I looked up my name on google and found thousands of people I didn’t know were separating me

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

Tattle Life is an online forum dedicated to gossiping about people. Here, you’ll find dozens of posts, all dedicated to ripping bits off people in the public eye, from A-listers to small influencers, where slut-shaming, victim-blaming and body-shaming abound. It is the ultimate platform for mean girls, designed to demean other women – although the platform has challenged this reputation.

Although the majority of users on the site are believed to be women, the anonymous nature makes it almost impossible to distinguish between genders. Early on, in the ‘About’ section of the site the moderator, identified only by her username ‘Helen’, created a long statement about what Tattle Life is: “Tattle Life is a website that analyzes social media accounts of a public business. We allow comments and criticism from people who choose to monetize their personal life as a business and take it out into the public domain.”

Helen’s post goes on to explain that Tattle Life has a 24/7 moderation service that seeks to remove “offensive, hateful and harmful” content. Helen says 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 to land someone in the crosshairs of Tattle Life users. This is something that Lauren (not her real name), a UK-based influencer and author, has experienced firsthand. In 2020, while searching for something she had written online, Lauren noticed that a Tattle Life mini-series had been published about her. He explains that, in many ways, it felt inevitable, as he realized it would be a long time before he found himself there. “I was like, Oh, God – here we go,” he recalls. But as she continued to read, the language used against Lauren grew in character. “I was very sad, because I know many of my friends who create content and I know who are also on that website. [as victims]and it’s some of the most soul-crushing content you’ll ever find.”

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

“They’ll just make up weird situations and go along with it like it’s real,” Lauren said. “They talk about my partner, my body, my clothes, my parents … It got to the point where I had to protect the screen when I checked my name on google; it was damaging my mental health, I see new things written about me, sometimes every week.”

Commenting on Tattle Life became so overwhelming that it began to affect the way Lauren worked. “I realized that I was starting to adjust my content based on what they were saying. So, for example, if I had gone in there and noticed that they said, ‘He does too many Instagram stories where he talks to the camera and looks bad,’ or something like that, I would have stopped,” he recounts, before continuing. “If they said something about the way I was dressed, I would stop shopping at that particular store to appease them and not let them talk about me. It got to that point that it just seemed to control my daily life.”

This desire to adapt is Lauren’s character, and she describes herself as someone who had the strength to resist people discussing her body. “It’s in the body that I do … it’s always attracted trolls, especially fatphobic men who don’t like to listen to a big, dark-skinned woman talk a lot about body image and desirability,” she explains. Despite this, it was the comments about Lauren’s personality that boosted her confidence the most: “I really try to pride myself on being a good person and being kind to people and being very honest as an influencer as well,” she says. “And when they start calling me angry, or like I’m a cruel person, and when they start talking about my parents – that’s when I start defending myself.” Lauren realized that one of the people writing about her in Tattle Life must be someone she knows, further deepening the betrayal. “I had to put a long distance between myself and many people, because it showed me that I can’t trust anyone.

“I had to put a long distance between myself and many people, because it showed me that I can’t trust anyone.

Tattle Life has been labeled a “troll’s paradise” by the Guardian, and the site is linked to doxxing, cyberbullying, and other anti-social behavior online – so much so that research into the motivations behind the site shows that this online community “legitimizes itself by sending women’s gender identities in three anti-social ways” to harm,” “to moralize their actions” and to “seek the status of persecuted victims.” There are hundreds of thousands of posts and threads that exist for the purpose of discrediting other women. The idea that this kind of bichiness is an inherently feminine trait, or that threads that process and abuse celebrities and influencers should be dismissed as nothing more than ‘silly girl’ behavior seems absurd.

For years, Tattle Life has been believed to be a place made by women, for women. In 2025, however, it was revealed that the site was founded by Sebastian Bond, a 42-year-old vegan food promoter, who was using the fake 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 protect people from liability. The couple were awarded £300,000 in damages and Bond was named as a result.

Issued on Beyond Belief: The Gossip Defense and the Women Who Do It by Katie Baskerville (HQ, £20).