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.
The Raders were performing and monetizing their marriage for the world, and their success as vloggers — including a bizarre viral moment that involved Sam secretly using the pee in their toilet to give Nia a pregnancy test — allowed Sam to quit his day job as a nurse. Nia was a stay-at-home mom. As Sam put it in their new memoir, “Sam and Nia | Live in Truth: Public Scandal | Secret Vows | Restored Hearts,” his marriage became his full-time job.
When he first heard about the Ashley Madison hack, Rader was terrified of his involvement becoming public. “It would have just completely decimated my reputation, especially as a Christian. I would have been known for the opposite of what I stood for,” he says, adding, “We were living in the public now, and suddenly I felt so vulnerable.” In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, Sam made a video with Nia by his side in which he confessed to merely creating a profile on Ashley Madison because he wanted attention. But he maintained that he hadn’t had an affair, and that both Nia and God forgave him — though he says he later admitted to Nia that the video was a lie.
Certainly, no one forced the Raders into becoming family vloggers — or using their YouTube channel as their ministry, which is how they see it. (And frankly, it’s not a great idea under most circumstances to monetize children’s lives on social media before they can meaningfully consent.)
But I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for them as the documentary rolled on. In the first episode, Nia says, “I did want to be the perfect wife.” And learning about her husband’s infidelities, especially when he hit on her friends, made her feel like her world was “crumbling.” She says that “every single aspect of my life up until this point felt like a lie.” Having the worst moment of your marital life as public fodder isn’t something I would wish on anyone.
Christi Gibson’s courage in talking about the worst moment of her life is commendable — she now travels the country in an R.V. ministering and telling her story. The way she talks about the public view of her marriage in her own community shows the pressure she felt to maintain a certain appearance. “I would say most people thought we had a very happy marriage. You can work so hard at an image that you can make it very believable. You spend so much time building that that you begin to believe it’s the reality,” she says in episode two.
After she describes finding her husband after his death, Gibson expresses what might be a thesis statement for the whole series:
I’m sure there are people who are angry about Ashley Madison. But I blame the secrecy. The cancer of shame that was eating away at him. As far as the people who just were poring over that list and looking for names and the witch hunt, there’s just a self-righteousness in that that I think assumes that you are without sin and without fault. And when the men were stoning the woman caught in adultery, Jesus said, “Let you who is without sin cast the first stone.”
The Raders are still married, which you probably inferred from the fact that they just published a book together. They continue to vlog about their family, which to me seems ill-advised, but hey, it’s a free country. And most of their beliefs run counter to mine: Unlike Nia, I wouldn’t describe the prevalence of divorce in our society as a “pestilence.” In plenty of cases I think divorce can be the right answer, and I don’t think I would have stayed married had I been in their shoes. I also don’t think marriage is for everyone.
Still, I’m glad that the documentary encourages viewers to give other people grace. This doesn’t mean I think it’s OK for couples who’ve vowed to be monogamous to cheat on each other — I absolutely do not. There’s a reason that, as one study puts it, “research across 160 cultures revealed that spousal infidelity is the most common reason for a breakup.” But I do think that every marriage, even the strongest ones, have downturns and hard times and minor and major tragedies to overcome — and that we can never really know what’s going on with other people’s relationships.
A much better book about infidelity than the Raders’s is “How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told,” by Harrison Scott Key. Key is also a Christian, but in his book you can find some thoughts about dealing with infidelity and the fragility of the marital relationship that are not unlike what you might get from the atheist sex columnist Dan Savage.
Key’s wife cheated on him with a family friend, and they too managed to stay married. This is how he describes the institution: “The reality is that every marriage is a partnership of two broken” jerks “with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver.” That sentiment doesn’t make for a heartwarming YouTube video, but it’s honest and mostly true.
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