A victim of vile abuse on gossip site Tattle Life has opened up on a bullying experience which left her ‘sick to the core’ after trolls went after her daughter, her husband and even found out where she lived.
Online health influencer Dani Kumrou first ventured onto the online forum in 2022 despite her best friend’s very firm warning: ‘Don’t look at it.’
By logging on, she joined 12 million monthly visitors on a site initially created to expose disingenuous social media stars, but which rapidly descended into a sea of hatred aimed at everyone from Stacey Solomon to ‘mummy bloggers’ with small followings.
She instantly regretted it, spotting thousands of existing nasty messages, before the ‘personal attack’ accelerated when her abusers realised she was on the site.
After a miserable three-year ordeal, Ms Kumrou is finally ready to spill Tattle’s secrets, following the unmasking of the page’s ‘owner’ Sebastian Bond this week.
The social media personality told MailOnline: ‘All I did was Google “Tattle Life” and my name and then I saw all this stuff come up.
‘It made me feel sick to the core. I’d never read anything like it in my life. I couldn’t believe it. It really shook me up.
‘Most of the stuff was about my appearance. They would say I was fat and ugly, and talk about the way I speak, the way I dress, it really was a personal attack.’
A self-described ‘confident person’, the influencer weathered this initial spate of nastiness.
But when trolls brought her family into their campaign of hatred, Ms Kumrou was left reeling.
‘I then read stuff about my daughter, who is now 14. My husband was also ridiculed on there.
‘It’s almost like obsession. I would look at it every day, and it did really affect me.
I’m a very confident person. I don’t really get knocked by things like that, but when it’s that personal and it’s about you every day you start to question, “is what I’m doing right? Do I even want to work online anymore?”
‘I was determined not to let these people take me off of the internet. When it was about me, a lot of it was nonsense, but when they start talking about your family and your children, it gets a little bit more personal.’
Amid this nightmare period of online abuse and vitriole, Ms Kumrou was occupied with one question: ‘Why her?’
An influencer working for a health company with a healthy, but fairly modest, follower count in the tens of thousands, she wasn’t exactly a traditional target for a pitchfork-wielding mob.
‘I do share bits of my life online but I’m not a celebrity,’ she said. ‘So I couldn’t understand why they were so fascinated with me.
‘I didn’t understand at first, the concept of anonymous posting and the fake profile.
‘A lot of the people writing about me actually had me as their profile picture. But they would screenshot a picture, if I was on a live stream or something that looked really unattractive, that made me look like I had 10 chins.
‘Then they would have these made up names, so I couldn’t work out who they were, why they had my profile picture, and then I looked into it and realised, these were anonymous people posting about people and tearing them apart.’
With wave after wave of nasty remarks being plastered across the site for all to see, Ms Kumrou took comfort from the fact that she still maintained a modicum of privacy.
But the mob soon took a torch to this too, finding out where she lived and where she was moving to.
‘They put up my address. Even though I share my life online, I’ve always been quite careful with not tagging myself in exact locations. When I’m at home, I tag myself in a different city because I’m aware that I work online and you have to be careful.
‘And they’ve always been obsessed with where I live. Then, when we put our house for sale, they found it on Rightmove, and publicly posted the Rightmove with my address on there.
‘That’s when I thought, “You know what? Enough is enough.” That’s when it really upset me, because it is scary. Why do they want to know where I live?
‘Then I did a public post on my social media saying I wouldn’t be sharing my moving journey.
‘We found a property that we thought that we were going to move into, and all I did online was send a picture from the balcony.
‘There was no picture of the house online but somehow they found it and this is how your brain starts thinking, “Oh, it must be someone I know. It must be someone that I’ve told about this house that I’m looking at.”
‘You start to suspect everyone so it really does affect your relationships and your friendships, because you don’t know who you can and can’t trust.
‘I’ve blocked so many people off my social media who are probably innocent. It really does damage your mental health.’
Last week, restrictions on identifying Bond were lifted, two years after Neil and Donna Sands were awarded £300,000 at the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland after successfully suing him for ‘defamation and harassment’ in posts on the site.
He was also ordered to pay the pair’s legal costs, with ‘further costs and third-party compliance expenses’ amounting to £1.8 million.
The thread about the Sands was removed in May, but thousands and thousands of others remain.
Checking back in on the site after hearing of Bond’s unmasking, Ms Kumrou was surprised to see that comments about her had been taken down.
‘You can’t actually access my thread anymore,’ she said. ‘So when you try to look, it says login.
‘I don’t know whether they’re taking them down or whether they’re making them private.’
The influencer has worked hard to wean herself off Tattle, but the effects of three years of persistent online abuse can still be felt.
She added: ‘I put blockers on my phone which stopped me from doing it because it can become obsessive and can completely take over your life.
‘It has such an effect on you that everything you do is different, even if you think that it doesn’t bother you.
‘It’s always in your subconscious. It’s always in the back of your mind. My thread was very active, it wasn’t once a week – it was hour by hour.’
Ms Kumrou was one of thousands of victims to welcome the unmasking of Bond last week, but the social media personality is now calling for Tattle to be pulled down entirely.
‘It’s brilliant what they’ve done,’ she said. ‘I’ve joined petitions before because it;s such an unhealthy website it’s so horrible.
‘I think it’s very good that people are joining forces and talking about it.
‘I thought it would be something I never spoke about. You almost don’t want to tell people you’re being talked about in this way.
‘The names they called an innocent child…I would never want my daughter to see it.
‘It needs to go. In a world with so many people suffering with mental health and committing suicide…it needs to go.’
For nearly a decade, since the site was set up in 2017, no one knew who ran Tattle Life, with the site’s operator going under the fake name Helen McDougal.
Many will be surprised to learn the creator is in fact a man, who is the author and foodie behind plant-based recipe Instagram page Nest and Glow, which boasts 135,000 followers.
For the past eight years, the vegan cookbook author has secretly presided over the site, which makes an estimated £276,770 in Google Ad revenue every six months, according to figures from 2021.
The Sands, however, have become the first to fight back against the site and win.
Donna, who runs fashion label Sylkie along with other brands, and Neil, an AI founder, said they found a 45-page thread about them and reached out to the site operators in 2021 asking them to take down the commentary ‘or face legal action’.
In 2023, they initiated the process. Neil and Donna got £150,000 each in damages, and the Court granted an injunctive relief to prevent Tattle Life from posting about the couple again.
Awarding damages to the couple in December 2023, Mr Justice McAlinden hit out at Tattle Life, stating there was ‘clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit’.
‘It is the exercise of extreme cynicism – the calculated exercise of extreme cynicism,’ he continued.
‘Which in reality constitutes behaviour solely aimed at making profit out of people’s misery. People facilitating this are making money out of it… protecting their income streams by protecting the identity of the individual posters.’
At court last week, reporting restrictions which prevented Bond being named were lifted.
He has also had his assets frozen and must pay a cessation figure of £1,077,173 to have this order lifted.
It’s likely that deeply popular Tattle Life racked up a decent amount of money for Bond.
As reported by The Guardian in 2021, the blog had 43.2 million visits in just six months that year. The figures are still in the millions this year. In May, as per Similarweb, there were 11.5 million visits on the site, mostly from British users.
It is also understood that Bond uses different names online – one of them being Bastian Durward – and owns a number of businesses across the world. Two of them, Mr Justice Colton confirmed, include UK-registered Yuzu Zest Limited and Hong Kong-registered Kumquat Tree Limited.
According to Companies House information, the former is currently in liquidation but alleged to offer ‘media representation services’.
At a hearing last Thursday, the court saw a letter from Bond’s legal team, sent to one of the plaintiffs, claiming he was the Tattle Life founder but was ‘unaware of any legal proceedings against him’.
The Sands legal representatives disputed that he was unaware.
An initial glimpse at Bond’s Nest and Glow page won’t rouse suspicions that its founder is running a social media platform that has become known for its ‘cruel’ remarks.
Aesthetic photos of mango chia seed pots and sweet potato snacks dominate the feed, along with instructions for recipes.
An Amazon author page for his cookbook – being flogged for £20 online – claims that ‘Bastian’ has a ‘passion for sharing healthy recipes to inspire everyone to eat natural food full of nutrients and vitamins’.
‘I’ve been vegan for over 30 years and on a nutrient-dense plant-based healthy diet for 15 of those,’ he added.
‘In 2015 I decided to leave my office job in order to follow my passions. This resulted in setting up the site Nest and Glow where I share healthy recipes and other natural lifestyle content.’
However, the Irish couple who unmasked him as Tattle Life, have shared the names of his aliases on their social media – stating he was masking under the false name as a site moderator, Helen McDougal.
‘Dear Friends,’ Neil and Donna shared in an Instagram statement this weekend. ‘As a couple we never wanted or expected to undertake this work, however when we discovered the hate site Tattle.Life we were forced to take action.
‘We are very grateful for your support, and hope that this serves as a reminder to those who want to attack others from behind a screen – that the internet is not an anonymous place.
‘We will share more soon, but for today, we hope that this news will provide some peace to those affected by online hate and harassment, and that the internet can be a safer space for us all. Onward.’
Tattle Life states on its site that it has a ‘zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful, harmful and a team of moderators online 24/7 to remove any content that breaks our strict rules – often in minutes’.
However, it adds: ‘Influencer marketing is insidious [and] revolves around people that occupy the space between celebrity and friend to stealthy sell when in reality it’s a parasocial relationship.
‘It’s an important part of a healthy, free and fair society for members of the public to have an opinion on those in a position of power and influence; that is why Tattle exists.
‘We allow people to express their views on businesses away from an influencers feed on a site where they would have to go out of their way to read, this is not trolling.’
Neil Sands also said: ‘We undertook this case not just for ourselves but for the many people who have suffered serious personal and professional harm through anonymous online attacks on this and other websites.
‘We believe in free speech, but not consequence-free speech – particularly where it is intended to, and succeeds in, causing real-world damage to people’s lives, livelihoods and mental health. We were in the fortunate position to be able to take the fight to these faceless operators, and it took a lot of time, effort and expense.’
A surprising amount of charged criticism has circulated on the message boards, hitting out at various famous people.
In one instance, Alice Evans – a Hollywood actress who split from husband Ioan Gruffudd – took to social media in the initial aftermath of their separation, during which time she discovered he was having an affair and documented her anguish.
‘She is full of s***. It’s kinda sad she felt she has to make this stuff up for attention and likes,’ one tattler slammed.
Another stated: ‘She was controlling him. A good mother would simply not be using her children to get back at her ex whether he cheated on her or not.’
Elsewhere, Katie Price was labelled a ‘drugged up p*** artist’.
Countless celebrities have been subject to vitriol at the hands of vicious comment threads – but those with smaller online presences are also at risk.
Number one on the hit list at one point was Mrs Hinch, who has made a fortune from posting cleaning videos on Instagram.
Tens of thousands of comments raged that she and her husband are a ‘deluded pair of t***s’.
Solomon, an avid Instagrammer who posts regular updates of her home renovations, marriage and children was also torn apart for her ‘filthy kids, scruffy hair, outfits from Build A Bear’.
One tribe seems to draw particular malice: so-called mumfluencers, Instagram influencers who make their trade in sharing the exploits of themselves and their children online.
In 2023, former mummy blogger Clemmie Hooper was handed a caution order for a period of one-year following a midwifery misconduct hearing – four years after she engaged in trolling other influencers on a gossip forum.
The mother-of-four from Kent, once boasted 700,000 followers on Instagram and had partnered with brands such as Mothercare and Boden on sponsored posts.
But in 2019, Hooper – who worked part-time as a midwife – came off social media after her account on Tattle Life was exposed.
Among the posts made under the Alice in Wanderlust psuedonym, was one accusing black mummy blogger Candice Brathwaite of social climbing, being ‘aggressive’ and using her ‘race as a weapon’.
Just two months before, Hooper had invited Ms Brathwaite onto her podcast to discuss her traumatic birth experience and how she developed life-threatening sepsis following an emergency C-section.
Following the Fitness To Practise Committee Substantive Hearing with the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which started on February 28 of that year, the panel’s decision was announced on March 7.
Earlier in the hearing, Hooper had admitted to three of the charges facing her – that she made the comments in question, and that they had been intended to ‘undermine or humiliate’ their target.
She also accepted that elements of the posts were ‘racially offensive and/or discriminatory’, but maintains that she was unaware of this offence at the time.
The panel took into account some mitigating factors, including Hooper’s health at the time of making the posts, which was said to have clouded her objectivity.
Speaking to Grazia in 2021, Candice Brathwaite, said it had been ‘painful’ reading the posts on Tattle.
