BOSTON — David and Ina Steiner ran an e-commerce trade newsletter from their home in Natick, Massachusetts. They had covered the industry for twenty years. In 2019, the company they had spent those years writing about sent packages to their house containing live cockroaches, a preserved fetal pig, and a bloody pig mask. Their neighbor received unsolicited pornographic magazines. Someone tried to attach a GPS tracker to their car. Death threats arrived through social media direct messages.
The people who did this were executives at eBay.
Seven years later, eBay agreed to pay the Steiners $55.7 million to settle the civil lawsuit the couple filed in 2021. The settlement, announced Wednesday, includes $46.15 million from eBay directly, $2 million from former CEO Devin Wenig, $500,000 from former senior vice president Wendy Jones, and $50,000 from former chief communications officer Steve Wymer. eBay also committed to $6 million in charitable donations, with an additional $1 million charity contribution from Wenig to a First Amendment organization.
The settlement carries no confidentiality clause. That was the Steiners’ stated priority. “We hope that the size of the settlement amount will act as a deterrent to any corporation that uses their resources to intimidate journalists,” the couple said in a statement. Ina Steiner added: “I could not conceive that a company I had been covering for the past two decades had tried to terrorize us into stopping our reporting.”
The facts of the harassment campaign were established through criminal proceedings that concluded years before Wednesday’s settlement. Federal prosecutors in Massachusetts charged six former eBay employees and one contractor in 2020. All eventually pleaded guilty. The criminal case established that eBay’s internal intelligence team, operating under senior executive direction, had monitored the Steiners’ newsletter — EcommerceBytes — and concluded its coverage was damaging to the company. The response was a sustained harassment operation designed to terrorize the couple into stopping their work.
The civil lawsuit added a question the criminal proceedings did not answer: what did the company owe the targets? eBay settled a criminal case in 2024, paying a $3 million penalty to the Department of Justice. Wednesday’s settlement addresses the civil dimension — what the Steiners are owed for what was done to them by people acting on behalf of a company they had written about for two decades. The $55.7 million figure, paid by multiple defendants rather than eBay alone, suggests the company’s lawyers concluded that the litigation risk of a trial verdict exceeded the settlement cost.
Wenig, the former CEO, has maintained he had no knowledge of the harassment scheme. His $2 million contribution to the settlement — nearly forty times what the former CCO paid — is not an admission of liability, but it is the second-largest individual component of the deal. eBay said Wednesday that the company “acknowledged the unprofessional tone in internal communications” and that the conduct was “wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened.” The company indicated it has strengthened internal ethics policies and controls since 2019.
Press freedom in the United States has been under sustained pressure in 2026 from multiple directions, including federal subpoenas targeting journalists and the use of legal and administrative mechanisms to interfere with newsgathering. The eBay case predates the current environment, but the Steiners’ decision to insist on a settlement with no confidentiality clause — ensuring the record of what was done to them remains public — reads differently in a year when the distinction between accountability and suppression has become a live legal question in American media.
Corporate settlements of this scale have become a feature of the American legal landscape in 2026, as courts have shown willingness to hold companies accountable for executive conduct that caused demonstrable harm. The eBay case is unusual in the category of harm: not a product defect or financial fraud, but a corporate intelligence operation that weaponized the company’s resources against two private citizens who happened to write about it. The settlement amount — more than eighteen times the criminal penalty eBay paid to the Justice Department — reflects the civil system’s capacity to impose financial consequences that criminal courts cannot, particularly where the targets were private individuals rather than regulators or competing corporations.
The lawsuit is resolved. The questions it does not answer: whether any executive above Wenig had awareness of the harassment operation, whether eBay’s internal ethics controls have actually changed in ways that would prevent similar conduct, and whether the EcommerceBytes newsletter the harassment was designed to stop has recovered its position in the market. The Steiners covered eBay for twenty years. They did not stop.
