If you happened to catch eBay in the headlines Monday, you probably shook your head in utter disbelief. Did at least six eBay employees set out on a months-long campaign of physical and virtual terror against blogger Ina Steiner, which included the sending of a preserved pig fetus, fly larvae, live spiders and cockroaches, a bloody pig mask, pornography, adult entertainers, implied death threats, social media harassment laced with foul obscenities, defacement of property, and the purchasing of equipment to both commit breaking and entering and unlawful GPS monitoring of her automobile? It seems almost too far-fetched to possibly be true. And yet, James Baugh (former eBay senior director of safety and security), David Harville (former eBay director of global resiliency), Stephanie Popp (former eBay senior manager of global intelligence), Brian Gilbert (former eBay senior manager of special operations and one-time Santa Clara police captain), Stephanie Stockwell (former eBay intelligence analyst), and Veronica Zea (former intelligence analyst contractor with eBay), among others, stand accused of doing just that.

EBay used to be a darling of Silicon Valley. It was once a Fortune 100 company and ranked No. 14 on the list of the world’s most valuable brands. When I was applying for in-house attorney jobs in the Bay Area in 2006 (before Facebook, before Apple had won back the world with its iPad and iPhones, before Airbnb, Netflix, Dropbox, Box, Uber, Lyft, Zoom, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok or Postmates) there were three companies most lawyers wanted to work for in Silicon Valley: Google, eBay and Yahoo. While Google was further ahead in terms of popularity, it wasn’t by much. In fact, after interviewing at Google and eBay on the same day, I called Google and withdrew my candidacy, accepting an offer from eBay on the spot, as it seemed like a more collegial environment.

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