Member-only story
Consequences
eBay employees harassed journalists. They were arrested. The man who encouraged them now leads a Silicon Valley charity.
Last year, staff members who worked in “corporate security” at eBay set out to harass a husband-and-wife team who publish a newsletter that criticized the company. Things got ugly in a hurry.
The security staff sent them boxes of live cockroaches, a bloody Halloween mask, a funeral wreath and a book on how to survive the death of a spouse. They spied on the pair, had pizzas delivered to them in the middle of the night and tried to discredit them with neighbors. David Streitfeld, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, detailed these exploits in a long, colorful story last week.
When federal prosecutors charged six former eBay workers with cyberstalking and witness tampering, the arrests were reported widely and in great detail. Steve Wymer, eBay’s senior vice president, chief communications officer and board chair of eBay’s corporate foundation, was not charged with a crime but the company says it fired him because of his role in the scandal. Published emails made clear that he urged the security team to intimidate David Steiner and his wife, Ina.
“I want her DONE,” Wymer told eBay’s former senior director of safety and security…
