Every notable king has a castle – and, for Sebastian Bond, that fortress is a four-bedroom house lying a stone’s throw from Glastonbury’s historic abbey.
Security cameras monitor the driveway, which is protected by a set of tall metal gates, and, when the Mail visited this week, the curtains on every single window were firmly drawn.
Bond, 41, has in recent times registered the company behind his high-profile business empire to this smart, modern residence.
But the place is actually owned by his parents. His father Henry, 76, answered the door when we called.
‘We are not making any comment,’ he said. ‘Sebastian is abroad, solicitors are dealing with recent events, and we have been told not to say anything about it.’
Those ‘recent events’ are remarkable court proceedings which this week saw Henry’s son make headlines around the world after being identified as an internet Svengali dubbed ‘The King of the Trolls’.
Sebastian Bond, who previously earned a living as a vegan blogger, was revealed to be the creator of Tattle Life, a notorious gossip website set up in 2018.
It is famed for publishing grotesquely abusive and, at times, highly defamatory material about celebrities and social media influencers.
For seven years, this outwardly unremarkable university graduate had been living a secret double life: pursuing a modest and largely middle-class existence (largely in and around Glastonbury) while simultaneously extracting millions of pounds from a toxic internet empire.
His hidden role as ringmaster of Tattle Life’s vicious online forums – whose victims frequently suffered severe trauma and were, on occasion, driven to the brink of suicide – has over that period seen the balding entrepreneur adopt a number of weird aliases. They included ‘Bastian Durward’, a vegan food writer and lifestyle blogger, and ‘Helen McDougal’, a combative female tech ‘founder’.
Bond’s real identity was finally made public via an extraordinary defamation and harassment case which culminated at the High Court in Belfast last Friday.
There it emerged that this Walter Mitty figure had been ordered to pay £300,000 in damages to an Irish couple who were subjected to a barrage of appalling abuse via the so-called ‘trolls’ paradise’ which he created and ran.
He was exposed thanks to Neil and Donna Sands. They sued Tattle Life over a 46-page thread in which a number of false and highly damaging claims about their business, relationships and personal lives were aired over a period spanning years.
During this time, the couple were relentlessly harassed, with their home address made public, private details regarding their family affairs published and their professional reputations smeared.
They made repeated pleas for the most toxic posts to be taken down, only to meet with silence from Tattle Life’s founder.
In court, Bond was found by the judge, Mr Justice McAlinden, to have shamelessly built a career out of ‘peddling untruths for profit’ and exercising ‘extreme cynicism… aimed at making profit out of people’s misery’.
‘The way in which [Neil and Donna Sands] have been vilified by anonymous posters to this Tattle Life website is quite appalling,’ he found. ‘This should not happen.’
The profits of this grotty enterprise have been considerable, too. Thanks to Tattle Life’s 12 to 15million monthly visitors, the website has in recent years been making £276,770 from advertising every six months, according to research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate.
Yet the good times have now come to a shuddering halt. For in addition to the £300,000 compensation, he must now pay costs to Mr and Mrs Sands of about £1.8million.
Prior to what Mr Justice McAlinden called this ‘day of reckoning’, Bond initially fled Britain and transferred large amounts of cash from his UK accounts.
But justice soon caught up with him: more than a million pounds of his ill-gotten gains have now been frozen by court orders covering financial institutions across the world and lawyers are confident that the remainder will soon be secured.
Meanwhile, a host of other victims of Tattle Life are now coming after Bond, with lawyers saying that further defamation and harassment claims – some from well-known celebrities – could leave him with a bill which runs into tens of millions of pounds.
And the Information Commissioner’s Office has launched an investigation into the site for its ‘use of cookies’ and ‘apparent failure to register’ with the regulator.
So who exactly is the fallen ‘King of the Trolls’? Where on Earth did he come from? And, more to the point, how did the creator of this fetid site manage to get away for it for so long?
Although Sebastian Henry Bond has taken elaborate steps to conceal his identity, I have been able to trace his strange journey from obscurity to infamy.
He was born in August 1983 in Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, to Henry and his wife Sheila, who is 75. They had married in
Dunstable, Bedfordshire, a decade earlier. The third of four children, he remains close to his two older sisters (one of whom is an IT consultant and the other works for the Scottish NHS) and younger brother, a flamboyant character who recently posted an image of himself in underpants and a Spider Man ‘gimp’ mask, upside down on a dancing pole, on social media.
They were raised in Down Hatherley, a village just outside Gloucester, and are believed to have attended local schools. Then, in the early 2000s, Bond spent three years studying for a degree in computing and information studies at Brighton University. He was then recruited by a blue-chip consulting firm.
But after about a decade working in a well-paid office job in London, he decided to quit the rat race and move to Glastonbury – buying a £150,000 bungalow on the outskirts of the town with wooden floorboards, a log-burning stove and views from its garden to St Edmund’s Well, a holy site purported to produce water with healing powers.
His parents followed him to the Somerset town a few years later, selling the family home for £610,000 and purchasing the residence where they now live. Two years after buying his bungalow, Bond launched himself as a vegan ‘influencer’. But rather than doing it under his own name, he decided to reinvent himself using the alter ego ‘Bastian Durward’.
Using that alias he then set up a website called Nest and Glow which posted images of plant-based food along with a blog in which he wrote about his ‘passion for sharing healthy recipes to inspire everyone to eat natural food full of nutrients and vitamins’. It soon became his main source of income.
‘I’ve been vegan for over 30 years and on a nutrient-dense plant-based healty diet for 15 of those,’ the mysterious ‘Bastian’ told readers. ‘In 2015, I decided to leave my office job in order to follow my passions. This resulted in setting up the site.’ An Instagram feed, purportedly curated by ‘Bastian’ and an alleged collaborator named ‘Eloise’, soon attracted about 135,000 followers, while a £20 Nest and Glow cookbook containing 100 recipes for people who are ‘vegan, health conscious, allergic to dairy or just trying to incorporate some more healthy plant-based recipes into your diet’ was published in 2017.
Bond’s career as a fully paid-up member of the bunny-hugging ‘#bekind’ community then took an unlikely turn. For at some point in 2018, he came up a second business venture in the shape of Tattle Life.
This internet bearpit was founded on a simple (if somewhat hypocritical) premise: that members of the ‘influencer’ community deserved to be subjected to unrelenting harassment, criticism and abuse.
The message board-style site Bond created resembles Reddit and other discussion forums.
But unlike mainstream rivals, which are moderated to ensure highly abusive or illegal content is removed, it allows anonymous keyboard warriors to share almost anything they choose.
Therein lies a problem. For while many of Tattle Life’s threads revolve around legitimate criticism of public figures, including celebrities, there is almost nothing to stop users crossing the line into sharing material that is either highly defamatory or incites violence, or might contain personal data such as the home addresses of influencers or photographs of their children.
Some of the vitriol that ensues can be justified (the site helped to expose the misdeeds of such wealthy and powerful celebrities as Huw Edwards and Phillip Schofield) but plenty of it can’t.
Critics point out that many of Tattle Life’s targets are barely famous, while much of the content targeting them is deeply misogynistic, with about three-quarters of threads devoted to attacking women.
By August 2021, it nonetheless had 217,000 registered posters (today there are thought to be 374,000) along with between 12 and 15million monthly visitors, generating around £40,000 per month in advertising revenue.
Around this time, Bond sold his Glastonbury home for £220,000, pocketing a £70,000 profit, and moved to Poole in Dorset.
By now, he was making serious money. But the internet venture fuelling his growing wealth had begun to attract severe criticism. In 2020, the Guardian’s beauty columnist Sali Hughes took part in a Radio 4 documentary describing how she’d been the subject of malicious threads in which users ‘screen grabbed every post, every article, scuttling back to their sewer to mock and belittle me’.
The following year, influencer Em Sheldon told Parliament the site should be taken down, dubbing it a ‘dark space’ populated by women who saw it as their ‘sole mission to ruin our lives’.
Yet as the site’s notoriety grew, the identity of the man behind it remained secret and those who were defamed and harassed by it therefore found themselves unable to take civil action. Since it was neither registered with HM Revenue & Customs nor the Information Commissioner’s Office, regulators seemed powerless to hold it to account.
The veil of anonymity was, of course, deliberate. On its homepage, Tattle Life claimed to be owned by a website called Lime Gloss, which posts blogs with such titles as ‘Why Influencers are so insidious’. And it was here that in 2020 an individual calling themselves ‘Helen McDougal’ came out of the woodwork, purporting to be its mysterious founder.
In an interview, ‘Helen’ said the site ‘isn’t trolling as it gives people somewhere to comment about people that choose to become a public figure and broadcast their private life to make money’ and shamelessly insisted that criticism of its vile excesses ‘is all good publicity for Tattle’.
There was one problem: ‘Helen’ didn’t exist.
The name was a second alias of Bond. Once again, he was using an alter ego to keep his real identity secret.
That this bizarre deception failed is almost entirely thanks to Mr and Mrs Sands, a professional couple from Ulster, who in early 2021 fell into Tattle Life’s grisly orbit.
Mr Sands is a 43-year-old tech entrepreneur who previously worked in Silicon Valley, while Mrs Sands, 34, is the founder of a fashion label called Sylkie. It was their Instagram feeds which prompted Tattle Life users to begin the highly abusive thread about the couple.
‘I first came across it one day in February and was just shocked and appalled about what I was reading,’ Mr Sands recalled this week.
‘There was every comment you can imagine, lots of them saying things that were totally untrue.’
Users soon began sharing pictures of their home and cars, along with footage and accounts of them drinking in bars and eating in restaurants. There were also false claims about the quality of Sylkie’s clothing and the state of its finances.
Court papers detail how they were falsely accused of ‘fraud, dishonesty in business dealings’ and worse.
Over the ensuing months, Mr Sands made a series of polite requests for a series of defamatory posts to be removed.
But they met with no response. So in 2023, he and his wife decided to sue. That December, the High Court in Belfast awarded them £300,000 in damages.
The judgment allowed the couple to begin attempting to retrieve money from the site’s operator. But first they had to establish who he or she actually was.
A ‘global investigations’ firm, Nardello, was duly brought in to track him down.
With the help of court orders, Nardello was able to compel a firm whose software had been used in Tattle Life’s creation, along with a web hosting company which its domain name was registered with, to reveal details of the entity which had paid for those services.
Following this, money led to a UK-registered company, Yuzu Zest, which had been incorporated in 2019 and was registered to the offices of Ashdown Hurrey, a chartered accountancy firm in Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex.
Its sole director, and ultimate controlling party, was listed as Sebastian Bond.
Although Yuzu Zest described its line of business as ‘media representation services’ it was, in fact, the vehicle via which Tattle Life’s profits were being held and distributed. According to court orders released this week, it was making monthly payments to Bond’s account.
As Nardello’s investigation continued, Bond began attempting to squirrel assets away. He’d placed Yuzu Zest into ‘voluntary liquidation’ days after the 2023 damages judgment and wound it up in September 2024, filing a ‘declaration of solvency’ listing the firm’s assets, which was notarised by a ‘solicitor or commissioner of oaths’ in Thailand.
A second company, Kumquat Tree Limited, was meanwhile established in Hong Kong. Bond used his parents’ home in Glastonbury in documents related to its formation, but directed mail about the process to Jinda Outsourcing Co, an accountancy business in Bangkok.
By now, his finances were the subject of a variety of court orders. Yuzu Zest’s assets were frozen in December 2024 and Kumquat Tree’s in March this year. Last October, Bond’s personal bank account was also shut down, according to material released by the High Court this week.
He now appears to be living largely in Thailand, but bank records reveal that he spent time in the UK in 2023 and part of 2024, and also visited in March, spending money on a debit card. Legal filings suggest that he may hold some investments in cryptocurrency. Various entities linked to his empire have, at times, been registered to his parents’ home in Glastonbury.
Bond’s attempt to remain below the radar ended last Friday, when the High Court lifted reporting restrictions surrounding the litigation, meaning that his name and image could finally be splashed across news pages. In the days that followed, Tattle Life has continued to pump out bile. Its threads about Mr and Mrs Sands, which had been removed, were briefly republished this week, in an apparent contempt of court.
And since it continues to ignore requests to take down abusive content, the couple say they now intend to also sue the (currently anonymous) users of the site who created it.
Where that might lead is anyone’s guess. But regardless of whether the ‘King of the Trolls’ ever returns to Glastonbury to face the music, he probably isn’t the only keyboard warrior who now regrets getting involved with the nastiest site on the internet.