More Ashley Madison fallout continues to plague users, their spouses and families, and the embattled parent company, Avid Life Media. The now-infamous hack was announced in July — by mid-August, names, email addresses, and other personal information began to be dumped all over the ‘net. So far, some famous names such as Josh Duggar, Sam Rader, and Jeff Ashton (among many others) have found themselves “victims” to the fallout.
People reports that at least two suicides are presumed to be related to the Ashley breach, as well.
Avid Life Media has offered a reward of roughly $400,000 USD for information leading to the hackers. The parent company of Ashley Madison has found itself the focus of a $500 million or so in class-action and other lawsuits as more fallout from the leak continues.
Ashley Madison has been hit with $500 million in lawsuits http://t.co/CULLnCeRIf
— WIRED (@WIRED) August 26, 2015
Arguably, the celeb that’s gotten the most attention as more Ashley fallout continues to hit the fan is the now-notorious reality star, Josh Duggar, reports USA Today . The former star of the the now-defunct 19 Kids and Counting has been in the media virtually non-stop since he publicly admitted to molesting several of his younger sisters and a neighbor girl when he was 14-years-old. That news broke a few months ago, and was the direct cause of the cancellation of his family’s TLC hit. When the Ashley Madison information dump went public, his was one of the first names to be named in the fallout.
“While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife.”
Now, in the midst of his many admitted troubles, the star is checking into rehab as a result of his personal Ashley fallout.
While his wife has thus far remained by his side, Anna’s now facing calls from at least one of her own family members to wash her hands of Josh. While more Ashley fallout continues to burn up the ‘net, her brother, Daniel Keller, pulls no punches in his feelings about his cheating brother-in-law. Us Magazine has the scoop.
“You have to confess and forsake your sin to have mercy. Not sin confess and repeat.”
Anna Duggar’s Brother Daniel Keller Rips “That Pig” Josh Duggar: He “Brought So Much Disgrace” to Family http://t.co/4riKzFrM2Q
— Los Angeles News Now (@lanewsnow) August 24, 2015
While receiving the bulk of the media attention from the Ashley Madison fallout, Duggar may not have been cheating so much as getting duped and trolled in a really epic way. New reports from Us Weekly indicate that while Duggar and millions of other cheaters thought they were chatting it up with eligible ladies, the vast, vast, majority of the Ashley chicks were really dudes in disguise.
“What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots… When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.”
When you consider the stance Duggar has publicly taken against men who get sexual with other men and the LGBT community in general, the irony of this Ashley revelation is pretty sweet, indeed.
It’s true that if you’re on the outside looking in, the Ashley Madison fallout can be pretty humorous. It’s easy to say the cheaters or would-be cheaters brought their collective and individual fates on themselves by having an Ashley account to begin with. The real problem, though, is that these kinds of consequences never solely impact the person responsible for them. This security breach and data dump fallout has already begun to divide families. It is possibly responsible for at least two suicides. Blackmailing has been reported.
Criminals have already started trying to blackmail Ashley Madison users http://t.co/HadgevRXNk pic.twitter.com/yVYQnPriU3
— The Verge (@verge) August 24, 2015
Millions of email addresses, many of them already believed or confirmed to be connected to high-profile names of Ashley members are still floating out there. Who knows who’s going to be the next to get caught up in more Ashley fallout, or what additional damage it will do?
[Photo Credit: Carl Court / Getty Images]