The man unmasked as the creator of brutal gossip forum Tattle Life hails from a very comfortable background in the West Country, can reveal.
Vegan influencer Sebastian Bond’s retired parents, former company director Henry Bond, 76, and his wife Sheila, 75, live in a £500,000 detached four-bedroomed house in Glastonbury, Somerset with no mortgage, official records show.
Their plush home was used in documents when their son set up one of his companies, Kumquat Tree Limited, in February 2024.
In a historic libel case against Bond, who was found to have run the ‘toxic’ Tattle Life platform where users could anonymously post nasty and defamatory comments about people in the public eye, a judge said that Kumquat Tree Limited had received money generated from the site.
Bond, 41, dubbed ‘The King of Trolls’, who is believed to be living somewhere in the Far East after losing a devastating libel case, in which damages of £300,000 were awarded against him, is the third of the Bonds’ four children.
The polite gentility of the middle-class street where the Bonds live is in stark contrast to the often toxic content of their son’s website, which is supposedly aimed at exposing disingenuous influencers.
It swiftly became a breeding ground for trolls to hurl abuse at everyone from Mrs Hinch and Stacey Solomon to mummy bloggers with small followings.
Tech entrepreneur Neil, 43, and Donna Sands, 34, won their historic libel case after suing the founder for ‘defamation and harassment’ over posts aimed at them on the site at the High Court in Northern Ireland in 2023.
It was never clear what motivated the online campaign directed against the couple, which they argued in court was ‘hate speech’.
Mr Sands and his lawyers discovered that Sebastian Bond created various online aliases apparently to mask his ownership of Tattle Life, one of which was Bastian Durward, a surname which, can reveal, came from his paternal grandmother Chrissie May Durward, who died in 1957, aged 48.
It didn’t take long to find examples of abuse aimed at celebrities and others on Tattle, which attracts around 12million visitors a month.
One poster remarked: ‘It’s really obvious (and sad) to see that her self worth is directly linked to how skinny she is. The aforementioned manic/attention seeking behaviours evidence that.
‘She knows she looks tiny and so she is jumping at the chance (with a totally random narrative) to flaunt it on the internet in the hope she is flooded with comments and DMs from onlookers.
‘It’s a super sad way to live and she is an abominable and dangerous example to her daughters.’
Another piled on with: ‘I’ve seen girls on hen dos look better than her. She couldn’t be more (sic) anymore unsexy tbh’
Neil and Donna Sands appeared on Good Morning Britain on Tuesday and told hosts Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley about the ‘stalking’ and ‘horrendous feeling’ of the ‘daily abuse’.
Donna, who runs fashion label Sylkie along with other brands and has a ‘modest’ 20,000 followers, said: ‘It impacted me on so many different levels.
I would wake up and I would think “what have they said now in the last 7 hours” when I would turn on my phone. My body would actually just shake.’
In an effort to ‘overcome’ it all, she joined Trinity College to do an MBA but when her fellow professionals in class asked her what her business was called she didn’t want to tell them.
‘Everyone is normally proud of their business and able to say it and the first thing I thought when I started an MBA was “they’re all going to google me and this thread will come up”,’ she said.
Her husband Neil, an AI founder, explained how they found ‘defamatory details’ of their businesses ‘that were completely untrue’.
The couple said the defamatory comments about their enterprises ‘completely misrepresented’ everything they do and accused Donna of selling ‘poor quality’ clothes and ‘over-representing’ her prices.
Neil said the trolls even went down to the ‘molecular level’ of finding information about their finances on Companies House and posting them on the site.
He said: ‘It got more menacing overtime and eventually it got into stalking. There was lots of commentary about where we were, who we were in restaurants with, “we are watching you” stuff like that.’
But the online stalkers soon turned to in person harassment with trolls telling the couple ‘we we can see you in this restaurant, we are looking at you right now’.
Obsessive ‘Tattlers’ even started driving back and fourth past their home and posted details of their house on Tattle Life threads dedicated to abusing them.
Donna, revealed how she went from ‘someone who has stood on the shop floor since I was 16 years of age meeting people all the time’ to being ‘completely withdrawn’.
In December 2023, the Sands obtained awards of £150,000 in damages each, plus legal costs in mounting the action over what they termed as ‘hate speech’.
In a ruling at that stage, Mr Justice McAlinden stated: ‘A day of reckoning will come for those behind Tattle Life and for those individuals who posted on Tattle Life.’
According to the judge, the site had been set up to deliberately inflict hurt and harm on others by allowing the anonymous trashing of people’s reputations. ‘This is clearly a case of peddling untruths for profit,’ he stated.
In a complex two-year legal battle funded by themselves, the Sands deployed advanced technological and intelligence methods as they sought to discover who was in charge of the site, reported the Belfast Telegraph.
Earlier this week, the defendants were able to be legally identified as Sebastian Bond and the British and Hong Kong-registered companies Yuzu Zest Limited and Kumquat Tree Limited.
Yuzu Zest Limited, a UK-registered company controlled by Bond, was placed into voluntary liquidation just weeks after he was hit with a £300,000 damages judgement in December 2023.
A resolution to wind up the company was signed on 27 September 2024, and a liquidator was formally appointed the following month.
Despite being wound up, Yuzu Zest was named in a High Court freezing order issued in December 2024, as lawyers tried to secure £1.8million in assets linked to Tattle Life’s operations.
Just weeks after that order was issued, Bond incorporated a second company – Kumquat Tree Limited – in Hong Kong on 22 February 2024.
Although his parents’ detached home was used in documentation, official mail for the firm is directed to Jinda Outsourcing Co., Ltd., an accountancy firm in Bangkok.
In March 2025, the court extended the freezing order to include Kumquat, after financial disclosures revealed it had also received funds linked to the website.
The Sands’ barrister Peter Girvan argued it was now beyond doubt that Mr Bond operated the site.
With reporting restrictions and anonymity orders lifted, further legal efforts are now expected to focus on securing enforcement of the damages award.
Other celebrities are also likely to mount their own libel actions.