BOSTON– eBay Inc. agreed to pay nearly $50 million to a Massachusetts couple who said former company employees attacked them with threats and bizarre anonymous deliveries, including live insects, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig Halloween mask, according to settlement details released Tuesday.

The parties reported reaching a tentative agreement in February as the case headed to trial, but were unable to finalize it. David and Ina Steiner asked a federal judge in June to restore the case to the trial schedule and reached a new agreement this month.

The agreement with the Steiners, founders of EcommerceBytes, a newsletter covering the e-commerce industry, includes an additional $7 million in charitable donations, including organizations that support First Amendment rights. The agreement does not contain any confidentiality provisions, allowing the Steiners to discuss the case publicly.

“David and I agreed that this settlement should and must be made public, as victims who want to prevent something like this from happening to anyone else, and as reporters who believe in transparency,” Ina Steiner said Tuesday in an email response to questions from The Associated Press. “We hope this case will serve as a deterrent.”

The settlement resolves more than six years of criminal and civil proceedings stemming from the harassment campaign. In their 2021 lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston, the Steiners said the company engaged in a conspiracy to “intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence them” in order to “suppress their reporting on eBay.” Natick residents, who report on the e-commerce industry in their newsletter, said they were subjected to cyberbullying, death threats and in-person surveillance by former eBay workers.

Ina Steiner said the campaign began with threatening direct messages on social media before escalating to anonymous deliveries of live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig Halloween mask and a book about surviving the death of a spouse. The employees also sent pornographic magazines under David Steiner’s name to a neighbor’s house and planned to install a GPS device in the couple’s car.

He said he initially didn’t know who was behind it or why.

“I couldn’t conceive that a company that had been covering for the last two decades had tried to terrorize us into stopping reporting,” he said.

When the lawsuit was filed, the company said that “the misconduct of these former employees was wrong” and that it would “do whatever is fair and appropriate to try to address what the Steiners went through.”

eBay reiterated its apology Tuesday, saying, “What former eBay employees subjected the Steiners to in 2019 was wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened.” The company also acknowledged “the unprofessional tone in internal communications” from former CEO Devin Wenig, former communications director Steve Wymer and former senior vice president Wendy Jones.

The company said the conduct “is not representative of eBay’s culture” and said it has since changed leadership and strengthened its policies, procedures and ethics training.

In 2020, federal prosecutors charged seven former eBay employees, alleging that they carried out a coordinated campaign of harassment against the couple after becoming angry over coverage of the couple’s online newsletter. Most of the defendants pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and cyberstalking and were subsequently sentenced to prison terms or home confinement.

In 2024, eBay Inc. agreed to pay a $3 million criminal fine under a deferred prosecution agreement with federal authorities.

Under the agreement, the Steiners will receive $48.7 million in compensation, including $46.15 million from eBay, $2 million from former CEO Wenig, $500,000 from former executive Jones and $50,000 from former executive Wymer.

The company will fund $6 million in charitable contributions to various nonprofit organizations, and Wenig will contribute an additional $1 million to a charity dedicated to protecting First Amendment rights in Ina Steiner’s name.

In a statement, Steiner’s attorney, Christopher Murphy, cited the amount recovered, personal payments from former executives, a $7 million commitment to go to nonprofit organizations and the absence of a confidentiality provision in a system where “wrongdoers too often hide their misdeeds by offering compensation to those they victimized and exchanging that compensation for confidentiality or an NDA.”

Protecting journalists and editors and deterring corporate misconduct were goals from the beginning, he said. “We believe this resolution sends a clear message that corporations and their executives cannot engage in this type of misconduct without facing significant consequences,” said Murphy, of Massachusetts-based Scalli Murphy Law.

Ina Steiner said she and her husband hoped “something good will come out of this painful, life-changing experience.”