I saw the new Netflix documentary series “Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal,” anticipating just some prurient garbage to half-watch before drifting off to sleep. That’s because ashleymadison.com is a website for married people looking to find partners in infidelity — its tagline is “Life is short. Have an affair.” The documentary is about what happened in 2015 when hackers released “members’ names, user names, addresses, phone numbers and birth dates as well as details of credit card transactions,” as The Times’s Daniel Victor reported, a breach that “promises to roil the marital lives of its members.”
While the three-part series has its lurid moments, the details of the hack and the accounts of the employees who worked at Ashley Madison were the least interesting sections. The heart of the series comes from the couples who were affected. Though one couple that had an open marriage seemed unruffled by the invasion of privacy, two other families are featured that were devastated by the hack.
One of those couples is Sam and Nia Rader, a Texas-based Christian vlogging couple who had gone viral a few times before the hack. They had millions following their wholesome family content on YouTube, like lip-syncing to a song from the Disney movie “Frozen.” “For us,” Sam Rader says in the second episode, “vlogging was just showing other families what it looked like to live for the Lord.” He had an Ashley Madison account, and ultimately admits that he was cheating on his wife, going to massage parlors and strip clubs and hitting on her friends.
Another featured couple has a truly tragic story: John Gibson was a minister who taught at a seminary in Louisiana and died by suicide six days after the leak. His widow, Christi Gibson, is interviewed at length.
Their stories are told with sensitivity and empathy, in a way that actively discourages schadenfreude, which is refreshing. As a result, my biggest takeaway from the series is that there’s no way to perform a good marriage. Marriage is an intimate connection that evolves over a lifetime into an intricate partnership between two flawed people. Yes, there are commonalities between many different types of successful marriages, but there are serious downsides to becoming — or trying to become — a publicist for the perfect union.
In the series, both the Raders and Christi Gibson talk about how heavily the public perception of their relationships weighed on them, even before their Ashley Madison connections were unearthed.
