It started with a dead pig.
August 2019: Ina Steiner opened a delivery at her Massachusetts home. She screamed when she saw a bloody pig’s face. It was just a Halloween mask, but earlier that day, someone had tried to send a fetal pig preserved in formaldehyde. “What is a wet specimen?” her husband, David, asked the delivery company. When he heard the answer, he called the police. Someone was very, very angry.
For 20 years, the Steiners had run EcommerceBytes, a modest newsletter covering online retail. They wrote about Amazon, Craigslist, eBay. Sometimes critical. Always honest. Just journalism.
But 2,500 miles away in eBay’s San Jose headquarters, executives were reading. And they were furious.
💬 The text messages
On Aug. 1, 2019, 30 minutes after Ina published an article about eBay suing Amazon, CEO Devin Wenig texted his communications chief: “If you are ever going to take her down … now is the time.”
Chief Communications Officer Steve Wymer had previously texted the CEO: “We are going to crush this lady.” Soon, he texted security director Jim Baugh: “I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.”
What followed wasn’t a PR campaign. It was psychological warfare.
😱 The terror campaign
The Steiners were suddenly drowning in newsletter subscriptions: Sin City Fetish Night, the Satanic Temple, the Communist Party. Then came the packages. Live cockroaches. Live spiders. A funeral wreath. A book on surviving spousal death.
Anonymous Twitter accounts threatened visits to their home. Craigslist ads invited strangers for hot sexual encounters at their address. Their sanctuary became a target.
Then they noticed the black van. Professional surveillance. Someone was watching.
Baugh had assembled a team: David Harville (director of global resiliency), Stephanie Popp (senior manager of global intelligence), Brian Gilbert (a former police captain) and three others. They flew from California to Boston. Staked out the Steiners’ home. Purchased tools to break into their garage to install a GPS tracker.
The plan? The “White Knight Strategy.” Terrorize the Steiners, then have Gilbert pretend to help them, gaining their trust and manipulating coverage.
🧶 The unraveling
David Steiner photographed a license plate. It belonged to a rental car that was traced directly to an eBay contractor.
When the FBI arrived, eBay’s security team scrambled to delete evidence and lie to investigators. Too late. Flight manifests and payment card records all led back to Silicon Valley.
By September 2019, all the conspirators were fired. Wenig resigned with a $57 million severance. Wymer, who’d demanded “ashes,” was quietly hired to run a Boys & Girls Club.
eBay’s internal investigation concluded Wenig’s messages were inappropriate but claimed he didn’t know criminal acts would follow.
🌈 The reckoning
Seven employees were convicted. Sentences ranged from probation to Baugh’s 57 months in federal prison. eBay paid a $3 million fine and admitted to six felonies.
But Wenig and Wymer? Never charged. Wenig still sits on General Motors’ board.
The Steiners filed a civil lawsuit seeking accountability from the executives who sparked it all. After years of delays, the trial is set to begin March 2, 2026.
⚖️ Justice finally served
People went to prison for following orders. But the men who gave those orders, who wrote “crush this lady” and “take her down,” walked away and hold prominent roles today.
“This was a bizarre, premeditated assault on our lives … with buy-in at the highest levels of eBay,” David Steiner told the court. Their fear? That corporations now have a blueprint for silencing journalists.
EcommerceBytes still publishes. The newsletter that a Fortune 500 company tried to destroy through live insects and psychological torture remains online, independent and unbroken.
Because that’s the thing about the truth, you can’t terrorize it into silence.
Employees at eBay wanted to hide their misdeeds. Don’t let them. Forward this story to a friend to shine a light on what eBay put the Steiners through.