Original subtitles

And you're... Are... You're not getting the coffee table, I'm guessing.

Okay.

I'm not wearing these glasses, by the way.

I don't wanna come off as some douche with sunglasses on inside.

I have other glasses.

I know you'll like these.

You know, you... you guys decide.

I'm sure I'll look very good, and I'm not gonna regret any of this.

They go with the shirt, they have pink lenses.

Granny glasses, a little bit.

I think my... They make my face look thinner because they're so big.

We're going for the thin.

Let's do it then, come on.

My name is Evan Back.

And I worked for... for Ashley Madison for just under ten years.

It was a dating site for married people who wanted to have an affair.

♪ I'm looking for someone Other than my wife ♪

Part of what I really love about Ashley Madison,

it's so outrageous to some people.

♪ I'm looking for someone Other than my wife ♪

When I would go to trade shows,

and they would say, ya know, "Who's your biggest competitor?"

And I'd say, "The Bible."

We all dream of the perfect marriage.

Sometimes life just doesn't work out that way.

For most people, married life is really hard.

If you found yourself stuck in an unhappy marriage,

well, what would you do?

The perfect affair is not just meeting someone,

it's meeting someone and not getting discovered.

When I first heard about Ashley Madison,

I thought it was a great fucking idea.

What the company was selling was secrecy and discretion.

Just the deepest, most personal stuff you can imagine,

people were providing to this website and trusting it to keep safe.

By 2015, we had 35 to 40 million members at Ashley Madison.

It was a cash cow.

And then, all of a sudden,

the shit really hit the fan.

Ashley Madison has become the target of a massive cyberattack.

Tens of millions of unfaithful customers could be exposed.

This hack is one of the largest data breaches in the world.

We betrayed their trust.

Now millions of marriages could blow up.

These were people's innermost secrets

that they never intended to be public.

I had no idea when I signed up for Ashley Madison

that it would turn into the biggest mistake of my life.

My world was, like, crumbling.

Every single aspect of my life up until this point felt like a lie.

It was like Pandora's box has been opened.

What's gonna happen next?

I grew up here in Texas, out by Lake Tawakoni.

At 13 years old, my dad upped and left the family.

And so nobody ever really taught me about love.

But one of the movies that came out when I was younger was Big Fish.

Edward Bloom, played amazingly by Ewan McGregor.

And one of the best scenes in that movie

is, like, the big scene where he confesses his dying love to this girl.

He turns around and looks up to the window, and he says...

Sandra Templeton...

"...I love you, and I will marry you!"

And that was one of the most influential movies for me.

The falling-in-love aspect, I was just so drawn to.

So when I saw Nia...

it was such an amazing moment for me.

It was like all these dreams that I had coming to reality.

I was, like, living what I've always, like, dreamed of.

I'm getting ready to walk down the aisle,

and I looked forward and I see Sam, and he started really, really bawling.

It was so amazing for me to see that as... as his wife.

Like, "Oh, my gosh." Like, "He really loves me."

You know? Like, it was like a dream.

Just that like, "Look at what we're promising each other,"

and if we really, really follow through this is going to be forever, like, really.

There is no part of me that thought, like, things would turn out the way they did.

My name is Marc Morgenstern,

and originally I was the creative director at Ashley Madison.

Uh, it was founded, actually, by my brother.

It was like early 2000s.

And I remember my brother was really excited

because of some stat about dating websites.

Thirty percent of the people on those non-cheating websites were married.

And he went, "Wow, that's just an insane figure."

That's how it started.

We don't think it's sleazy at all.

I mean, Ashley Madison is n... not about porn.

Ashley Madison is not an adult site. Ashley Madison is mature-themed.

Those were the two most popular girl names,

Ashley and Madison.

It seemed a little upper-class.

So you felt the site had a... a certain pedigree.

Ashley Madison was ahead of its time.

They were not just an online-dating pioneer,

but an Internet pioneer.

The company first launched

right in the dot-com boom of the early 2000s.

The idea of a dating website was still at that time, you know,

a little out there, a little sort of weird.

Like, "Oh you're gonna sign up for a dating website."

Then, especially, you add it's a dating website for adultery,

it's, you know, it's certainly a bit of an "out there" idea.

When it first started, we were tryin' to figure out taglines.

The one they chose was "When monogamy becomes monotony."

It was the first one.

I don't think we properly focus-grouped it just because we thought it was clever.

And, uh, a lot of people thought it was wood.

It was "mahogany."

Some want to talk, some want to do more.

They tried an infomercial, which I... I wasn't really a part of.

They tried other things, and, uh, they kinda failed.

Let's face it, we're sexual beings

and some of us will always find a way to have multiple partners.

It just didn't work. They weren't bringin' the... the... the people in.

And it wasn't until Noel showed up

that things really changed.

He's now the new CEO.

Yeah, it's a dating site with a huge caveat.

It's for people who are already in relationships,

but looking to pursue that proverbial something on the side.

Noel Biderman started his career as a sports lawyer.

And he would say in media interviews

that's when he realized there was a market for a site like Ashley Madison

because he had so many clients who were having affairs.

Noel, he was fearless.

He was like, "Let's try to push the envelope."

"Let's try to make this really resonate with people."

We went, "No, let's just... Let's just go right for the jugular."

You know, life is short.

If you're unsatisfied with your life, have an affair.

Noel and I have been friends, uh,

for about 34 years.

We met at, uh, summer camp, and we became close and fast friends,

and I like to tell people,

you know, we put the "fun" in dysfunctional.

As a kid, you know, he was really, really fun to be around.

Fantastic sense of humor.

Charming, funny, smart.

Didn't take, uh, any shit from anybody,

including, you know, elders or people of authority.

He went to UCLA and... and became a lawyer.

Noel's all about conflict. Like, he's ready to go all the time.

It's 2007, I guess.

There was a message from Noel.

He just said, "Have you heard of Ashley Madison?"

And I said no.

He said, "You're the best sales guy I know and the best business-development guy,

and there's an opportunity in traffic and affiliates and..."

All kinds of things that are like a completely foreign language to me.

I didn't know about any of it because I had not used a computer

up until that point.

As we're getting off the phone,

he said, "You know your way around a computer?"

I'm like, "Heh. I know my way around a computer."

They offered me $100,000 plus 10%, I was doing backwards somersaults,

and I was like, "Great, what a... what a great opportunity."

"I'll learn."

My first day,

Noel sat me down in his office and explained to me the brand.

He understood the audience.

You're coming to Ashley Madison

because you don't wanna blow up your marriage or your relationship.

The perfect affair is not just meeting someone,

it's meeting and not getting discovered.

When you have an affair in the workplace, our biggest competitor,

it's bound to be uncovered.

The whole business is built on secrecy and discretion.

A married guy hooks up with a married woman,

neither one of them is going to squeal on the other one

because they both have the same to lose.

I admire his brilliance.

With Noel, the vision became clear,

was to be the largest and only married-dating website in the world.

So he said to me,

"You need to attract men who are willing to upload their credit card

and spend money to meet women."

When I first joined, there were not very many dating sites.

Ashley Madison was the best one for me.

I didn't want to get divorced,

and I... I definitely wasn't lookin' for someone to replace my wife.

I'm married.

I'm not a sugar daddy.

One of the reasons Ashley Madison's worked so well for me,

it allowed me to be specific in what I was looking for.

There are d... different things that you can choose

about, like, what type of kinky activities you like,

dirty talk or stuff like that.

I can narrow it down by height, by weight, the color of their skin.

You know, m... my type, uh,

women that usually are younger than myself.

It's... it's very exciting when you first sign up,

and... and you look at all the profiles and you... you e-mail a bunch of people.

Yeah, you're excited, you're enthusiastic, you can't wait to see what this brings.

Most dating sites are a monthly subscription.

Ashley is not a monthly subscription.

In order to send messages, you had to buy credits.

And when your credits ran out, you had to buy more credits.

I think the best way I can put it is you have to pay to play.

Men sign up,

they message, say, the first ten profiles they see on the site.

Very quickly, they've burned through their package of, ya know, 50 credits.

Um, ya know, it's rolling over on their cre... credit card.

You're very quickly racking up a big, big credit-card bill,

and the company is making lots and lots of money.

There's a lot of women and it's... and it's awesome.

There... there's more... You... you almost gotta buy more credits

'cause you wanna e-mail so many people.

I just hoped that I would match with a couple of 'em.

We had big screens around the office

showing all the sign-ups, gross revenue.

All of this data was coming in,

and, uh, it was really professional-looking.

We started small,

and we had to expand the business through our advertising and our marketing.

Action.

Oh, no, you didn't!

So I thought, "Let's make a commercial..."

Good, cut.

"...people will talk about it."

Oh, just... just...

But because no one had done something like this before,

it wasn't necessarily, uh...

"All right, let's sit down and make a marketing plan

and... and... and figure this out," and how to... how to bring people in.

A lot of it was trial and error.

We did the bedroom-frolic commercial.

It's brightly lit,

so it looks like they're meeting in the middle of the day.

It's clandestine.

It's romantic and fantasy.

The ad lines were, "This couple is married."

And you go, "Oh, hey, isn't that sweet?"

"But not to each other." Oh!

That was the one that started the uptick in registrations and people signing up,

because you read into it as,

wow, this... this is exciting, this is fantastic.

You know, I could possibly find this.

You know, instead of my boring, everyday,

you know, existence, I can have this.

I was 24 and Nia was 20 years old when we got married.

She really was my everything.

I loved our early days of our marriage.

I got pregnant pretty quickly,

and so that... Things started to change and shift a little bit,

but with that comes also a lot of excitement.

Oh, my gosh. Did she just wake up?

Yeah.

Still a lot of passion,

and, I mean, really that season of life was like all my dreams coming to fruition.

I loved being a dad. I loved my children, crazy about 'em.

It was a beautiful life, but it was also just like this sudden, uh,

inundation of responsibilities.

So much responsibility that I... I wasn't ready for.

- Aw! - Come to Daddy hugs.

Oh my gosh. He's so cute. Oh my God... Ow!

He hit my teeth. You okay? You okay?

Paying bills, keeping up with our finances, not getting in debt.

Making sure our mortgage got paid on time,

make sure the electric bill didn't go off like when I was a kid.

I had imagined my life being exciting, and it wasn't exciting anymore.

Life became monotonous.

That picture of love that I saw in movies

and that I so desired to be a part of just started disappearing.

And I longed for, like, that kinda passionate romantic love.

I didn't want to leave my family,

but I wanted some exci... something exciting in my life.

- Dada! - Awww!

Did Daddy go to work?

Dada.

I was at my night shift as an ER nurse.

Probably 3 or 4 a.m., when things were very slow in the ER,

and most of us just sat there and did our own thing.

And what I often did was read Yahoo! News online.

That was a big thing during that time.

And, um, I just remember seeing an advertisement for Ashley Madison,

"Life is short, have an affair."

I was like, "That sounds intriguing."

Life is short, they... they're right.

They have that right,

so maybe they have "have an affair" right too.

I wanted more of the good stuff that life had to give.

So I signed up because it sounded like they had the answer.

I signed up with all my real information, which obviously was a stupid decision.

I spelled everything correctly.

My birthday.

I... I put everything exactly how... As if I was signing up for a credit card.

The site made it easy for me just to put it all out there.

Used real pictures of myself, put a few photos of my face on there.

I think I may've put one with my shirt off.

That just kinda showed my upper body.

Think about how sensitive the information is

that you would be providing to a website like Ashley Madison.

Details about your sexual fantasies.

Just the deepest, most personal stuff you can imagine,

people were providing to this website and trusting it to keep safe.

Think of the people's lives that could potentially be ruined

if that intimate information got out there.

At that time, cybersecurity was sort of

just starting to enter the public consciousness.

But the risk of being hacked wasn't something, I don't think,

that the average person was particularly concerned about.

I didn't really hesitate to give out my information.

Maybe I would on other sites,

but this one specifically, they told you how protected you were.

I trusted they would lock it down hard.

But when I signed up for Ashley Madison,

I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

I think we had about seven million members in 2010,

but it wasn't growing fast enough for Noel.

The marketing team was mainly all men,

and I think that a lot of the advertising and marketing that we did back then

was not respectful of women

and just appealed to men, men who wanna get laid.

You're thinking, "Ashley Madison, sex."

That's where the problem lay.

AshleyMadison.com is no stranger to rejection.

The company has struggled to get its racy ads approved.

It was virtually impossible to get ads on television.

No mainstream networks would take us.

CBS said, "We're no longer gonna let you air these ads on CSI."

Why do you need some executive sitting in an ivory tower,

saying, "This should see the light of day," or, "That should"?

That's not how we should do it.

It was a tough time.

Myself and Noel, you know, eat and breathed

and lived and thought about growing Ashley Madison 24/7.

We couldn't make a commercial and put it on television,

but Noel's original stroke of brilliance came

when he became the face of Ashley Madison.

We had a PR and Communications Department that spent all day long

trying to get television-show gigs for Noel.

Now we were on the offensive all the time.

Really? A dating site for extramarital affairs?

Its founder, Noel Biderman, is here.

He believed that an affair could really be beneficial,

therapeutic and... and helpful.

This was the point that he was gonna drive across,

and probably took it to a level that no one else would've or could have.

I read that you actually think that this is a marriage saver. How so?

It's a preservation device

for so many people who are in a marriage, who say...

No, no.

They love their partners, they cherish their children.

No, love and sex are different things, they're very different things.

Noel didn't back down.

He's a lawyer, right? He's a debater.

He believed if you're in a marriage,

and you don't want to break up the marriage,

you love your spouse,

but you're just not fulfilled physically,

you're no good in your marriage if you're unhappy.

So go get happy, and then you can love your spouse more

because you're not resenting them.

Marriage is preserved through infidelity.

- You may not believe it. So many people... - No!

- Of course, you're wrong... - Really, do you believe that rubbish?

Oh c... It's not rubbish.

There's no proof that somehow romantic love should be exclusionary.

You wouldn't tell me, I have two children, I can only love one of them.

That would be a ridiculous notion. But somehow I can only love one woman.

If... if you just talk to your wife or you talk to your husband,

you would find out there's a lot more going on with them sexually,

but most people don't like to talk to each other.

So I'm sure there were a lot of people that had crazy nights

that were so happy because they met on Ashley Madison.

When I first joined Ashley Madison, I was happy with my wife.

I had been a married guy for almost six years,

but being married is very difficult.

Ya know, we're all stressed out from work, and we have a... a child,

and we're not communicating,

and we're not really spending time with each other talking,

and really finding out about each other's day.

And... and that causes stress in a relationship.

And, um, I... I think sometimes your sex life can get a little boring

if you're with the same person for 20, 30 years.

Sometimes you need somethin' to mix it up a little bit.

There was one girl on Ashley Madison, she was really beautiful,

didn't think she'd be interested in me.

But, uh, she got back to me and we started talking,

and sometimes you have a connection even through e-mails with somebody.

You just kind of are on the same page.

And you just kinda get them.

We arranged to meet at a park, up where she lived.

I drove up there to meet her.

It was really exciting. I... I didn't know how it was gonna go.

And I remember seeing her from far away, and I was happy that she was there.

Kinda met, we talked, we started kissing rather quickly.

I asked her if she wanted to get a room and she said yes.

You could feel the tension between us.

And, um...

we kinda did what we do.

It was all supposed to be a secret.

That's why they use the adultery website AshleyMadison.com.

"Hey! They'd have done it on their own. I was just helping them."

I mean, that's just what Satan says.

There's an old advertising expression which we lived by.

Talk good about me, talk bad about me, but please talk about me.

Ashley Madison, a... a sort of dating site,

that brings adulterers together so that they can betray their spouses.

Setting up affairs that are gonna cause divorce,

ripping apart families, lives, the lives of kids.

As if it's not disturbing enough

a service like that exists in the first place,

well, now it's actually gaining popularity.

America, what has happened to our morals?

We actually preferred it

when they were saying negative things about Ashley Madison

because those stories went viral.

It's brand building.

Ashley Madison. Ashley Madison. Ashley Madison.

The Ashley Madison website is... is morally reprehensible.

Uh, the owner is promoting adultery.

- AshleyMadison.com... - Terrible!

- Ashley Madison. - It's immoral!

There was a moral outrage because infidelity,

in the Bible, says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

That's one of the big ten. Right?

Encouraging more of this behavior.

Of course, they don't know there's 613 commandments, actually,

not just ten.

And one of them is "don't eat shrimp."

So, you know, you're already breaking that law.

Don't pretend like it's morally neutral.

Of course, it shouldn't be illegal,

but I don't know how you look at yourself in the mirror every day.

A lot of people felt we were bringing misery on people's lives

by breaking up marriages.

My initial reaction was, well, people are gonna cheat.

Like, it wasn't shocking to me.

But with Ashley Madison, they were doing it safely and securely.

Secrecy and discretion were central to the brand.

This was my first real job out of business school,

and speaking to friends and family,

it was apparent that people who work there and the company itself

was not seen in a very positive light.

But I realized it was quite different than literally everything else out there.

Every department had to get creative because there was no real playbook

for running a web service such as this one.

My name is Cathy,

and I was a customer-service representative,

and I worked at Ashley Madison for four and a half years.

I am totally, 100% monogamy...

...but I don't judge people that aren't monogamous.

I had a lot of wives calling.

They would say, "I have this $19 charge on my card."

"I don't recognize it."

We would just tell them, ya know, "It's not your name on the card."

"Unfortunately, we're unable to assist you."

But, uh, the majority would get mad.

"Well, this is my husband's credit card."

So a... a lot would call back with their husbands.

Agents would say,

"Well, we are a generalized billing company,

and we bill across many different web properties..."

Which was true.

"... so we are unsure of exactly what this ties back to,

but we will reverse the charge so you don't have to worry about it."

The customer would reply back, saying, "Thank you."

"Here is another credit card."

And believe me, I think I saved a lot of marriages.

And that's the idea. We weren't there to destroy any marriages.

As a kid, when I thought of getting married and settling down

and that happily ever after was like everything.

I couldn't wait to be the grown-up version of myself

and finally find, like, you know, the man that was gonna be

my soulmate.

I would say avoiding infidelity in my marriage was like top of my list.

Sam, he checked my boxes.

He was a Christian, he didn't party, he was a kind guy,

and he had really strong morals.

And I also really had faith in his faith, knew that he was a Christian.

I knew that he had a relationship with God when I met him.

I hid the app on my phone.

I would hide it within a folder and dump a lot of other things in there.

So if she was looking for anything, she wouldn't click on that folder.

It'd be just full of junk.

I paid for elite membership to give me more features such as messaging.

Maybe multiple winks,

because Ashley Madison had that function where you could go wink at each other.

And I think maybe they also said

your messages to the women would be prioritized

over other men's messages.

My stupid screen name was dirty_little_secret_man.

It gave me a list of women in the Dallas area who wanna cheat.

You see little profile photos.

They would put things on their profiles such as,

"Just lookin' to have a good time outside of my marriage," or,

"My husband's not sexually satisfying me."

If I came across a photo that was pornographic at all,

I would generally just skip it.

The ones that attracted me most were ones that were more natural, more real-looking.

Not so out there. "Come get me, sexually, I'm half naked and this is all for you,"

you know, type thing.

First, I wasn't actually out to have sex, I don't think.

I dunno what I was out for, to be honest.

I wanted attention. I wanted something exciting.

But I wasn't crazy horny, you know?

My wife was satisfying me.

But I did respond. I feel like I responded to everybody in my area,

and then once that was exhausted, I had to start reaching beyond my area.

There was this sense when he was working nights,

he was distancing himself from me.

I was kind of like a single mom for, ya know, half of the week.

But I really used all of the moments I was given

to, like, keep the love alive

and keep, like, my devotion to him really evident.

Like, just the way that I got his clothes ready for work,

greeting him when he came home,

waking up really, really early to have food prepared for him

when he would get home from those night shifts.

I did wanna be the perfect wife.

I... It was... it was honestly just, like, what I wanted,

and I wanted him to feel, like, lucky in a way

and not as a reflection of me, but I just loved him.

When I finally did get in touch with one of the ladies on there,

um, of course, I was excited that she was actually responding to me,

and that she wanted to meet up.

Um...

Uh, I was scared as well.

I was just like, "Am I really gonna meet this person?"

And once I meet them, what the heck are we gonna do?

Is it really that unusual for women to be the cheaters?

Absolutely not. They are actually driving this wave of infidelity.

Their first big jump, women? The workplace.

That's when they started having affairs en masse.

Internet is that second big jump,

and they are starting to behave more and more like men.

You need a good mix of both sexes for this thing to work.

Women were vital.

Women could join and become fully functional members for free, forever.

They never buy anything.

I mean, if you don't have women,

then you don't have anybody corresponding with the men who are paying.

Have you ever found yourself on a really bad blind date?

Ashley Madison was always advertising to women,

and the company was always saying,

"We're a site for women, we have so many women on our site."

So my character is this married woman,

hard-done-by woman who's basically been a doormat,

I would imagine for the entirety of her marriage.

She's on a date with her husband.

Supposed to appear as a blind date, but they're celebrating their anniversary.

One of the things Noel would always claim, he'd say, "I'm a postmodern feminist."

"I'm just trying to make things better for women."

"I am trying to help them, ya know, escape the bounds of patriarchal marriage."

I think it'll speak to a ton of women,

it's genuinely how they feel.

Their husband's just non-attentive to what their needs are,

is rude and inconsiderate,

and they're seriously considering what the alternatives might be.

And that might be visiting Ashley Madison and finding... finding a new lover.

Now imagine that date lasting the rest of your life.

The idea was, you have a bunch of women at home,

you perk the ears up of the ones who aren't happily married.

Why should you go your whole life

in this loveless, sexless, you know, marriage?

You've only got one life to live, life is short.

To maintain that monogamous, faithful, loving relationship,

it gets so hard.

You begin to take advantage of each other.

You don't show the love as much.

They still need to feel desired, loved, and wanted,

not just like a roommate.

It was hard to just be with just one person,

and even though I'm, like, going, "Okay, I love this person,"

ya know, "I'm not gonna cheat on 'em..."

Um, but then I cheat on 'em, you know?

Then I say, "Okay, I'm not gonna cheat on this one,"

and then I cheat on 'em.

And I'm like, "Fuck," you know? Am I... am I a serial cheater?

But everyone I've ever been with knows I'm a sexual person.

I had one boyfriend,

and the reason I cheated on him was because he's playing video games.

And I'm like, "Dude, let's bone."

And he's like, "Okay, let me finish this game."

I'm like, "Are you fucking kidding me? I'm horny."

And so I cheated on him.

I felt bad,

but I always had a reason to cheat, you know?

And I know that's no excuse, you know?

But I'm, like, going, ya know, "One guy, okay, I cheated on you,"

um, "because you didn't give me enough attention,"

and that's his own fault.

And then, um, my ex-husband, he wasn't in town.

He was in the military and he was away,

and I was really horny, and I met a hot guy.

So then he and I were fucking for a while.

It was nice to have something different,

to have a man touch you different.

Like, when you're in a long relationship, it gets routine.

It's just a chore just to have sex, to get a nut,

then you're like, "Okay," roll off each other and go to bed now.

So when I first heard about the site Ashley Madison,

I thought it was a great fucking idea.

You go on a site and you're able to talk to this stranger,

and tell him your deepest, darkest desires,

and they're not gonna judge you for it.

No strings attached.

This is strictly sex.

I'm married. I'm happily married. I'm not leaving my husband.

Um, this is just sex.

Everyone deserves to be sexually fulfilled and mentally fulfilled.

By 2012, it was a lot of growth, a lot of members,

but once we started to launch in some other countries,

it went crazy.

We are now in 35 countries, 15 languages,

and there's really no marketplace that we can't see us expanding into.

It was very much a concerted effort

into having things tailored to fit that country.

Our marketing guy came up with the idea for a billboard in India.

"Your parents arranged your marriage. Let us help you with your affair."

And people were outraged.

I mean, outraged.

I think it was funny.

We're now in the arranged marriage realm in India,

we're in places where divorce is illegal, in the Philippines,

even the Muslim world, in Turkey.

I mean, we were on a roll, like a snowball going down a mountain.

I mean, the growth was incredible.

There were months and months and months where we would just double our revenue.

Doubled, doubled, continuously doubled.

Now we're a real business, a global business, right?

In 46 countries, generating over $100,000,000 a year.

By 2015, we had 35 to 40 million members at Ashley Madison.

Things started scaling up very quickly,

and security was

something that came up quite frequently.

We talked about it.

We were worried about it,

but it just kept falling to the back burner

because it was understood that we could make this work

while keeping up with our growth plans.

That is what everyone was focused on, every single day.

I think it was very well understood that if any of the web properties were hacked,

it would have been almost catastrophic.

The hope was that it wouldn't happen.

The anonymous way you sign up,

the discreet nature of their communication platform,

the billing being secretive,

and ultimately our servers, which sit in a remote location.

Kind of untouchable.

So I think we do everything we can to protect privacy.

Well...

You know, when I watch that, we know it's kinda snake oil salesman, right?

It's not true. I mean, we know it's not true.

The promise of security and anonymity and guarantee and... and safety

was just something we said.

It wasn't something we did.

For people to run a company

that is based on security and keeping your clients' secrets,

and protecting your clients,

and having very little security, you're pushing it to the limits.

How far can I go

before someone's going to come in and hack us?

It was like gambling with people's lives.

For Noel, it's all about pushing the boundaries.

Pushing the envelope, pushing the envelope,

that's part of his personality.

He wants to fly as close to the sun as possible.

Noel Biderman and his wife Amanda

join us in studio this morning to talk about...

I got married later in life than some of my friends.

I think I was 31.

But I, too, kind of have bought into the narrative, right?

I'm trying to live a monogamous life, raising a traditional family.

It just so happens that I help millions of people break with tradition

and, you know, uh, stray on their spouses, and I'm okay with that.

Noel would bring his wife Amanda onto these TV appearances with him,

which must have made it extra enticing for the producers of these talk shows, uh,

that, ya know, not only do we get, uh, this man, the king of infidelity,

who runs this website for affairs but claims to have never had one,

but we also get his wife, you know?

Well, of course we wanna talk to the wife of the king of infidelity.

Like, we wanna know what she has to say.

The co-founder and CEO, and his wife, are here to tell us...

He convinced her to come on The View.

Whatever she's saying, it's because Noel has prepped her.

But you're now the face of the advertising for it.

Which I guess leads me to the question... There you are.

You know, having myself up there,

in my mind, it's gonna spawn on some conversations

amongst married people who don't even talk about this issue.

And they talked about how good their own marriage was,

and completely monogamous,

and then used that to promote Ashley,

but say, "But not everybody has a great marriage like ours."

I would be devastated if he did it to me, but I would not blame a website.

Ashley Madison is not creating cheaters.

It is servicing a need.

How would you feel if your husband cheated on you?

Um...

Well...

I would be shocked.

My husband and I are in a 23-year relationship,

completely monogamous,

but I don't think I would blame him.

Ashley Madison taught me that

the cheater is not the only person to blame.

If somebody is cheating,

either they're a narcissistic sociopath and they just...

It's in their makeup, and there's nothing you can do.

But most of the time when people cheat,

it's because something's broken in their union,

in their partnership, in their marriage.

I feel that there are a lot of people

that are not effective and honest communicators.

I consider myself one of the happiest married men that I... that I know,

simply because I have options that my friends do not have.

I can meet a girl,

and if we hit it off I... I can bring her home that night,

if... if I so please. Um...

I'd have to tell my wife about her, introduce her to my wife,

but that's... that's not a problem if that were to happen.

- Hey. - Hey.

- I made cookies. - Oh, nice!

You're the best. Honey, you're the best.

- Love these. - You're welcome.

I let him have sex with other women, and I'm okay with it.

I do not get jealous at all.

He's mine, and I know he's gonna come back to me.

I just don't have the jealousy in me.

I'm honest with women I talk to on the website.

I... I let them know up front that I'm married,

and, uh, Ashley Madison was one of the few choices I had to do that.

We have two rules.

Number one, she always knows where I'm at, who I'm with, so I'm not hiding anything.

I... I basically get permission before I go.

And the second rule is I wear a condom, which is pretty obvious.

If I'm not in the mood, then it's a no, and he's never thrown a fit or anything.

He's just like, "Okay, it's a no." You know?

And he tells 'em, "My wife said no."

Want a big salad or a little salad?

Uh, the little one's fine.

That way I have more room for cookies.

You're so smart.

My wife's letting me express my sexual fantasies

and... and... and really what makes me happy,

and I think it's fair for her to have the same.

I am a dominatrix.

I get so high from it.

It's just such a thrill to have a man under your control.

I'm... I'm... I'm cool with all that.

I think she needs to have her own sexual expression and outlets.

It's things that I'm not into it all.

I call him Tiny Tim because he's tiny,

and any guy can handle Tiny Tim.

I'd be lost without Steph.

If we broke up, I'd be so miserable 'cause I could never replace her.

I could never... I'd be a fool to try to.

He's my everything.

He's a good father, and he's a good husband.

He doesn't lie to me.

Consent, the... the other person knows. I mean, cheating...

I think the real harm when someone cheats

is... is what's done emotionally and to the trust.

It's not the physical action.

It's not the intercourse itself,

but the... the violation of... of everything that was sacred,

of communication, of trust, of honesty.

- Uh, I think that's the real issue. - Yeah.

Constantly lying to Nia, that was really hard for me.

But there's just a lot that I was seeking through Ashley Madison.

Validation from other women

and them noticing me was just huge,

and Ashley Madison was just a way for me to find women who'd be attracted to me,

and so I could suck up their validation.

But during that period of time,

something happened and that just completely changed my life.

The movie Disney Frozen came out.

We got the soundtrack,

listening to it in the car all the time just like everybody else.

And I saw that, you know, all these videos were going viral.

No matter what kinda video you made regarded to Frozen, it was doing huge.

I was on YouTube seeing this.

So Nia and I were singing to that song, "Love Is an Open Door."

I was like, we gotta sing to this song. We're... We have to lip-sync this song.

♪ I see your face And it's nothing like I've known before ♪

♪ Love is an open door ♪

We practiced really hard to perfect it

and did several takes of us lip-syncing, and we finally nailed it.

♪...Door ♪

♪ Love is an open door ♪

- ♪ With you ♪ - ♪ With you ♪

It was some of the most fun memories I have,

of kinda laying in bed at night, practicing these lyrics,

and we just had so much fun.

Like, the most fun we'd had in a while. 'Cause Sam had been working nights.

It was just such a really sweet time in our, like, relationship.

Man, it just went crazy viral.

It took off like almost immediately.

It was just millions of views, I think daily.

I was just, like, mind-blown. It was like winning... For me...

With the validation that I wanted so much in my life

from women, from other people,

to get that validation from YouTube and the world was just...

It was better than winning the lottery.

Like, that was winning the lottery to me. It was huge.

"Hi, Sam and Nia, I work for Disney-ABC,

and I'd like to talk to you about your Frozen video

and incorporating that into our Christmas special this year."

"Let me know if you're interested."

- Woo! That's so cool! - How cool is that?

At that point I started enjoying my life again.

It just brought an... an excitement to my life

that I... that I may have been seeking signing up from Ashley Madison.

- You look gorgeous. - Yeah, I had to change my outfit.

- Does this look okay? - Look at this.

Love the dress, love the shirt, the face, love the hair, love it all. Love it.

The infidelity desires kinda just stopped,

and, um, during that period of time I deleted Ashley Madison.

But I was still carrying all these secrets.

My intentions were to keep them to myself until my death,

that nobody would know about them except the people that were involved,

and I was gonna be takin' this to my grave.

- You got off-key there at the end. - Did I really?

- Yeah. I would do the same. - I thought I was on key the whole time.

I can't tell if he's serious.

I just knew inside, Nia would never be able to handle it.

Like it would be impossible for her to accept what I've done.

I just remember coming into the office.

And normally people are kind of mulling around, drinking coffee,

lotta chitchat.

When I got into work that day,

it was a strange, weary, uncomfortable silence.

Like, silence.

Somebody must've just got their ass chewed off or something, I thought.

Flipped on my computer,

and the image came up and music started to play.

It was really in-your-face rock and roll.

Like, what the fuck is this?

I went in to... to talk to Noel, and Noel was in there with our COO

and a couple of the tech team.

I knock and I, you know, go to slide the barn door.

And I'm like, "Hey, I'm having an issue."

They're like... "We know! We know!"

Okay. What?

"Don't touch your computer."

Okay.

I thought, well, "I guess maybe our site's down."

So we're not making any money, right?

But then once everything set in, I'm like, "Oooh."

We got hacked.

"Ashley Madison must shut down immediately."

"We have taken over all systems in your entire office."

"We will release all customer records,

with all customers' secret sexual fantasies..."

It was blackmail.

If you don't shut down your business,

we're going to make public

everybody in your databases.

We were shocked and terrified.

I mean, we're there trying to protect their discretion, their identities,

and this would ruin a lot of people's lives.

We immediately switched to crisis mode.

But I just never expected everything to get as bad as it did.

Ashley Madison has become the target of a massive cyberattack.

The Impact Team is threatening to leak 37 million customers

if the website does not shut itself down.

We're not gonna shut down our business. Like, who the fuck are you?

We had 30 days to figure out who hacked us.

Otherwise, our business could be finished.

Millions of marriages could blow up.

People disgraced.

Tens of millions of unfaithful customers could be exposed.

These customers have a lot to hide.

The pressure was enormous.

I realized, okay, the... this is... this is... this is fucking bad.