June 2025 saw a potential watershed moment in internet history: Neil and Donna Sands, married Irish entrepreneurs and creators, posted on Instagram: “For nearly a decade, the hate site Tattle Life has profited as a space where users could defame, harass, stalk and attack others online – all behind a veil of anonymity. Today we secured a court order to unmask the site’s operator, who has used the fake name “Helen McDougal”. Their true identity, however, is an Englishman named Sebastian Henry Bond, aka Bastian Durward (43).”
This was not the Sandses’ first Tattle battle. They have been pursuing the business and its principals for over three years. In 2023, the High Court in Northern Ireland awarded the Sandses £300,000 for defamation and harassment against the publishers. The judge, Mr Justice McAlinden, noted in his ruling: “Clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit”. He went on to say, “this is a site which has been set up to facilitate the deliberate infliction of hurt and harm on others.”
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The Sandses were not done, however, and the High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland granted an application to name the defendants in their defamation and harassment case. Hence the Instagram bombshell reveal. But who was behind the investigation? CORQ exclusively interviewed the brains who exposed the true identity of Bond: Nardello & Co.’s managing director Alan Kennedy and senior analyst, Finn Duggan.
Behind the scenes
Nardello & Co. is a global investigations company that deals broadly with fact finding around the world, including reputation management and uncovering bad actors in hostile PR campaigns as well as online abuse. The pair are talking to CORQ, because in a rare moment for their careers, says Kennedy, they can. “In the entire time I have been at this company, this is one of the very few projects that has gone public.”
Kennedy has been with Nardello & Co. for 11 years and discretion is key; the company deals in privacy and, more often than not, their clients are high-net worth individuals or businesses trying to protect rather than publish information about themselves. The very nature of the Sandses’ case means that talking about it is exactly the thing that makes it worthwhile, and Kennedy says it is already making a difference: “What’s nice about this project is the social impact. We’ve already been in touch with a few people who’ve noticed the trolls have stopped writing to them.”
On the face of it, influencers complaining about people talking and sharing details about them online when they reveal so much about themselves, has not always been met with the greatest sympathy. It’s not unlike the potential eye-roll when celebrities complain about privacy while leveraging their success for astonishing privilege. It’s the worm at the heart of the parasocial relationship. But exposing the trolls has impact far beyond the lives of Neil and Donna Sands, as the comments under their Instagram attest. Kennedy says: “I think it’s made a few people think, ‘actually, maybe I should think twice about harassing this person day in and day out’.”
Not only that but Duggan tells me the tools used in the investigation mimic those used in anti-corruption cases. “We do a lot of anti-corruption work, supporting lawyers in litigation and arbitration, complex due diligence assignments in challenging jurisdictions, and the skill set for the Tattle Life work is really complimentary.” The engine that fuelled conversations on Tattle Life was not a blameless one: it profited as a platform, very successfully, on the misery of others.
Unveiling Sebastian Bond
The investigation came at the instructions of the Sandses’ lawyers Gateley Legal, and ran over the course of three years. Kennedy and Duggan tell me it wasn’t merely, “a case of us coming across the name Sebastian Bond one day and knowing that it was him for sure. We had lots of other people on our radar.”
At points, the team thought figures from the influencer world could have been behind the site. Although the details of the investigation are under wraps, the sheer volume of digital information the team reviewed is extraordinary – from media sites to property records to language analysis: “We looked at language used on the Tattle Life website to see patterns, to draw inferences to what kind of person it was; what turns of phrase do they like? Do they make the same kind of mistake sometimes, such as using semi-colons where they shouldn’t be used?” From corporate records to vocabulary ticks, all roads led to Bond, who was a small-time vegan influencer in his own right and is currently unavailable in Asia. Bond was clever, but as Duggan says: “Maintaining perfect, what we would call operational security, over a multi-decade period is almost impossible.”
Operational security is a distinct strand of the Nardello & Co. offering. The team are able to deep dive into what people are wittingly and unwittingly revealing online, and advise on steps to minimise exposure. Obviously this is a delicate balance in the influencer world. As Duggan affirms: “It will always be a problem for influencers, where your brand and your business are your life and your identity. We can offer some of the protective steps to mitigate those effects without needing to stop operating your business, in effect.”
The bigger picture impact
Apart from a kind of vindication for the Sandses personally, this case has potential ramifications across the internet more generally. Kennedy agrees, for instance, that while it is early days: “Something like the Tattle Life case could be used as part of a lobbying strategy to have some change in legislation, to compel the tech companies to be more proactive in helping people take things down.” He also points to the other companies, “involved in hosting a website or managing a transfer of data who could be held to account more.” Google announced on 23 June that it was no longer supporting ads on Tattle Life. Accountability for the big platforms is surely a priority, without undermining free speech or the understanding that being able to post anonymously is essential in certain parts of the world.
The question of how much we all put online without thinking also comes up in the course of our discussion. Kennedy says: “The influence of big tech on all of us, given the way things are going, given that big tech knows so much about everything that we do, from what time we get up, what we like, what we read etc, is extraordinary. There are people in San Francisco who know more about us than our family members.” Cases such as Tattle Life highlight the need for social literacy from individuals and corporations. The acceleration and potential dominance of AI also makes these types of investigations both easier and harder. Harder because smarter bots mean they mimic real behaviour rather than falling into discoverable traps, such as posting too quickly and in too many places at once.
The Sandses, incidentally, are not done with Tattle Life and its bad actors – and neither, I imagine, are Kennedy and Duggan, although they could not confirm or deny it. What is clear is that important lines have been drawn in the war against the trolls and the trading of information online – and that Nardello & Co. will be watching.
By Emilie McMeekan, insights director for CORQ.
The Tattle Life takedown and how 2025 became the year that influencers globally took on their trolls and won