A website for women to tear down women? Of course it was started by a man

How the founder of 'gossip' site Tattle Life pretended to be female and exploited our 'bitchiness' to make money

At last, the person making money from the most hateful gossip site on the internet, largely dedicated to tearing down women, has been exposed - and of course, it’s a man.

I’m talking about Tattle Life which, if you haven’t heard of it, is a UK-based online forum; a collection of live threads dedicated to - as the site itself would have it - commentary ‘on public business social media accounts’.

Translation: the abuse, harassment and stalking of women, and some men, who have the audacity to be celebrities/influencers/business owners who use social media to promote their wares. It’s been called a ‘troll’s paradise’ and ‘the most hate-filled corner of the web’.

Emily Clarkson (daughter of Jeremy) has spoken about how her pregnancy was announced on the site before she’d had a chance to make it public and said that abuse over her appearance on her wedding day was part of the reason she went into therapy. Beauty guru Caroline Hirons had private documents, as well as stolen photos of her children and grandchildren shared. Katie Price says that several visits to mental health hospitals have been prompted by Tattle Life trolling and told the BBC this week that the “constant and disgusting abuse on the website” had contributed to her attempting to take her own life. Multiple other women have said the same and many of them just regular people who have an online presence, blog or business.

The site has been going since 2018 - can you imagine how many have been attacked in that time? I've been mentioned myself - trust me, when a search for your name pops up with results, it makes your blood run cold - but largely just run-of-the-mill criticism of my ‘shocking journalism’. All in a day’s work.

I don’t want to give much oxygen to the sorts of really vile things that ‘Tattlers’ write, but you need to know the level to which these people can stoop. Misogynistic, sexualised slurs. Posting people’s addresses online. Their mum’s addresses. Criticising them in the days after they’ve had a baby. Contacting their employers or brand collaborators in an effort to destroy their careers. Making baseless claims to social services over their parenting. Accusing women of faking postnatal depression.

There are plenty of reasons to distrust some of the influencers out there or think them hypocrites. But laughing about whether they or their partner really have cancer and joking about contacting them to get on with dying, isn’t ‘calling them out’, it’s abuse.

Or as Tattle Life puts it: “We have a zero-tolerance policy to any content that is abusive, hateful or harmful.” Sure, sure.

The disgraceful example below is from a forum called ‘Celebrity Gossip’ and is genuinely from the first page I landed on, having not wanted to go trawling the site. It was also written this week. That’s AFTER the site’s founder had been exposed, Tattlers were being warned to step away from their keyboards and some of the most horrendous threads were apparently being deleted. I’m not going to say who this is about:

‘Let’s not forget that redacted has had her flaps trimmed… Weird that she’s injecting stuff into her gob to give herself duck lips then taking it off other areas.

‘She doesn’t have anything, just a slit’.

I’ll just let you sit with that for a moment. It feels wrong even repeating it here, but we need to know what we’re talking about and not let it hide in the shadows of the internet any longer. Also because I’ve seen some people online saying ‘from what I’ve seen, it’s not that bad’. Still think that?