz Morton
The new Risk Committee charter removes explicit mention of a Chief Compliance Officer, confirming eBay currently does not list anyone in that role, while the Corporate Governance Committee will continue to receive reports from Chief Ethics Officer Aaron Johnson who was promoted to that role despite being included in Wymer's "Whatever. It. Takes" email.
The Quiet Founder Behind The Scenes
The film’s production ecosystem deserves scrutiny too.
Producers Allyson Luchak and Ben Travers had previously worked with the Steiners’ former attorney Rosemary Scapicchio on Trial 4, a documentary series about the fight to free Sean Ellis from wrongful conviction.
The film was backed by Concordia Studio, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, who has collaborated with Omidyar on media and philanthropic projects and invested in Participant Media, the impact-film company founded by eBay’s first president, Jeff Skoll.
Concordia executives Jonathan Silberberg and Nicole Stott also worked with Omidyar’s Luminate on A Thousand Cuts - a documentary about the CEO/Founder of news site Rappler, Maria Ressa, and press freedom in the Philippines.
Omidyar Network later removed public references to its prior support of Maria Ressa and Rappler during a 2024 strategy shift away from press-freedom work.
Skoll and Omidyar attended the 2016 Oscars together, where Spotlight, the Participant Media produced film about the Boston Globe's uncovering of the Catholic Church child abuse scandal, won Best Picture.
Jim Baugh was also in attendance that night, providing additional security for then Vice President Joe Biden - 6 months later, he was hired at eBay.
While that doesn't establish a direct connection between Skoll, Omidyar, and Baugh, it adds useful context to a broader question the film does not explore: how a former intelligence and private-security operator moved through elite political and philanthropic security circles before landing inside eBay’s corporate security apparatus.
Liz Morton
Skoll appears on camera in Whatever It Takes, revisiting eBay’s founding story and reinforcing the familiar ethos that “people are basically good.”
The film returns to that idea at the end, when the interviewer asks Zea if she knew about it. She laughs and says, “Yeah, I never met the founder,” an apparent reference to Pierre Omidyar.
At first, Skoll’s appearance seems odd. He was not an executive at eBay in 2019, and there is no public indication he had operational involvement in the harassment campaign.
But he is relevant to its deeper narrative function: preserving eBay’s origin myth.
If the documentary had centered board oversight, founder legacy, and attacks on journalists and anonymous sources, Skoll’s appearance would have invited very different questions about why this impact-media ecosystem was helping narrate the scandal.
Skoll is joined by eBay's first VP of Trust and Safety, Rob Chesnut, who has gone on to become a highly regarded corporate ethics and integrity expert, also extolling the virtues of eBay's early ideals.
Shortly after news of the stalking scandal went public, current CEO Jamie Iannone issued an internal memo on corporate ethics encouraging employees to "see something, say something" - and also hosted an all hands event bringing Chesnut in as guest speaker to provide a company-wide presentation on corporate ethics and integrity.
Iannone said:
Since I rejoined eBay earlier this year, and particularly over the last couple of months, the eBay Leadership Team has frequently discussed how openness, honesty, respect and doing business with integrity drives our success...
...And, here's the thing...ethics is everyone's responsibility. We all need to see ourselves as being personally accountable for our commitment to doing business ethically.
That's why I strongly encourage you to join me, Marie Oh Huber, Chief Legal Officer, and Molly Finn, Chief Compliance Officer in conversation with Rob Chesnut, an eBay alum and highly-regarded ethics and integrity expert.
That places Chesnut in the same legacy-protection frame as Skoll.
Omidyar does not appear as a present-day interview subject in the documentary, except in archival footage from old interviews.
Instead, the filmmakers use long-time sellers to tell the story of eBay’s idealistic beginnings, reinforcing a storyline that distances the scandal from the founder while never mentioning Omidyar was still on the board when the crimes occurred.
None of that proves any improper coordination but it does create an obvious potential conflict-of-interest question that the film never invites viewers to consider.
If the production ecosystem included prior professional connections to the Steiners’ former attorney and to Omidyar/Skoll-adjacent media and philanthropic networks, viewers are entitled to ask whether clearer disclosure of those connections would have been warranted.
Slow rollout after SXSW release
The movie debuted at the SXSW film festival in March 2024, shortly before Scapicchio withdrew from representing the Steiners, with limited media coverage at the time.
Diego Ramos Bechara
After doing the festival circuit, Whatever It Takes was released to streaming in 2025 through a patchwork of non-U.S. and niche outlets.
It made a quiet U.S. streaming debut on Amazon Prime in early June 2026 but there appears to have been little media promotion alerting U.S. viewers to its availability.
What the film leaves viewers with
The problem with Whatever It Takes is not that it gets the horror of the cyberstalking campaign wrong, but that it leaves out crucial pieces needed to understand what the scandal really revealed.
Viewers are left outraged at the cruelty of the criminal defendants, sympathetic to the Steiners, and reassured that eBay’s real identity was something better than this.
That's a comforting version of the story for eBay, its founders, its board, and the media and philanthropic networks now helping narrate it.
It's also far too neat.
The court record points to a darker and more consequential story: a public company whose executives wanted critical reporting suppressed, whose security team tried to identify an anonymous critic and source, whose board allowed key leaders to exit with large payouts, and whose founder remained publicly silent despite years spent funding journalism and press-freedom initiatives.
None of this takes away from the Steiners’ account or the value of bringing the harassment campaign to a wider audience. But a film can expose one layer of a scandal while leaving the people and institutions around it largely untouched.
The omissions in Whatever It Takes: Inside The eBay Scandal point to the question the film never answers.
Did it reveal the full scandal, or help narrow what viewers were allowed to see?
