Welcome to the “most toxic place on the internet”. Tattle Life is an online forum which publishes endless threads of unhinged speculation for a million monthly visitors. It sells itself as “a commentary website on public business social media accounts”, but its targets range widely: everyone from obscure influencers to that “nasty little oik” Prince Harry. Under cover of anonymity, posters pretty much say what they like. Tattle Life, then, is surely the internet at its worst, ruining lives as well as livelihoods. Yet it turns out that anonymous bitching pays pretty well. Tattle’s founder, Sebastian Bond, is still making tens of thousands of pounds from ad revenue on the site. But, as he has found to his cost, two can play the anonymous game.

***

For years, we didn’t know who Bond, the so-called “King of the Trolls”, even was. Until recently, he remained in the shadows, running the website under a female pseudonym, Helen McDougal. That’s even as disgust at the website grew, with a petition to close it now signed by over 70,000 people, including a sitting MP. But then, in June 2025, Bond was finally unmasked. His nemesis came in the shape of Neil and Donna Sands, a Northern Irish couple who were victimised on the site, and who sued Bond for libel and harassment. After launching what their lawyer described as a “global forensic investigation”, it eventually identified Bond as the website’s host.

Giving judgment at the High Court in Belfast, Mr Justice McAlinden said Bond had been “peddling untruths for profit” and built his site to “monetize people’s misery”. That was made even worse by his anonymity — which, the judge said, had made it “practically impossible” to sue him. None of the victims of the website’s venom could ever find redress, with many complaints ignored or even mocked. Exemplary damages totaling £300,000 were awarded to the Sands, plus costs up to £1.5 million and an order freezing Bond’s worldwide assets. Cue a TV victory lap from the Sands, with their spokesman claiming Netflix has expressed interest in adapting their tale.

It seemed, then, that this two-year legal saga was finally over. But today, I can reveal, lawyers acting for Bond will appear at another Belfast hearing, asking the High Court to quash the original judgment. Among other things, they allege the Sands knew who Bond was a full 18 months before they informed the judge. That secrecy, Bond’s lawyers claim, meant he couldn’t defend himself: he simply didn’t know he was being sued. The irony is inescapable.

Bond, meanwhile, has remained invisible, though his website still bristles with nasty abuse. Reports claimed he was “lying low” in Thailand, and he has never given an interview — he would only ever appear on Tattle under his pseudonym enthusing about the site. The only photos of him published are years old. Last month, however, he spoke exclusively to UnHerd and posed for pictures. We met on a drizzly day in Manchester, at a hotel next to Piccadilly station. There, he told me the story of his life, and tried to defend the site that’s caused misery to so many.

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In person, Bond looks younger than his 42 years. Slim and softly spoken, he’s dressed in a polo neck and jeans and carries two small rucksacks — which, he says, contain most of his clothes and other worldly goods. Since the end of the pandemic, he has spent much of his time as a digital nomad, traveling the world with hand luggage only. “I like being minimal,” he adds, “having very little stuff.”

His early life contained few clues to his future as “king of the trolls”. Both parents were teachers, who brought him up on the outskirts of Gloucester. After studying computing at the University of Brighton, he joined Accenture as an IT consultant, but grew to loathe the work’s corporate stuffiness. They expected him to wear a suit, he says, and “they just wanted too much of my life. I thought, ‘you don’t pay me enough for this’”. Soon enough, he became a web developer at the online sex shop Lovehoney, a job where “you’d walk into the office and see one of the girls on a video call with someone measuring their cock”.

Despite such distractions, Bond still craved independence. So, in 2016, he set up Nest and Glow, a vegan recipes website. It remains online, though Bond is no longer a vegan and hasn’t updated it for years. It also includes his photo, but not his true identity. The site names him as “Bastian Durward” — his grandmother’s maiden name — and Bond tells me that his almost pathological privacy came after a stalker turned up at his house. “I tried to make myself less visible”.

Nest and Glow was successful, bringing in up to £4,000 a month from ads and it is also where Bond first heard about influencers. As he tells it, the crucial moment came when he was offered £500 to feature a vegan yogurt that he didn’t actually like. He took the money, and it also gave him an idea. “That was the one and only time I did any influencing,” he tells me, “but once I had, I started getting a lot of offers to push products in this way. It opened my eyes to the influencing world — a cheap, insidious way to advertise brands. Yet the work is so easy! If you’ve got 30,000 followers, you can easily make double what a nurse makes in a year.”

Especially appalled by influencers who “monetize their children”, Bond says he was inspired to set up Tattle Life. An old-fashioned forum, it’s split into various sections — “Influencers”, “Instagrammers”, “Bloggers” — with each containing hundreds of threads and millions of messages, often visceral in their spite. Just like Bond, most users prefer to remain anonymous — hardly surprising when almost every thread deteriorates so rapidly.

“She has cod eyes,” remarks one user, commenting on Price’s plastic surgery. “Has she finally realized how repulsive her mouth is?” asks another, their profile picture a zoomed-in image of their victim. Yet perhaps the grimmest weapon wielded against Katie Price are the online polls, with one speculating about her next batch of cosmetic surgery. With 124 votes, the Tattle Life crowd thought “Gnashers replaced” was the most likely option, though “Saggy bum chopped” and “Cheeky ears moved” were popular alternatives.

Of course, such abuse is hardly unique to Tattle Life. But Bond’s website surely distinguishes itself by its deeply personal, and often misogynist, brand of nastiness, especially when it’s aimed at D-list celebrities you’ve probably never heard of. Yet if Price has stated that Tattle Life’s relentless churn even contributed to a suicide attempt, Bond himself seems remarkably relaxed about the project. Yes, he concedes that posts against Price are “problematic” — but equally says there’s “often a long backstory to a problematic influencer and previous behavior that won’t be gleaned from a cursory glance at the curated image they portray on their Instagram.”

Overall, then, Bond offers a broad defense of Tattle Life and its content. “Most of the threads I agree with,” he tells me, “although as with any user-generated site, some will overstep the mark.” It’s a position he’s taken before. As the website has put it: “It’s an important part of a healthy, free and fair society for members of the public to have an opinion on those in a position of power and influence.”

Such a laid-back approach might be explained financially. In 2020, Tattle Life’s annual income from ads hit six figures. In 2022, it made a profit of £410,000, and in its best-ever month, May 2023, had 1.8 million visits. It likely boomed because it had an effective monopoly: no one else seems to have thought of building a website where users can devote 27 pages to attacking “Disney Vloggers”.

I ask Bond how he squares this bonanza with his self-proclaimed crusade against “insidious” influencers. “When it was set up money wasn’t the aim, but I’d be lying if I claimed money wasn’t a big part of why I carried on running it over the years,” he admits. “It does corrupt everything.” Bond adds that he closed the site to new registrants at the end of 2022, something he wouldn’t have done if he’d wanted to “earn every penny I could”.

In this, Bond seems to have changed his tune. As recently as 2021, writing under his adopted female persona of “Helen McDougal”, he boasted that an anti-Tattle campaign by influencer Em Sheldon is “all good publicity” for the site, parading its rising user numbers. That indifference to criticism is arguably reflected elsewhere. For one thing, the complaints system apparently consists of a rudimentary form. For another, there’s little evidence that Bond took even serious concerns seriously.

After Tattle Life posters allegedly worked out the home address of one content creator — discussing their findings openly — she contacted the website: only to be met by a silence. “I had such paranoia that someone was going to break in and kill me, and my unborn baby,” she later said, “that I was signed off work for a week.” Bond, for his part, insists that claims the site “doxxed” influencers are untrue. At the same time, he says his website is equipped with special software that flags sexual threats and other abusive content, theoretically allowing it to be removed. But you don’t have to spend long on Tattle Life to wonder how well that’s working out.

Then there’s the question of Bond’s anonymity. Why, in short, did he choose not only to conceal his identity, but also adopt the female persona of “Helen McDougal” when he emailed his critics? In part, his response again hinges on privacy. “I’ve never wanted fame or attention,” he says. “I’m not sure I deliberately started out to make it anonymous: I just didn’t put myself out there.” That’s hard to square with his erstwhile pride in Tattle Life’s soaring user base, let alone the irony that Bond himself was keen to stay hidden while the website’s targets were so publicly insulted.

As for the reason he chose a female alterego, Bond points out that 70% of the website’s users are women, mostly commenting on other women, so a male persona might have seemed strange. On the other hand, though Bond insists he does not regret establishing the site, he says he wishes he’d been open about his identity from the start. That, he says, “has allowed people to run wild with the worst possible false accusations. It turned it into a mystery. I just never thought there would be such interest in the person that started the site.”

Long before that, Bond knew just how much the website was loathed. In 2021, it was the subject of a fiercely critical Radio 4 documentary by the Tattle Life victim and Guardian beauty columnist Sali Hughes. Further coverage included an article stating that reading Tattle Life was like “dipping a foot into an acid bath”. In practice, however, there wasn’t much people could do. With many of its subjects small-time influencers, they just didn’t have the funds to fight “Helen” directly. As one 35-year-old influencer told The Guardian, she looked into taking Tattle Life to court after her address was published on the site. But as her lawyer explained, that would have cost £30,000. It goes without saying, of course, that Bond himself didn’t have such concerns. In 2022, Tattle Life’s ad revenue hit £550,000.

Yet that didn’t stop some of Tattle Life’s enemies from taking a more proactive approach. In 2021, an anonymous team of “troll hunters” called “The Detechtives” began asking followers of their Instagram account to “report trolls anonymously”. They went on to issue threats against the authors of Tattle Life posts, claiming they had software designed for counter-terrorism that meant they could see users’ keystrokes and unmask them.

With his business under threat, Bond examined The Detechtives’ digital footprint. He found evidence it belonged to one Neil Sands, a Belfast tech entrepreneur — who, it turned out, had once emailed “Helen” asking her to delete a thread about him and his wife Donna. As seems the norm, there was no response. But now it was his turn to issue a threat. On 24 September 2021, using his female alias, Bond sent Sands an email to his personal address, saying he knew he was behind The Detechtives’ account and would sue him if he did not close it. Less than an hour later, the Detechtives had vanished.

Round one of the fight between Tattle Life and the Sands had gone to Bond. But round two was looming, and this time, Neil and Donna would do the suing.

***

The Sands were a high-profile couple. Donna had her own clothing label, which she promoted on Instagram, while Neil was cutting a swathe through Irish society having started out in Silicon Valley. In 2023, he and his father Conor made headlines when they spent £1.1 million on a horse to race at Ascot, while Neil has claimed that his tech consultancy is “the secret weapon of Fortune 500 companies all over the globe”.

At first, the Tattle Life thread about the Sands focused on a business dispute between Donna and her sister. But as seems inevitable on this website, the anons grew vitriolic, and started to comment about the couple’s taste and personalities, as well as make unfounded claims about their marriage. They also discussed a scheme for which Neil attracted widespread publicity to make “cost price” Covid face masks in Sligo, which in the end did not materialize.

The Sands decided to sue. In April 2023, they employed a private investigation firm, Nardello and Co, to uncover the real owner of Tattle Life. Nardello has described “piecing together” Bond’s identity through a muddle of aliases and personas, amassed over two decades. Yet despite this — and whatever the real reason Bond has used so many pseudonyms, from “Bastian Durward” to “Helen McDougal” — it seems to have found the job relatively easy.

After all, Nardello’s report, obtained by UnHerd, states that a month before the Sands launched their legal action, in June 2023, its investigator visited Bond at his Dorset home and confirmed his identity. On 28 June, Xenforo, whose servers hosted Tattle Life, disclosed everything they knew about the site to the Sands’ solicitor Peter Barr. That included Bond’s email and postal addresses, as well as financial records making it clear he ran Tattle Life.

The evidence that the Sands had this information at such an early stage is now central to Bond’s attempt to get the verdict against him overturned. For when the Sands first appeared at the High Court, in June 2023, they asked the judge to conduct the case in secret: on the grounds they did not know who owned Tattle Life. This would allow them to issue their claim against “persons unknown”; to conceal their own identities; and to impose a media gagging order. Their lawyers accepted this went against the usual requirement that justice should be open and seen to be done, but claimed publicity could “tip off” the site’s owner and make it harder to find him.

Their wishes were granted, with the proviso that the secrecy would end once the Sands found out who was behind the site. Yet by Neil’s own account, they already knew: in June 2025, in the wake of their victory, he reposted an Instagram story that suggested that Bond was first unmasked on May 4, 2023, appearing to confirm that he had known Bond’s identity weeks before the June 2023 hearing.

Bond’s lawyers now argue that because of the secrecy, their client lost his right to mount a defense. Either way, by 8 September, 2023, the Sands’ lawyers told the judge that Tattle Life had “chosen not to reveal the true identity of the persons behind it” — implying that the “persons unknown” had made a conscious decision to ignore the lawsuit. On that basis, and because no one had come forward to offer a defense, the judge entered a judgment by “default”. This meant he awarded damages and costs without hearing any evidence, because the claim had not been challenged.

It was not until November 2024, when the Sands asked him to freeze Bond’s assets, that they finally disclosed they knew who ran Tattle Life. Bond says that if had known about the lawsuit, he would have defended it, arguing that “private” information which the Sands said was posted on Tattle Life was readily available from public sources, and that the posts were not libelous. Be that as it may, he says it was only at the end of last year that he realized something was amiss — when he discovered he could not withdraw money from his Nationwide account and his bank said the secrecy orders meant it could not provide them. And it was only in June, when the Sands asked the court to lift the anonymity orders, that he finally learned the truth, and received the details of the Sands’ claim against him for the first time.

Currently, he is allowed to withdraw just over £1,000 a week, and would need to pay a “cessation figure” of over £1 million to have the order lifted. Not that Bond is exactly poor: its readership is down, but Tattle Life is still generating some £20,000 a month, paid into an account Bond controls in Hong Kong. But the asset freeze means he cannot touch it.

Today’s hearing, then, is a preliminary skirmish to fix a date for the battle to come — round three in the battle of Sands vs Bond. “If I lose”, Bond says, “it will cost me everything I’ve earned from the site, everything saved in my years of working in tech.” If he wins, the Sands, who refused all requests for comment, will not only lose their damages, but become liable to pay their huge and mounting costs.

In the meantime, and minus the thread about the Sands, Bond’s website remains online, as chaotic and vicious as ever. Yet whatever happens to the site, to say nothing of its multi-named owner, Tattle Life is surely a tale of our times. It speaks, for one thing, about the ways in which online anonymity can both empower and destroy — sometimes both at once. For if Bond is right that people with “power and influence” shouldn’t be immune from criticism, he himself is a walking, talking example of how easily that same principle can be twisted back against you, whatever the outcome of his legal troubles.

And if Tattle Life is the ultimate online ouroboros, that ancient snake that ate its own tail, there’s another irony here too. Bond started Tattle Life, he says, with a noble goal, to strike at the heart of the greedy influencers that dominate contemporary internet discourse. Yet as the man himself admits, money corrupts everything. And, no matter your take on Tattle Life, it’s hard to spend time on the site, or the strange legal saga it’s spawned, and really disagree.

Despite my own susceptibility to poetry, I had always imagined that, in this age of mass media, it was as niche a phenomenon as lepidopterology or flag-collecting. Imagine my surprise, then, in 2016, when I was given a copy of Hollie McNish’s collection of poems about motherhood, Nobody Told Me. Her short, intense pieces about motherhood spoke to me as a new mum. But here, too, was proof that poetry could be a best-seller in the 21^st century, and poets could hold sell-out gigs and be venerated on Mumsnet 

If McNish is now a cult figure among mothers, poetry has climbed to still giddier heights since Nobody Told Me was published, most recently with the central role played by 22-year-old “slam poet” Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of Joe Biden as US President. Gorman’s poem (and her person, her attire, her youth and even her allegedly very empowering headband) have made her the subject of fevered discourse since her performance.

One can only imagine what Plato would have thought. In the Republic, Plato argued that by virtue of mirroring the messy temporal world, rather than the ideal one of metaphysical Forms, poetry drew human eyes away from contemplating the Good. Far from making poets a central part of presidential inaugurations, Plato thought they should be banned from his ideal republic.

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His disciple Aristotle disagreed, though, arguing that poetry can in fact reveal better versions of the world we live in, helping us to direct our search for that Good. And whether or not you like Gorman’s style, it’s idealistic writing in its most unabashedly Aristotelian form.

Impressionistic and kinetic, The Hill We Climb tells a story of American democracy as something incomplete, whose pursuit is a task that falls on the shoulders of every new American generation. It captures perfectly the progressive ideal: a sense of utopia that constantly needs renewal. Society is threatened by “a force that would shatter our nation/rather than share it”. But, says Gorman, this opposition is destined to be defeated, by the determination of the faithful to “raise this wounded world into a wondrous one”.

Gorman is not the first poet to read verse at a presidential inauguration. But the response to her performance reveals a shift in 21^st century Western politics, as well as in our relationship to poetry. That shift takes us away from the rationalistic style that’s been our norm for centuries, and back toward one that pre-dates the founding of America itself: the age of Elizabeth I.

In 1595, as a member of Elizabeth’s court, Sir Phillip Sidney made the first self-conscious modern move away from the Platonic aversion to verse. In A Defense of Poesie, Sidney argued for the improving power of poetry; far from being something toxic that should be banned from politics, Sidney suggested, the aim of poetry should be “to teach and delight”.

That is, it’s not just legitimate to gift-wrap moral messages in art, in the interests of the greater good. It’s something all artists should be aiming to do across their creative work. It sounds high-minded, but in practice it led to the increasingly deliberate use of literature and performance as propaganda.

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The court in which Sidney operated, both as a writer and politician, was a place in which theatricality and power merged in ways that are difficult to imagine today. Masques, poems, allegories and theatrical performances were inseparable from political influence. And for Elizabeth, performing as a queen was impossible to separate from actually being queen.

During nearly every summer of her 44-year reign, she would stage a spectacular Queen’s Progress in which she’d travel slowly across her realm, elaborately dressed and surrounded by thousands of guards, animals, carts, servants and flunkeys. And while no one since Elizabeth has fused power and theatre with such skill and impact, theatre carved a deep groove through the politics of the age that followed.

It wasn’t until after 1688, when the Glorious Revolution put paid to all the drama — by ending absolute monarchy in favour of a purely ceremonial role — that poetry gradually freed itself from propagandising for the ruling class. Poets took advantage of the blossoming publishing revolution, and gave up aristocratic patronage for earning a living in print. The most famous poets of the subsequent era, the Romantics, wafted around largely detached from real centres of political power while describing themselves — in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous words of 1821 — as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.

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Yet the manipulative potential of storytelling didn’t go away. Instead, it migrated to the parallel domains of political propaganda and commercial advertising, whose pioneers were often one and the same. One such was Edward Bernays, whose description in 1928 of the propagandist as an “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country” echoes almost word-for-word Shelley’s characterisation of the poet.

Fast-forward another century and a new publishing revolution — the digital one — has largely scuppered the income stream that freed the Romantics from the need to seek patronage. The result has been a new class of court poet, whether it’s George the Poet offering corporate presentations in poetic form or Pam Ayres writing advertising doggerel. Hollie McNish, justifying her decision to do a voiceover for an energy supplier, explained: “I think anyone who entirely berates an artist for doing corporate work has likely never been in the financial position to find it hard to turn down.”

But the internet has also had profound consequences for those other inheritors of Aristotle and Sidney: the worlds of advertising and propaganda. Thanks to the internet, we’re no longer passive recipients of messages from TV, print and the press. Instead, we’re all in control of the means (and memes) of symbolic production. Just as Elizabeth I treated her rule as a deadly serious form of LARPing, whenever we pause to take and post a selfie we’re adding to our very own online Queen’s Progress: each of us engaged in never-ending dramatisation of our idealised selves.

And the power of the new online propaganda free-for-all has driven us back into the arms of Elizabethan-style rhetoric, too. Wordplay such as puns and alliteration were part of the rhetorical stock-in-trade for an Elizabethan wordsmith. And while such fancy verbal footwork was frowned upon in the Age of Reason, perhaps it’s only natural that it once again finds a home in a new progressiveness that dismisses objectivity, truth and linear thinking as “whiteness”.

And indeed, in Gorman’s work, her plain-English style gains a “poetic” feeling in speech via rhymes, resonance and puns. “What just is/Isn’t always justice”, as she writes. The slickness of the wordplay makes it seem a done deal, smuggling the revolutionary desire to dynamite all existing norms — including what we understand as ‘justice’ – past the listener, on a tide of verbal showboating.

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If there’s a difference today, it’s that unlike the Elizabethan court, the digital-era update of “slam poetry” seeks to purge language of any reference to literary tradition. Elizabethan poets mingled Biblical references with classical ones in a dazzling range of allusions. But today, even superficially innocent areas of literary and cultural study are coded alongside objectivity as problematic repositories of whiteness.

A modern court rhetoric capable of being both persuasive and inclusive must be purged of any dangerous nods to tradition. Such apparent plainness, blending wordplay with a stubborn refusal to be overtly “literary”, has prompted attacks on Hollie McNish and other “Instapoets” for producing “consumer-driven content”. It’s a style that also infuriates conservative critics of Gorman’s work. One characterised it (accurately) as the perfect embodiment of a politics that “amounts, simply, to a total dissociation from and dissolution of the bonds of our national past”.

What such critics miss, though, is that what we’re seeing here is the birth of a new, broadly popular court literary style that’s the perfect complement to the mode of government emerging worldwide in the wake of the pandemic: a media-saturated regime based not on shared social norms but the pure exercise of power to enforce its own vision — even as counterfactually as abolishing the legal standing of biological sex.

Its moral register is love hearts on the White House lawn, and the hygienic language of “empowerment” and “communities”, beloved of the (slam-poetry-loving, naturally) Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Its modus operandi is a mixture of therapeutic language and coercive force, backed by surveillance and censorship where necessary. Gorman herself characterises this new hybrid regime more charitably than perhaps I could:

“If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy,
and change our children’s birthright.”

It’s the perfect sentiment for an event that swapped a human audience for placeholder flags and surrounded a celebration of democracy with concrete barriers and 15,000 National Guardsman brought in to defend democracy from the demos.

If we’re alternately intrigued and creeped out by the wordsmiths who’ve found the magic formula to “teach and delight” in a world that no longer values reasoned argument, it’s because something decisive has shifted. The Age of Reason is over. Rhetoric is back. The new court poets are jostling for patronage.