Instead, US District Judge Patti Saris issued an order on Wednesday morning dismissing the Steiners’ lawsuit, writing that she had been advised the “action has been settled.”
Court documents did not disclose the terms or the amount of the settlement.
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The Steiners declined to comment on the settlement. Andrew Finkelstein, the Steiners’ lead attorney, could not be reached immediately.
EBay spokesperson Maddy Martinez referred a reporter to the court filing disclosing the settlement. A lawyer for eBay’s former chief executive, Devin Wenig, also referred to the filing.
The Steiners started out as early users and fans of eBay in the 1990s. They began writing advice for fellow eBay users as a newsletter that eventually became a website that evolved to cover many ecommerce companies.
As early as 2018, Wenig was complaining to his communications team about critical coverage on the site, according to emails made public as part of a settlement the company struck with prosecutors to avoid charges. Subordinates promised to “clap back at Ina” and “eff with her.”
Wenig’s complaints continued. In May 2019, he wrote to his top communications officer: “I couldn’t care less what she says” and “take her down,” in reference to Ina Steiner. And in an August 2019 text conversation, the CEO wrote: “If we are ever going to take her down ..now is the time.”
Dealing directly with the Steiners fell to a former CIA employee, Jim Baugh, who eBay had tapped to head its global security unit. Baugh, who later pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges and was sentenced to almost five years in prison, hatched the harassment campaign from his unit, including sending the Steiners threatening messages from fake Twitter accounts, live spiders and roaches, a bloody pig mask like the one in the horror movie “Saw,” and a funeral wreath.
On Aug. 15, 2019, Baugh and several of his employees traveled to Boston. They tried to install a GPS tracking device on the Steiners’ car and followed David Steiner around Natick.
When a pizza delivery ordered by the eBay team arrived in the middle of the night on Aug. 17, the Steiners said they thought it might be a hitman.
But after the Steiners reported to local police the license plate number of the rental car the eBay team was using to stalk them, the scheme unraveled.
Six people who worked under Baugh at eBay eventually also pleaded guilty to criminal charges.
The Steiners spoke at all of the sentencing hearings, asking judges to impose stern sentences because of the abuse they had suffered. “There is a sadness in our lives, and a sense of safety we used to take for granted is gone,” Ina Steiner said at an October 2022 hearing.
In 2024, eBay struck a deferred prosecution agreement with the US attorneys office in Boston and paid a $3 million penalty to avoid further criminal charges.
Wenig and other senior executives were not charged.
The Steiners originally hired well-known Boston defense attorney Rosemary Scapicchio to represent them in their civil lawsuit against eBay, Wenig, and other former company employees. The couple switched to a team of more experienced personal injury lawyers led by Finkelstein in May 2024.
The 2019 scheme “to intimidate, threaten, torture, terrorize, stalk, and silence the Steiners was successful and harmful,” the Steiners’ lawsuit stated. “The unrelenting stream of threats to kill, disturbing deliveries, as well as the physical surveillance caused the Steiners to suffer from significant and continuing emotional distress.”
The Steiners’ lawsuit alleged that Wenig had set the incidents in motion by sending texts to a subordinate criticizing Ecommercebytes and saying of Ina Steiner, “take her down.”
Wenig, who received $57 million of severance when he left the company a month after the Steiners were harassed, has said he did not know about the effort to terrorize the couple and would have stopped it if he had.
According to a 2021 presentation from eBay lawyers to prosecutors, the company’s investigation found that “Wenig’s tone was improper and unacceptable.” But, the presentation continued, “we did not find evidence that he directed or knew that criminal acts would occur.”
Abbe Lowell, one of Wenig’s lawyers, told Judge Saris at a 2023 hearing that the charges against Wenig were “inference on top of inference based on facts that are misstated.”
In a ruling last summer, Saris rejected a motion to remove Wenig from the lawsuit. “Wenig’s statements also support a finding that he intended to induce Baugh’s conduct,” the judge wrote, adding the standard at that stage of the lawsuit was to view the facts “in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs.”
The judge’s intention was to allow a jury to decide whether the former CEO should be found financially liable for the Steiners’ suffering.
With the settlement, that won’t happen now.
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.