Have you ever experienced betrayal and humiliation when the stakes were high? How would you react if it went viral on a global scale? My guest, Everette Taylor, who is now the CEO of Kickstarter, knows first hand what it’s like to be exposed to the dark side of social media.

In 2020, he was the Chief Marketing Officer at Artsy, the largest online marketplace for buying and selling fine art. That year, a story broke in which an individual claimed that she was pregnant, and Everette was the father. This individual already had a documented history of manipulating media narratives, lying about the nature of past romantic partnerships, and making up scandals to sell books–but the story still spread like wildfire.

In the days that followed, Everette received a flood of derogatory messages, insensitive jokes, and intrusive questions that overwhelmed him to the point that he had no choice but to fully retreat from the public eye for quite some time. In this episode, I spoke with Everette about the way he healed from this violation of privacy, and learned to navigate the world differently afterwards.