This post contains quotes from threads on Tattle that are dedicated to discussing me. They’re not the only posts on there – some are complimentary! People post about how they like my writing, or our podcast; sometimes they berate meaner posters for what they’ve written about me. But, as tends to happen with these things, it’s not the nice posts that stick with me. It’s the rest of them.
She’s next level pathetic, adds no value to society, yet her entitlement knows no bounds.
Late last week, a Northern Irish court ordered the identity of a formerly anonymous website owner be made public, after the man in question lost a defamation case against a couple, Neil and Donna Sands, who were subject to defamation and harassment on his website, Tattle Life.
It’s a judgment that will mean absolutely nothing to the vast majority of people. For the influencers whose appearances, lives, relationships and businesses have been torn apart on the gossip website Tattle Life, however, knowing the identity of its founder, one Sebastian Bond, also known as Bastian Durward (and who posted on the site as Helen McDougal) marks one step towards unmasking the many anonymous users who spend a lot of their time posting criticism about influencers, business people and celebrities on the site.
The website, according to itself, has “a zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful”, while also hosting threads with titles such as “Katie Price #471 Leg's [sic] like sticks, prancing in her nicks, which went right up her crack, madam really is tack”; “Vicky Pattison #22 Vicky can’t stop posting, always boasting, crap at hosting!”; and “Charlotte Taylor #45 Monjaro speculation, child neglect, oh how I love myself, check”.
Posters will defend their “right” to post on Tattle by citing free speech laws; bringing up the fact that influencers can’t take criticism, and frequently respond by blocking their critics; and the old adage, “if you put yourself out there…” while using the site and their anonymity on it to post diatribes about people’s weight, looks, parenting, work ethic and the cleanliness of their homes, as if they’re somehow the internet’s crabby old auntie, just out here telling the truth, for each influencer’s “own good”.
The court case has seen a wide range of influencers and social media users commenting on the judgment, and the site more generally, detailing their own experiences of being posted about on Tattle, from mild criticism to threats of calling child services on mothers for the crime of, er, giving their children an “objectionable” nickname.
It has – but of course – made me start thinking about (surprise!) myself, my experience being the subject of b****y online posters, and what this experience has done to my confidence, my work and, ultimately, my life.
It's only a matter of time before her husband is worn down by the relentless negativity. She really doesn't contribute anything of note to the family unit, emotional or financial.
I first started to be posted about online at around the same time as I started posting online, which seems to be a common experience for a broad group of people we can call Women On the Internet™. In the earliest days, I was blogging about fashion from my parents’ kitchen table, posting photographs of my outfits my Dad took for me in the back garden of my childhood home.
There I was, in a long grey cardigan, cinched in at the waist by the skinniest brown leather belt imaginable; in another, I’m wearing snake print trousers and a paisley shirt, with the chunkiest necklace you’ve ever seen around my neck. The outfits, I can admit, weren’t great; at the time, the criticism focused largely on my terrible fashion sense, and the fact that my Dad was taking my pics. (I seemed to miss the boat on the blogger boyfriend, a fact that will never cease to irritate me. What was I doing wrong?!)
I saw a full body photo Rosemary shared a while back and I was surprised by just how much weight she had put on. If she keeps gaining like that she's on the road to health issues and mobility issues. I'd be surprised if at her weight she doesn't feel impeded by it already.
As time went on and I grew more prolific – I started the fashion blog on The Irish Times, Fash Mob (love a pun, so I do, and flash mobs were A Thing back then, FYI); regularly appeared on TV3’s magazine show, Xposé (RIP) as a stylist, contributor and fashion pundit; and wrote and/or styled features for magazines such as Irish Tatler, IMAGE and Irish Country Magazine, the criticism got more personal.
People had an issue with: my accent; my (alleged!) lisp; my opinions; the cheek of me to be fat while talking about fashion; the cheek of me to be unfashionable while talking about fashion; the way I tousled my hair when I filmed myself talking to camera on Snapchat; my (undeserved) confidence… the list goes on. The criticism started to feel less and less fair, more and more personal, and more and more subjective, eventually boiling down to: I just don’t like her.
Like does she like ever like stop like moaning like about like absolutely everything like?
And let’s be clear: we are, each and every one of us, entitled to our own opinions about others. I do, on an academic level, understand that not everybody will like me. I don’t like it, but I understand it as logical fact.
But it’s one thing to know this – like when we tell kids, “listen, I don’t know why x or y doesn’t want to be friends with you, but that’s life!” – and entirely another thing to be able to read exactly why and how and how much people dislike you. It can be soul-destroying.
Before Tattle – which was founded only in 2018, though it’s difficult to believe it’s only been going for seven years – there was Reddit and, at least for Irish influencers, boards.ie. But the moderators on Boards were notoriously quick to delete comments that were deemed personal in nature, or potentially defamatory, while the Irish blogger snark Reddit never quite got off the ground. Tattle, despite maintaining that its moderators do not allow “hateful” comments, seemed to grow at a feverish pace; today, it has more than 12 million monthly visitors.
As for her subscribers going down; does she not get that she is irrelevant now? Her feckless, thoughtless, without consequence spending is disgusting. Sitting in her car wondering where she will eat for breakfast after spending God knows how much on therapy as well as childcare for her self care. I spent €140 on groceries this week and Im dreading next week because the kids won’t be in school and will need 100s of snacks as well as entertaining for two weeks! And crying about her appearance? Please. This is the woman who happily poses naked or in a bikini for tens of thousands of people on the internet.
The money diaries have a lot to answer for when it comes to the worst posts on Tattle about me, honestly; had I never started sharing my “without consequence” spending… well, who am I kidding? They would have found something else to criticise. But it does feel as though my wanton consumerism has hit a very specific nerve among the Tattlers that may – and I’m going out on a limb here – have to do with the very crux of their issue.
I asked fashion and beauty influencer Grace Mongey Gernon why she thought people felt the need to post about influencers on Tattle. Her answer echoed a lot of my own thoughts: “I feel like maybe because of the opportunities we get and the stuff we are sent and because we don’t have a traditional job,” she suggested. “They don’t see it as work, so why should we get all these nice things?”
When you think about it like that – these people are just, you know, normal people, working their 40-hour-a-week jobs, struggling to get by (because it’s 2025; almost everyone’s struggling to get by), forced to fork out for their own mattresses and hair straighteners and “super supplements”, and when they log into Instagram for their daily dose of mindless escapism, they’re faced with reel after reel of women just like them getting paid to post about their lives on Instagram and (they think) never having to put their hands in their pockets.
She has to be the laziest person alive. I guess the parents are over keeping her on takeaways. Back to eating shite now she has no injections
And you know what? I GET ALL OF THAT! Even when I was an influencer, I would find myself being absolutely maddened by the freebies that another influencer – one I perceived as being (God help me) even lazier than I am, or less cool, or less (lol) “influential” – and I would think to myself, Jesus Christ, why are they sending that enormous box of lipsticks to that absolute dose?!
But guess what I didn’t do? I didn’t immediately run on to an online gossip forum – which, newsflash, may be anonymous, but is also entirely public, meaning anyone, including the person you’re talking about, can read it – to expose all of the worst parts of my jealous, insecure and, frankly, petty personality to other jealous, insecure and petty people. I WhatsApped my friends instead!
man she's hard work!! I wonder does the hubby put up with her shite and challenge her or is a he a bit of a gombeen and just stays quiet for an easy life!
I’m making light of it now, but honestly, there was a time where I found myself massively affected by – and this sounds stupid, as I write it down – the anonymous postings of anonymous people I don’t (and never will, nor do I want to) know.
I felt so exposed, in a way I’d never felt before, possibly because a lot of their criticisms about me were remarkably similar to criticisms I had about myself, especially when going through a particularly depressive episode. My sister once asked, about one specific poster, “Are you sure that’s not you?”, as if I’d be spending my spare time posting anonymous criticism about myself on Tattle (stranger things have happened…).
There was also a paranoia to it that leaked into my everyday life. I’d be walking down the road, looking around, wondering, could that person be posting on Tattle? Does that person know (and hate) me?
She's lazy and just wants everything in life to be as easy as possible (not just referring to her eating habits) She's not willing to make an effort with anything in life that requires a bit of work.
I’d start to wonder what I could possibly do to get them to stop, but I never had any answers. I’d wonder what it was they wanted – for me to change? For me to go away? For me to disappear off the internet altogether, once and for all, forever? But I tried that, of a sort, when I bowed out of being an influencer, deleted my blog, stopped doing my podcast and retrained as a personal trainer, thinking that, once I was out of the fashion and beauty game, they’d relent.
Instead, they posted about how anyone could ever go to me as a personal trainer; I was too fat, too undisciplined, too “unfit-looking” to inspire anyone, they said. (I was still posting on Instagram occasionally, trying to promote my PT services – getting new clients is one of the tougher aspects of personal training, and it felt ridiculous not to use my online following to help.)
And I know that I could stop reading it, but I also feel as though I can’t. I know it’s there now… it’s like a spot I can’t stop picking at, a loose thread in a jumper I can’t ignore, a misaligned piece of wallpaper I’ll never be able to forget about.
I also wondered, sometimes – again, at my lowest ebbs – what they would do if I were to just disappear from life, full stop. Would they be happy? Would they think, phew, I never have to listen to her moan or hear her lisp or look at her smug face ever again? Or would they just think, well, she’s been depressed for ages, and go on to post on someone else’s page?
I never thought of myself as a people-pleaser, before Tattle, but the website exposed a deep need in me to be liked, along with, cruelly, a part of me that seems to be, to some people at least, deeply unlikeable. That’s a hard pill to swallow, because, at the ripe age of 40, my personality feels very f*****g firmly established. I’m not sure I’ll be changing any time soon.
And when I saw the recent news about Tattle, and the identity of its founder, I felt so incredibly angry – that this man, whatever his name is, has been capitalising off the cultural conditioning that’s made generations of women feel that they will somehow be raised up by tearing other women down.
I was raging that these women have wasted so much of their lives posting these nasty, hateful and hurtful things about other women and, honestly, livid that I’ve wasted any of my time reading it and wondering how, exactly, I could make them like me more.
It’s all been such a waste. All to make money for a man named – of all things – Sebastian.
She does the bare minimum and wants to be rewarded for it.
(This one, at least, is true. Isn’t that the dream?!)
I asked three influencers – or, rather, two current and one former influencer – about their experiences with Tattle. Here’s what they told me.
Georgina Horne, formerly of @fullerfigurefullerbust
“I don’t know at what point I became aware of Tattle specifically – but sometimes when people asked me questions about things I’d worn, or old blog posts, I’d search my name and a subject. And it would bring up Tattle results.
“To this day, I’ve never been on my own thread. My husband went on it… he’s not told me how many times, but I know he went on it after we had our daughter because someone from my Facebook page posted on Tattle that we’d had her, before I was ready to post publicly about it. It’s almost like, if you put your child on the internet, people berate you. If you don’t put your child on the internet, people berate you. You just can’t win.
“It was one of the reasons I stopped wanting to be on the internet. After I had my daughter, they were leaving comments, saying they knew my daughter’s name, asking why I hadn’t posted about her – I just wanted to keep a bit of mystery around her name, face, date of birth. I thought, I’m going to be blogging forever, and I don’t want my daughter’s full details online.
“Even after I’d left [social media], they went on to this baby class we go to, where they’d posted pics of her – as just a regular mum who goes there, I allowed them to post those pictures… and I had people sending me messages, asking, ‘oh I thought you weren’t going to allow your daughter to be on the internet’.
“Whenever I think about my Tattle page, it makes me feel sick and I think… maybe I should just read it because it might not be as bad as I think?
“But I remember, when I first had my daughter, I was talking about night feeds and I was calling her a little gremlin, saying she had a stinky bum – people went on and listed every single thing I’d ever said. ‘You’ve called her a gremlin, you’ve said she’s this, you’ve said she’s that…’ and someone said they were reporting me to social services. That’s when I came off.”
Grace Mongey Gernon @facesbygrace
“My experience with Tattle has always been negative. About three years ago, I went on after I’d got a couple of messages from people and had a little read. Before then, I’d never gone in depth… but this time, I read a little more than I should have. It really fucked me over, mentally. I started to believe all this s**t I was reading about myself. My anxiety got really bad.
“I was already in a really bad head space and it just knocked me for six, reading what people were saying about me. I took a break, pushed all of my campaigns out, and came offline for two weeks.
“I couldn’t even tell you what they were saying. It was just the usual – bashing me as a mother, my appearance, my weight, saying stuff about the kids, about my husband, even about my Mam.
“I’ve spent so many therapy sessions talking about what other people thought of me. Going on that website was like self-sabotage. I vowed never to go on it again, and I never did, but obviously it all sticks in my mind.
“I’m a sensitive person and a people-pleaser, and it really knocked my confidence for a long time. But I wasn’t going to let a few anonymous accounts stop me from doing what I love, even if there was a time when I wanted to give it up because of all the hate.”
“I used to post freely… but after [hearing about] the commentary on how I act, talk and do everything in my life, I started to second guess everything I posted. Now, I talk as if I know loads of people who hate me are going to sit down and tear me apart.
“It’s made it hard to show up authentically, as it’s often easier to just post nothing. To have so many people watching you… you know everything you say is being analysed to be torn apart.
“Someone posted their notes about me to my parents’ house, which was a step too far. It was a 24-page document of notes they’d been keeping on me for the last seven years. I just skimmed it, because I knew it would upset me… they just analyse every single thing I do. I brought it to the guards, but they couldn’t do much about it.
“I mean… I have a hate campaign against me… and not just me. That’s one thing – I found solace [in the fact that] there are horrible things written about some of the nicest people I know.”
