I googled my name and found thousands of strangers tearing me apart

The following article contains an extract from Beyond Belief: A Defence of Gossip and the Women Who Do It by Katie Baskerville.

Tattle Life is an internet forum dedicated to gossiping negatively about people. Here, you’ll find a deluge of posts, all dedicated to ripping chunks out of people in the public eye, from A-listers to micro influencers, where slut-shaming, victim-blaming and body-shaming proliferate. It’s the ultimate mean-girl platform, built for tearing other women down – although the platform has in the past disputed this reputation. 

While it’s believed that the majority of the users on the site are female, the anonymous nature of it makes it near impossible to discern the gender split. Originally, on the site’s ‘About’ section a moderator, identified only by her username ‘Helen’, had created a lengthy statement about what Tattle Life is for: “Tattle Life is a commentary website on public business social media accounts. We allow commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain.”

Helen’s post goes on to explain that Tattle Life has a 24/7 moderation service that seeks to remove “abusive, hateful and harmful” content. Helen states that the purpose of the forum is to allow people to have their opinions as part of a “healthy and free society.”  

Any brush with fame, no matter how fleeting, is enough for someone to find themselves in the firing line of Tattle Life users. This is something that Lauren (not her real name), a UK-based influencer and writer, has experienced first-hand. In 2020, while searching for something she’d written online, Lauren noticed that a Tattle Life sub-thread had been published about her. She explains that, in many ways, it felt like an inevitability, having sensed that it would only be a matter of time before she found herself there. “I was like, Oh, God – here we go,” she remembers. But as she read on, the language used against Lauren became more and more personal. “I was absolutely heartbroken, because I know so many of my content-creator friends and acquaintances who are also on that website [as victims], and it’s some of the most soul-destroying content you could ever come across.”

“It got to the point where I had to shield the screen when I googled my name.”

“They will just make up really weird scenarios and run with it as if it’s fact,” says Lauren. “They talk about my partner, my body, my clothes, my parents … It got to the point where I had to shield the screen when I googled my name; it was detrimental to my mental health, seeing new things written about me, sometimes on a weekly basis.”

The comments on Tattle Life took such a toll that they started to impact how Lauren worked. “I noticed that I was beginning to tailor my content based on what they were saying. So, for instance, if I had gone in there and I had noticed that they said, ‘She’s doing too many Instagram stories where she’s talking to camera and she looks ugly,’ or something like that, I would stop,” she recounts, before continuing. “If they said something about the way I was dressed, I would stop buying from that specific store in order to appease them and not have them talk about me. It got to a point where it just felt like it was dictating my everyday life.”

This desire to conform went against Lauren’s character, and she describes herself as having developed a resilience to people discussing her body. “Existing in the body that I do … has always attracted trolls, specifically fatphobic men who don’t like listening to a larger, plus-sized, dark-skinned woman being very vocal about body image and desirability,” she explains. Despite this, it was comments about Lauren’s personality that chipped away at her self-esteem the most: “I really try to pride myself on being a nice person and being kind to people and being very honest as an influencer as well,” she says. “And when they started calling me annoying, or that I seemed like a nasty person, and when they began talking about my parents – that’s when I became defensive.” Lauren realised that one of the people writing about her on Tattle Life must have been someone she knew, further deepening the betrayal. “I have had to put a lot of distance between me and a lot of people, because it’s really shown me that I can’t trust anybody.”

“I have had to put a lot of distance between me and a lot of people, because it’s really shown me that I can’t trust anybody.”

Tattle Life has been labelled a “troll’s paradise” by the Guardian, and the site has been linked to doxxing, cyberbullying, and other antisocial online behaviours – so much so that research into the motivations behind the site show that this online community “legitimizes itself by deploying a feminine gender identity in three overlapping and internally contradictory ways”: to “minimise the power of their community to do harm,” to “provide moral justification for their actions’ and ‘to claim the status of persecuted victims.” There are hundreds of thousands of posts and threads that exist for the sole purpose of tearing other women down. The idea that this brand of bitchiness is an inherently female trait, or that threads scrutinising and harassing celebrities and influencers should be shrugged off as nothing more than ‘mean-girl’ behaviour seems absurd.

For years, Tattle Life was believed to be a site made by women, for women. In 2025, however, it was revealed that the site had been founded by Sebastian Bond, a 42-year-old vegan food influencer, who had been using the false name “Helen McDougal” – the moderator behind the ‘About’ page. In a landmark case that saw Neil and Donna Sands, two of the site’s victims, sue Tattle Life for defamation and harassment, anonymity would no longer shield people from culpability. The couple were awarded £300,000 in damages and Bond was named as a result.

Extracted from Beyond Belief: A Defence of Gossip and the Women Who Do It by Katie Baskerville (HQ, £20).