Six years after filing the lawsuit, the e-commerce giant eBay reached an agreement with the couple David and Ina Steiner from Massachusetts, who in 2019 were harassed by former employees of the company, receiving threats, insects, funeral wreaths and even a bloody pig mask in the mail.
According to details of the agreement, the compensation for the couple reached $56 million, $48.7 million in compensation and $2.55 million from former eBay executives, while the remaining almost $7 million will go to nonprofit organizations.
Given the ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, Ina Steiner declared that she and her husband considered making the agreement public "both because we are victims who want to prevent something like this from happening again to anyone else, and because we are journalists who believe in transparency. We hope that this case serves as a lesson," she said.
David and Ina Steiner are journalists by profession, founders of EcommerceBytes, a platform where information is provided on various e-commerce companies with the main objective of helping online sellers; However, the harassment actions came in 2019 when they published negative information about eBay and the corporation's senior officials.
David Steiner, for his part, expressed: "I think we accomplished a lot. I hope to enjoy life, while I have time on this planet, doing the things we like," he said.
Although eBay recently issued a statement apologizing to those affected and calling the conduct of its former employees “reprehensible”; However, he reiterated that the tone of the journalists' publication was “unprofessional.”
