Original subtitles

So my April Fool's Day prank plan is

to put some jelly

behind the refrigerator handle.

Then she's gonna come over here to the sink, turn it on

and...

And get sprayed in the face.

Ew, Samuel! Oh my gosh!

- What? - I hate jelly on my hands!

Samuel Paul Rader!

April Fool's!

Oh my gosh!

After the Frozen video went viral, a lot of people were like,

"You have a cute family. You should blog, you should vlog."

We're not really shy, we're both personable people.

We're like, "We could do this, this would be a lot of fun."

Well, hey!

And we just started.

We're on our way to the FC Dallas game.

Yes! This doesn't look very good.

Sam knew the... ya know, the YouTube scene, I guess.

He kinda knew how to title things and, like, how to create a legit video,

and our channel started to, like, thrive.

It's that time of the week again, Symphony and I are going exploring.

The response was really good. We were putting out videos day after day.

Good morning, guys!

Good morning!

How's everybody doing?

Our following just started amassing. We got more and more subscribers.

It was insane.

Nice to meet you.

You guys are the two things we watch as a family.

For us, vlogging was just showing other families

what it looked like to live for the Lord.

Even people who have not been introduced to God,

they're being introduced to God through the love we're demonstrating.

I really like to be outside with the kids for at least... Ahhh!

The most exciting thing for me

was that now Sam is present with the camera.

I was no longer going to the grocery store alone.

Cooking breakfast became, like, a family affair.

Everything was just like, "Life is awesome now."

Ashley Madison was behind me.

But I had no idea what was coming.

It was just a regular day going into work.

I was starting at nine.

When we walked into the office, everyone was just like standing around,

and we were told not to touch our computers.

Then we, in our customer-service morning meeting,

found out that there was a hack.

We had an overnight customer-service rep, and the message popped up on her screen.

"We are the Impact Team."

"We have taken over all systems

in your entire office and production domains."

"Ashley Madison must shut down immediately, permanently."

We got hacked.

I mean, it was just crazy.

It was blackmail.

"If you don't shut down your business, we're going

to make public everybody in your databases,

all of their addresses, all of their credit-card information,

and all of their sexual fantasies."

If that information got out, this would ruin a lot of people's lives.

I went in to talk to Noel and the top executives.

There was a lot of anger in that room, Noel was pissed.

If it hit the press, it would've been devastating.

Up until that point,

Noel's focus was taking the company public on the stock exchange.

For an investor,

if you believe online dating is here to stay,

then Ashley Madison becomes a very safe bet.

We were excited.

The IPO was gonna mean we would make a shitload of money,

and he didn't want anything to stop that,

so we would never shut down.

We were very secretive about what happened.

No press and certainly no police.

We had to figure out who hacked us

before they released the database.

Noel was not fearful.

He was like, "We have really bright guys,

we're gonna bring in some other bright guys."

He got on the phone with these specialists from Sweden.

I get a call from Canada,

and they informed me that Ashley Madison has been compromised.

Most of my clients are like government agencies.

It's, uh, national security-related.

Offensive security.

So more... more attack than defense, basically.

Ashley Madison wanted me to fly over, and I decided to call my friend André.

The first time I heard about Joel

was when I was working for the, uh, Swedish Security Services.

They were suspecting Joel of a computer breach.

He's the best hacker I know in the world.

They keep sliding down.

The thing is, I usually like work, you know, leaned back.

Yeah.

Well, he's......in the top ten.

Joel called me about the data breach, and we agreed that I should join him.

Before I went over to Canada, I did not know anything about the site.

I don't judge, I'm a Swede.

We're... we're quite liberal.

I arrived in Toronto at Ashley Madison.

It was obviously a bit chaotic.

Everyone was wondering what is going on and who... who was behind it.

All I remember is coming into the office

and seeing a team of individuals I've never seen before.

I was pretty young and junior, so, for me, I was completely in the dark.

Then I met the man in charge, Noel.

He did not know what to do, so he was a bit lost.

I could not see that there was an investigation ongoing.

There was no contact with law enforcement.

I took charge.

The mandate I got from Noel was find the data and secure the data.

I think he was the most determined anybody would be for anything.

I think he felt Ashley Madison was his baby,

and his baby had a brain tumor,

and it needed to get resolved or the baby was gonna die.

The mood was very intense.

The company had a daily revenue of like a quarter of a million.

So that was at stake here.

But also the integrity of 40 million users of the site.

People using this service, having affairs.

It was a lot of people's private life that was on the balance here.

In a close-knit community, you are known.

And there is a lot good about being known,

and there's a lot that's not so good about being known.

If you've got something to hide it's not so great,

or if you wanna get away with something, um, it's not so great.

For 30 years I lived in New Orleans,

where my husband was a professor at New Orleans Seminary,

and I worked on staff at a church.

I met John when I was 23.

I was visiting with some friends, and they invited John over.

I liked him. He was funny.

He was smart, and he was super friendly and outgoing.

And so we just begin writing back and forth.

I would get so excited about a letter coming.

This was before e-mail, it was before all of that.

John is an incredible letter writer.

He was very idealistic, and I felt like we wanted the same things.

By the time I was 24, we married.

I was just full of hope that I was gonna have this perfect life.

And yes, we would encounter trials.

But I would've never, in a million years, have imagined

that Ashley Madison would've played a part in our marriage.

At the office there was a space that they called the Clinton Room,

and that was a conference room in back of the office

that we commandeered and where we set up our headquarters.

The boardroom was relatively close to the customer-service area.

There's a lot of commotion, people going in and out,

pacing of higher-ups going back and forth.

Everything was still expected to get done.

So needless to say it was stressful and quite distracting

tryin' to juggle this unknown that was going on

with everything else we had to do.

Every investigation is a challenge,

and the challenge is finding the answer.

So it's like a treasure hunt.

There were things working against us.

When we arrived to Ashley Madison,

it seemed to me they were doing things like erasing hard drives.

They were probably trying to secure the systems

so they could lock out the hacker.

Like, if something is suspicious, okay, then wipe it.

Wipe the laptop, wipe the... And I'm like, "No!"

This is exactly what we need to be looking at.

But at least no data had been leaked yet.

The first thing to look at was the hackers' initial message.

Of course it's important, because that's a clue.

They had called themselves the Impact Team.

They were not after any money or recognition.

I think it's a very...

...ideologically, um,

motivated attack.

My first feeling was maybe some religious zealot.

There was watercooler conversation

that it might've been a disgruntled customer.

Somebody who found out that their spouse was using the website.

But it was clear that

with a service such as this,

you piss off a lot of people.

To find the traces, the fingerprints,

of whoever has done this, you always go to the log files

because that's the record of what has happened in... in the past

for that computer network.

We can see the time and what account has been used to log into the system.

I spent most of my time analyzing these logs.

And then I had found something that was quite interesting.

So in the log file,

I could see the hackers had connected using software

as if they were an employee,

with a very specific version.

And that particular version had only been used

by a previous contractor.

And that contractor

didn't work for Ashley Madison at the time when they connected.

We could already link them to unauthorized activity.

To me, it was quite clear that this had significance.

But then, suddenly, things got really bad for Ashley Madison.

New this morning, millions of cheating husbands and wives

should be on edge right now.

The Impact Team released the public statement on the Internet.

The hack had been our secret, and now everybody had found out.

Their names and other sensitive information

could soon be exposed.

Hackers have attacked the dating website Ashley Madison.

It got picked up by media,

and it was a complete frenzy.

Thirty-seven million users.

Thirty-seven million users.

Thirty-seven million.

Thirty-seven million people right now biting their fingernails.

If this is revealed...

I remember, uh, getting assigned to cover that story.

Just a sense of, is there a bomb that's about to go off?

They call themselves Impact Team.

"Shutting down AM will cost you, non-compliance will cost you more."

If you're a hacker, sometimes you steal data,

you sell it, you do everything in the shadows.

These guys, they had a demand, they wanted it to be known,

and not just to the company,

but to basically everybody else on the Internet.

This is not a site to share recipes, it's to share sexual fantasies and photos.

Okay, th... this is... this is... this is fucking bad.

- I'm waiting for the fun to begin on this. - Yeah.

- Could be horrible. - Whose name will be on it?

It was all over the place. Late night making jokes.

Isn't that like everyone? Isn't that like...

I mean, really.

Walmart doesn't have 37 million customers.

Noel's like, "I can't believe this has happened."

The IPO is gonna be blown up.

Now, the threat was to comply within a certain time window.

They gave us 30 days to shut down or they would release, uh, the data.

Ultimately, now Ashley Madison has a decision to make.

Now the clock was ticking, 30 days,

because then they were gonna release the database,

and nobody had any doubt that they had the database,

and they would release it.

Nobody had any doubt of that.

That's when the phone calls started.

Hundreds a day.

Everyone wanted to know what information was out there.

Do they really have my address?

Do they have access to my profile pics?

I had sympathy for them, of course.

We promised discretion and privacy, and that didn't happen.

So it was heartbreaking to see customers going through that.

I heard about the hack. The title appeared on Yahoo! News.

I didn't wanna consider it.

It would have just completely decimated my reputation, especially as a Christian.

I would've been known for the opposite of what I stood for.

So I just... Nope, not even going there.

Also, Nia and I were trying for another baby.

Hey, guys.

Trying to hide from Nia.

So I've had this dream about announcing Nia's pregnancy to her.

I wanted to find out before she does.

I have a specimen.

I have a specimen. I knew it would be there.

It's a pretty clear sample.

Two lines is "pregnant."

Oh my gosh!

Oh!

I felt kinda wrong.

Like I had this information I'm not allowed to have

before a woman has it.

Good morning.

Can you pick something out of my top pocket right there?

- Pull it out. - Oh my gosh.

Pull it out.

Oh gosh, you are so funny.

Oh, you brought a positive one home? You're so silly.

The joke's on her, right, guys?

What did you do? Did you get a dropper out of the toilet?

- No, you didn't. - I did.

No way. Are you serious right now?

Her reaction is just priceless.

She, like, freaked out.

I couldn't believe what was happening.

Like, has any guy in history ever been able to surprise the wife?

It never happens that way.

There's a baby in my tummy.

I uploaded the video and called it "Husband Shocks Wife with Pregnancy."

This is not fair!

That day, the video has this massive spike in views.

It took off right away.

This was like next level from what we had seen,

and we were getting calls from local news stations.

She wrote me at work, "I'm two weeks late."

I was like, "Oh, wow, I gotta get on this."

So I took some pregnancy tests home that... that morning.

This was good for Sam.

He could quit his job and do this full-time.

We are about to start an interview with RTL Television.

We were living in the public now, and suddenly I felt so vulnerable.

Oh, ho!

Samuel!

If my name was discovered in the Ashley Madison dump, I'm done.

That's it for me and my marriage.

I was sitting in my office at police headquarters,

and I was reading the Toronto Sun newspaper.

That's when I heard about Ashley Madison bein' hacked.

"Life is short, have an affair."

Yes, I mean, it was obviously, uh, what that was for.

I mean, it was for hookups.

One-night stands, maybe a week stands.

The hackers say they don't just have the records, each person's profile.

They also have the financial information.

This hack, it's criminal stuff.

So we went to Ashley Madison.

I wanted to get a clearer picture.

I met with the CEO.

We found out they hired a cybersecurity team from Europe.

I wanted to inform Ashley Madison the cooperation that was required.

But a lot of stuff was not bein' shared.

I don't think that any company would allow the police in with an open door.

Their focus was the damage control more than anything.

It was an enormous pressure from the board on Noel to get this fixed.

Earlier this spring the company was talking about going public.

I think this pushes those plans back.

The sense of urgency went up.

They'd already identified a potential suspect.

So we set up a phone conversation, and he agreed to meet us.

So we needed to have a plan.

Noel and the board wanted to have this meeting on the same day

and get the information back as soon as possible.

I was told later on that matters were taken in their own hands.

Their focus was making it go away at whatever resources they could afford.

As soon as we had a place to meet,

Noel sent me for this meeting with the suspect.

At that point, I really thought that things were quite promising.

And I met him and had a coffee.

He was very nervous, of course,

and he was like, "I had nothing to do with this."

After a while,

he starts to realize that we have information that was pointing at him.

So he understood that. So his demeanor changed.

He admitted readily to them about the previous breeches into the system.

But at this time, he's still not saying

that he is involved with the hack.

He was offered monies to help pay his mortgage off

if information would not be released to the general public.

They had a lot to lose as a company.

But, uh, at the end of the day, the money didn't talk.

He denied being involved.

Yeah, it... it's frustrating.

After, of course, we phoned up the office

and told them what the outcome of that conversation was.

I think Noel was disappointed.

But the contractor was not taking responsibility.

Of course, it may not have been him.

It could have been someone else using their credentials.

We need to gather more evidence.

When we, the Toronto Police, got search warrants

and finally go and interview this gentleman,

by then he was, uh, involved with a lawyer.

When he did not confess to the police,

they could not hold him on these circumstances.

We were hampered and hindered with this suspect

because there was a promise of monies being offered to this individual.

I would have did a different approach.

There's so many options,

but those options were limited to almost nonexistent with this gentleman.

Then there was not much more that the police could do,

and that was the end of that investigation.

So we needed to find other leads to investigate.

We were starting to interview certain employees

that were kinda identified as maybe potentially havin' knowledge

or bein' involved.

So we were looking at person X and person Y and so on.

Some were dismissed, uh, right away,

some were more of an ongoing investigation.

There was a lot of leads that did not go anywhere.

That was disappointing.

The police were not able to get anything done.

Our team was not really getting too much done.

Noel and the board members would never give up millions of dollars

in revenue.

So we had to play chicken.

We knew that if there was any truth behind the Impact Team,

of their actual threat, it was now just a waiting period.

We were bracing.

Our legal department, our PR machine, we were waiting, holding our breath.

Maybe hoping we'd come back the next day, turn on our computers, and it'd say,

"This is the Impact Team, we're just kidding."

Likely.

The hackers who stole private data

from the cheating website Ashley Madison just followed through on their threat.

The whole dataset was released to the world.

E-mails, names, credit-card transactions, and much more

reportedly leaked onto the so-called dark web.

This was the outcome that nobody wanted.

Another story we're following.

It could spell trouble for the millions of users

of the cheating website Ashley Madison.

Tonight, thanks to hackers, a lot of secrets are out.

It's a worldwide victimization.

It's now left many South Africans in a somewhat uncomfortable position.

I had not witnessed any other personal hacks of this magnitude

ever happen anywhere in the world.

It's the type of data that's not meant to be shared with the general public.

It was chaos.

It was one step forward, 10,000 steps backwards.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle once the data is out there.

- The damage is done. - Really scary.

Noel couldn't believe what was happening.

It was like they cut off Ashley Madison at the knees.

Everything we had worked so hard for was all just blowing up.

You see and witness what some of these clients place in their profile.

A lot of people were talkin' about three-way sex.

Most was two females and a male,

but a lot of these gentlemen wanted to have sex with a male and a female.

Uh, there's people that wanted to be urinated on, defecated on.

In 2015, journalists were still grappling with the idea

of whether they should even download or use data that was stolen by hackers.

I'm sure you're going through it.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this is true, I am looking through it for journalistic purposes.

But the question that matters is,

is there anything in here that's in the public interest,

that people should know?

Everyone was digging through it, looking for dirt,

uh, looking for names that they recognize.

When I saw that the Impact Team had decided to come out with the data,

I got worried.

Nia and I were at the airport.

We were headed to a vlogger fair in Seattle.

It's a conference for vloggers, family vloggers.

And then name after name started coming out.

State attorney Jeff Ashton had a membership to the website.

I deeply regret my affiliation with the site,

which has caused a great amount of stress and heartache to my wife and children.

That's when I did start freakin' out a little.

And I'm scrolling Twitter, makin' sure that my name was safe,

and I was just, like, hoping for the best.

And then as I'm scrolling,

I see this obscure account made this tweet that says,

"Did I just scoop that Sam Rader was found in the Ashley Madison dump?"

I was like...

I couldn't believe what I was reading.

I feel like it was probably the closest I've ever come to... to passing out

from just seeing something or reading something.

Everything just disappears around me.

I felt a sudden sense of doom

and that my life was over.

We're about to sit down to eat at a Chili's inside of the airport,

and so I make the decision somewhere right there.

I have to tell Nia before she reads this, before she finds out.

How the heck am I gonna tell her this?

I think it was like six at night by this point.

I had not eaten that day,

and I was just, like, on the menu, like really invested.

What are we getting? Let's get this quickly.

I look over, Sam's on his phone,

and he looks very serious and intent about what he's reading.

I just put my hands on the table. She can tell something's really wrong.

The waiter came, he took our order,

and after that I remember Sam leaning forward.

His body language was kind of like inward,

like he didn't want anybody to hear what he was about to say.

And he said, "I have something to tell you."

"There's a website where married people can go to have an affair,

and stupidly I had an account for that,

and someone has hacked into Ashley Madison,

and a list of names is being leaked, like, right now,

and my name was just exposed on Twitter."

She was just kinda lookin' down, listening to me,

and just tryin' to take it in.

I was infuriated.

I was really just angry right away

about the not thinking it through on his part. Like...

Just such a selfish decision.

Now here we are

potentially going to just, like, lose everything, like, maybe we've built.

Oh, wow.

I kinda started questioning him. "So did you meet up with anybody?" "No."

- "You talk to anybody?" "Not really." - This was a couple years ago.

I never met with a single person before, I never cheated on you.

He was a little v... um, vague about...

He k... kept that pretty, like...

Minimize. Like, "I did nothing. Nothing happened, don't worry."

And... and I... I kinda like latched onto that.

But I still felt betrayed.

We got on the airplane. Nia's kind of visibly upset.

For some reason, Nia and I sit separately on the plane.

I can't remember why.

I remember saying, "I don't wanna sit with you."

There was just a lot of anger.

Like, "I've been a good wife. I've been a good mother."

There's just no reason, you know? He's got everything he needs.

Like, I... I... I'm there for him in every way.

What in the world is missing that he needs to go on this website?

And at the same time, I didn't want to get off the plane

and arrive at a convention at odds with him.

I believed that he didn't do anything.

I really, truly believed him, and my heart wanted to forgive quickly.

So maybe he got curious about it,

and maybe I need to accept that he's got some curiosities I didn't know about.

But he still didn't, and it's like that part was still safe.

Plane lands, we're in Seattle.

She's like, "Okay. So, what are we gonna do?"

We went to a hotel that night.

I remember sitting on the edge of the bed, like so proud of myself.

Like, "I really am the best wife."

I really felt like I outdid him in that moment.

Like, "You signed up for the stupid, skeezy website,

and here I am working to forgive you,

still going to be intimate with you."

Like, "What woman would be intimate with you?"

And thinking like, "I'm winning at this marriage game."

I would say most people thought we had a very happy marriage.

You can work so hard at an image,

that you can make it very believable.

You spend so much time building that,

that you begin to believe it's the reality.

I remember hearing that Ashley Madison had been hacked,

and it crossed my mind that John's name might be there.

He has always been a secret-keeper.

But as secretive as John is,

he wasn't very careful with his secrets.

Early on, when I started seeing things that made me wonder,

that I wasn't real sure about, that I had doubts about,

I would just go, "Wait, no, everything's okay."

"I must be imagining that."

"I must be creating something that's not really there."

I think I gaslighted myself as much as anything.

But there were just a few things that...

that happened that I couldn't brush aside.

I discovered some inappropriate relationships.

I would come across a letter from someone to him.

I think the letters were one of the hardest things.

That was our thing.

And, um, that hurt.

So when I first heard about Ashley Madison,

I tried to search for his name.

And it wasn't quite that easy.

There were hoops you had to jump through, and I didn't wanna jump through them.

I had reached a point where I'd realized,

"Christi, you're really not gonna do anything about it."

"So why know?"

So I just didn't look anymore, hoping I was wrong.

The only people that aren't freaking out are probably lawyers,

'cause you can only imagine the number of people

that are gonna be taking their significant other to divorce court.

Seeing the scale of the data and how quickly the media picked up on it,

it was a real gut punch.

The list of Ashley Madison users being exposed is growing fast,

from school principals to state prosecutors.

You had celebrities being disgraced in... in public.

Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi's husband Jionni LaValle's e-mail

was reportedly found linked to the cheating site.

The reality television star Josh Duggar

admits now he cheated on his wife.

Real Housewives of New York star Kristen Taekman's husband Josh

has admitted he did indeed sign up for what Ashley Madison was selling.

Their clientele ranged from common folk to the prominent people in society,

and some of them had, uh, status.

WIRED magazine's reporting that one analysis of the e-mail addresses

shows that some 15,000 were dot-mil, military e-mail addresses,

or dot-gov addresses.

The son of Vice President Joe Biden is responding after an unconfirmed report

showed an Ashley Madison account linked to his e-mail address.

When you start seein' the names on those lists,

it could cause some national-security issues.

This could be the biggest hack of all time.

If not in raw numbers, at least in terms of impact.

A lot of people were starting to receive, um, threatening letters, blackmailing.

Saying that if you pay me X amount of dollars,

I will clear your name and any sort of trace

that you ever had an account with Ashley Madison.

We wouldn't advise to do it or not do it.

But we would definitely suggest that they change their password.

If a company states a privacy policy,

they'd better stand by that privacy policy.

They'll be out of business.

Everyone was on edge.

There could be lawsuits, there could be fines.

Noel still seemed to think that he would come through it

and he would save his company.

Hair 101 with April here.

- What do you think? - That looks cool.

The next day we wake up.

So we go into the conference.

It's a convention for vloggers. Like daily vloggers, weekly, whatever.

You can network, make new friends.

We were goin' about our day.

There were some comments on Twitter about me,

but it's not goin' viral or anything.

And then it kinda shifted. People were just kinda looking at us.

And I see all these articles start coming out about me.

That I was in the Ashley Madison dump.

Then another and another, and this is within like ten minutes.

"Oh gosh, it's happening."

Today we're sticking to one subject,

the celebrity fallout from the Ashley Madison hack.

Christian blogger Sam Rader was found on the master list as a subscriber.

I felt so humiliated.

Just had this sense of, like, all eyes on us.

I'm obviously the wife, and so "poor her," you know?

Like, "I'm so sorry for her."

And I was so annoyed, like, that he put all this on me.

And I start getting tons of e-mails from media outlets.

E-mail after e-mail, phone call.

I just didn't say a word. I kept completely silent.

It was just unbelievable to me that I'm in the news for this.

It just didn't make any sense to me that people cared.

If you do boast a moral high ground, you get more attention when you're caught

on a website with the sole purpose of adultery.

The attitude toward people using the website was...

It was an... it was an absolute witch hunt.

It certainly brings up echoes of,

in the past adulterers would have to wear a scarlet letter A around their neck.

I just love this.

I love the idea that people thought, somehow, that there was a fail-safe method

of going hunting for available women when you were married,

and somehow karma would not fall on you like a ton of bricks.

People started, uh, making websites

that you could type a name or e-mail address into the search bar,

and it would tell you if that person had an account on the website.

Now what you're seeing, this happened in the last couple hours,

people are taking this data

and making it easy to find on the open web.

Different media outlets took different approaches with this.

I think one that took it the farthest was an Australian radio station

that invited people to call in, provide their partner's e-mail address,

and they would look up whether or not their partner had been on the site,

live on the air.

All right, now, Jo, you've rung us.

You're suspicious about your partner.

Yeah. When I heard it, I thought I should ring up.

His hours have changed. He's following very close to him now.

Bits of money, where have they gone? Not really sure.

Okay. We've got his details here.

Um, and his details have revealed

that he's actually on the website, Jo.

Are you serious?

- Yeah, I'm sorry. - Are you kidding me?

Yeah. No, no, we... Yeah.

These websites are disgusting.

Yeah... Oh, Jo's gone.

I dunno if we should've done that.

This practice in terms of, uh, you know, the witch hunt,

of accusing people, trying to publicly shame them,

I think went way, way too far.

I woke up that morning just like any other morning.

The first thing I smell is the coffee.

And I know John's in the kitchen.

And we were standing in the kitchen, talking over our coffee.

We made plans for dinner.

He reminded me we had some leftovers in the fridge,

and I said, "Leftovers sounds good, let's eat that."

Then I went to work.

Later on, I got home and a friend met me at the house,

and we stood in the driveway and talked for a little while.

She said, "I hear something. Is there a phone in there that's ringing?"

And she eventually left and I went on inside.

So I began to sense that things weren't right.

John wasn't in the kitchen.

I went to the kitchen, he wasn't there, which is where he would've been.

So I began looking around the house for him.

Went upstairs.

Looked in our room.

He wasn't there.

And when I made it to the garage,

um...

That's where I found him.

I realized the sound that my friend was hearing

was the carbon monoxide alarm going off.

I immediately rushed over to him.

I checked his pulse at his neck, I checked his pulse in his arms.

I felt his skin, and he was cold to the touch.

He had been gone for a while.

I just sat there.

I didn't know what to do.

I was in shock. I was in shock.

Not a day I ever imagined.

Not a day I would ever wanna live through again.

It was horrible.

I went back inside to find my phone and called my friend,

and even in talking to her, I couldn't say the words

"John is dead."

I said, "I... I... I think John is dead."

Because we lived within our community, my house just immediately filled up.

In the course of all that, I remember the moment...

I remember somebody sitting down

and said, "Christi, we need to tell you a little bit about what happened today."

He went to work.

He was told that he had an appointment with the council that were his bosses.

And he went to the meeting,

and they let him know that his name had been on the Ashley Madison website.

And the way they described it, he was in tears,

and, um, did not try to deny it in any way.

Just said, "Yes, and I know you need my resignation."

And that he turned it in.

This was a school for people studying to be in the ministry,

and he was from three generations of pastors.

He couldn't walk into a classroom at a seminary

and continue to teach with this known.

To realize that his name was on Ashley Madison,

that realization, I think, was very shocking for people.

I'm sure there are people who are angry about Ashley Madison.

But I blame the secrecy.

The cancer of shame that was eating away at him.

As far as the people who just were poring over that list

and looking for names, and the witch hunt,

there's just a self-righteousness in that

that I think assumes that you are without sin and without fault.

And when the men were stoning the woman caught in adultery,

Jesus said, "Let you who is without sin cast the first stone."

And I don't think any of us is qualified.

So Nia and I, we get back to our Airbnb,

and then we started getting pressure from all directions to publish a response.

From our viewers, like, "Sam, tell us what's going on."

"Is this real? True? What's happening?"

Hey, guys, as you may have seen,

my name has been associated with an Ashley Madison account.

A website made for spouses who wanna have an affair.

Um, I'm here to clarify some of this with you guys because I owe it to you.

Um, I did make the account. I made the account two years ago.

This was brought to my wife's attention.

She has forgiven me for this mistake that I made in opening the account.

Um, I've sought forgiveness to God, and he's forgiven me.

So I've been completely cleansed of this sin.

And also, I need to c... I need to be clear

that I've never met with a single person face-to-face through that website,

and that I never had an affair with anybody ever

while I've been married with Nia.

I did feel like it was his mess to fix.

I felt like, "You got yourself into this and put us in this position."

Take responsibility and do the majority of speaking.

This is what the atonement's all about, forgiveness and second chances.

And I just wanna add too, guys,

I have forgiven Sam, and I stand behind him.

Marriage is the real deal, and it's been sealed,

and it's worth fighting for.

It always will be.

So... Oh, gosh.

Yeah, so the aim was to put an end to it and be done,

and continue our lives as it was before this came out.

And I would say it was pretty effective in doing that.

I'm really clinging

to just this naive and really hopeful place

of like, this is what is necessary for us to move forward.

But after uploading it,

the convictions like hit me like a ton of bricks.

I knew how phony that video was in the moment.

Like, I... I knew what I was doing.

I kept ignoring it.

Nia had forgiven me, for sure, right in that moment.

But Nia had no idea what she was actually gonna have to forgive.

I just remember it was everywhere.

We were all over the news.

The media was relentless.

Ashley Madison was a bad business. I didn't like it.

So the fact that they'll probably go out of business is good.

On one hand, I thought, "This is completely catastrophic."

"This is it."

I think a lot of people felt Ashley Madison, ya know, got hacked,

it's like, "Oh, Ted Bundy got killed in a car accident."

It's like, who gives a shit?

On the flip side,

I also saw signs that any press could mean good press.

All the world was talking about it.

Ashley Madison.

- Ashley Madison. - Ashley Madison.

The website saw traffic at levels that were never seen before.

They say, ya know, negative publicity is good publicity.

I think that was the idea. People were curious.

The history of the company has always been a lot of media attention,

and that led me to think that maybe that was just the whole purpose of it.

Why? Do we know anything about why the hackers did this?

It's interesting. I hadn't heard of this hacker group.

Not many people had. They call themselves the Impact Team.

There were never any demands for money.

She says she's never heard of this group, but you can assume they want publicity.

Maybe this was a publicity stunt.

Okay. Is the company responsible for this?

As I said, talk good about me, talk bad about me,

but please talk about me.

I have a total open mindset.

So everybody is a suspect until, uh, they are not.

And that's when I started to ask myself,

is Noel capable of doing that?