WhereIsAtlas · Technology
What Happened to Established Men?
Ashley Madison's sister site was a 2009 sugar-daddy brand that the 2015 hackers wanted shut down too. The "founder" was a paid spokeswoman, and the site itself is gone — though nothing official ever said so.
Established Men was a sugar-daddy dating website owned by Avid Life Media, the Toronto parent of Ashley Madison, and launched alongside Cougar Life in 2009. When the Impact Team breached Ashley Madison in July 2015, it demanded that both sites be permanently closed. A Financial Post investigation that October, working from leaked corporate emails, reported that the woman presented as Established Men's founder had been hired to promote it. The public announcements of the 2016 FTC and multistate settlement name Ashley Madison and its corporate owners, not Established Men. The site does not appear to be operating, though no closure was ever announced and no date could be confirmed.
The site next to the famous one
Established Men was a dating website operated by Avid Life Media Inc., the Toronto company that also ran Ashley Madison. Its product was matchmaking between older, wealthier men and younger women: the Financial Post described it as "a site aimed at connecting wealthy men with young women who appreciate the benefits of dating wealthy men," which places it squarely in the sugar-daddy category of paid-membership dating services [1].
That is the whole of what needs saying about the product. What makes the site worth an entry is what it shared with its sister brand: the same owner, the same publicity methods, the same hacker demand, and then a very different paper trail afterwards.
2009: two sites, one publicity push
Avid Life launched Established Men in 2009, at the same time as Cougar Life. The Financial Post reported that "Cougar Life was one of two new websites Avid Life launched with a big splash in 2009. The other was the sugar-daddy site Established Men" [1].
Both were niche brands built around a demographic — older women with younger men in one case, wealthy men with younger women in the other — and both were marketed in a way that put a person, rather than a product, in front of the cameras.
The "founder" who was a spokeswoman
The person presented as Established Men's founder was Simone Dadoun-Cohen. She was described as its founder, creator or chief executive on The Tyra Banks Show, on ABC News and elsewhere [1].
The 2015 Ashley Madison breach changed what is known about that arrangement, because it put Avid Life's internal email into the public domain. A Financial Post investigation published on 2 October 2015 reported that emails from Biderman's account indicated the women who promoted themselves in national media as top executives at Cougar Life, The Big and the Beautiful and Established Men "were hired to attract publicity and new members by spinning a compelling backstory for the sites." In reality, the newspaper reported, they were spokesmodels, with most reporters taking them at their word about their executive roles. Avid Life had a pay grid that compensated media appearances [1].
Dadoun-Cohen declined to comment when the Financial Post contacted her. By 2012 she was no longer the public face of Established Men, and 2013 emails between Biderman and Avid Life's public-relations manager discuss whether to pay her for one more interview [1].
The reporting goes further into how the brand was promoted. In one email chain in which staff were deciding who to attribute quotes to in a press release for Established Men, Biderman suggested making up a name, and a member of the public-relations team offered to play "Vanessa Charles," an apparently fictional spokeswoman [1].
The same investigation reported that Toronto Life, which had profiled Established Men, later published a mea culpa by one of its reporters alleging that Biderman used friends of his to pose as Established Men members for the piece. That is an allegation reported by the Financial Post, not a finding by a court [1].
Two things are worth keeping separate here. The marketing arrangement described above is documented in the company's own leaked correspondence and in a newspaper investigation built on it. The question of whether Established Men's member numbers were genuine is a different question, and nothing reviewed for this entry establishes an answer either way. The 2016 regulatory findings about fake profiles were made against the Ashley Madison website [4].
The Impact Team demanded both
Established Men's clearest moment in the public record is one in which it barely appears: it is the second name in the hackers' demand.
The Impact Team announced its attack on 19 July 2015 and threatened to expose the identities of Ashley Madison's users if Avid Life Media did not shut down Ashley Madison and its sister site, Established Men [2]. Wikipedia's article on Ashley Madison puts the same demand in the same terms — that the data would be posted online if Ashley Madison and fellow Avid Life Media site Established Men were not permanently closed [3].
Neither site was closed. The data was published in August 2015, and the fallout landed on Ashley Madison, its users and its chief executive [2][3].
The request to close Established Men is the part of the Impact Team's stated purpose that most clearly reaches beyond the affair site itself. The group's published messages in the breach accused Avid Life of "fraud, deceit, and stupidity" and of promising secrecy it did not deliver; a fuller statement singling out Established Men's own business model could not be found in the sources reviewed for this entry, and is left out rather than paraphrased [2].
The settlement named Ashley Madison, not this site
In December 2016 the District of Columbia, 13 states and the Federal Trade Commission announced a consumer-protection settlement with ruby Corp., ruby Life, Inc. and ADL Media, Inc., described in the Attorney General's release as "the owners of the Ashley Madison website" [4].
The findings in that release concern Ashley Madison: the company failed to take reasonable steps to secure users' personal information, created thousands of fake user profiles, misrepresented the strength of its security, and sold a "Full Delete" option it did not carry out in all instances. The penalty was $1,657,000, which could rise to as much as $17.5 million pending a review of the company's finances [4].
Established Men is not named in that release. That is a fact about the document, not proof that the action had nothing to do with the brand: the corporate respondents were the parent group rather than a single website, and the regulator described the settled case in relation to Ashley Madison. Whether Established Men featured in the underlying conduct alleged by the states and the commission could not be established from the public announcements, and no separate enforcement action concerning Established Men was found [4].
What happened to the site itself
This is where the record is thin, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than tidying it up.
No company announcement of a closure was found. No date of closure was found. The brand has no standalone encyclopedia article: on Wikipedia, "Established Men" is a redirect to the Ashley Madison article [3].
What can be observed is the domain. Archived captures of establishedmen.com — including one taken on 3 August 2026 — resolve to a page branded Ashley Madison rather than to a site of its own, which indicates the standalone service is no longer running [6]. It is not clear from that alone whether the redirect is operated by the company or by a third party, and no announcement confirms it either way.
A commercial dating-industry review page, updated in July 2026, states that "as of July 2024, Established Men is no longer active" [5]. That is a secondary claim from a page with a commercial interest in the category, and it could not be corroborated. The same page also asserts that Ashley Madison underwent "permanent closings," which is wrong — Ashley Madison is still trading and rebranded in February 2026 [3][5]. The claim is recorded here rather than relied on.
So the honest position is: the site appears to have stopped operating, retained as a name that now points at its sister brand, and nobody has documented when or why.
What the record supports
A reader who wants to know what happened to Established Men is asking a question the public record answers only partly. What is documented is what the brand was and how it was marketed: a 2009 sugar-daddy site, one of two Avid Life launched that year, promoted through a "founder" who the company's own leaked emails and a newspaper investigation indicate was a paid spokeswoman [1].
What is documented about the brand's end is thinner still, and comes down to a domain that no longer serves a site. What is documented in between is the one moment the site was named by someone other than its owner — the hackers who wanted it gone, alongside the site it shared a parent with [2][3].
The distance between those two things is the entry: a company good at manufacturing a story about itself, and a site whose own ending went unrecorded.
Entries in this story
Sources
- The women who fooled everyone by pretending to be executives at Ashley Madison's sister websites — Financial Post (via the Internet Archive) (2026-09-19) ↩
- Ashley Madison data breach — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
- Ashley Madison — Wikipedia (2026-09-19) ↩
- Owners of Ashley Madison Enter Into Settlement with District, Other States, and FTC Concerning Data Breach — Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia (2026-09-19) ↩
- Established Men Review 2026: Cost, Pros/Cons, What To Expect — Photofeeler Blog (2026-09-19) ↩
- Wayback Machine capture of establishedmen.com, 3 August 2026 — Internet Archive (2026-09-19) ↩