Kriti Mehrotra
With Netflix’s ‘Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal’ delving deep into the rise and fall of this titular affair-dating website, we get a documentary series that can only be described as gripping. After all, it incorporates not just archival footage but also exclusive interviews to really shine a light upon the way it impacted millions of real people and their marriages by encouraging infidelity. Amongs them was actually Christi Gibson, who had to endure deep trauma in the form of losing her husband/true love, John, to suicide in 2015 as a hacker leak told the world he was unfaithful.
Christi Gibson Knew Her Husband Cheated
It was back when Christi was merely 23 that she first came across John through some mutual friends, only for them to fall in love so quickly they decided to happily tie the knot within a year. “I liked him,” she candidly conceded in the aforementioned original production. “He was funny. He was smart. He was super friendly and outgoing. So, we just began writing back and forth. I would get so excited about a letter coming. This was before e-mail; it was before all of that. John is an incredible letter writer. He was very idealistic, and I felt like we wanted the same things.”
Christi was hence full of hope about leading a near-perfect life, especially since she and John were also devout Christians with the unwavering belief family as well as respect came above all. But alas, as the years passed by, she gradually realized there was more to their union than their pure affinity, their two children, and their day-to-day standard issues — there was also infidelity. Per her own narrative in the docuseries, they’d created this image of a happy family for society, yet she knew her pastor plus seminary professor husband had “always been a secret keeper.”
Christi then added, “But as secretive as John [was], he wasn’t very careful with his secrets. Early on, when I had started seeing things that made me wonder… I would just go, ‘Wait, no, everything’s okay. I must be imagining that. I must be creating something that’s not really there.’ I think I gaslighted myself as much as anything. But there were just a few things that happened that I couldn’t brush aside. I discovered some inappropriate relationships. I would come across a letter from someone to him. I think the letters were one of the hardest things. That was our thing. That hurt.”
However, over time, Christi realized that she wouldn’t really do anything about her husband’s betrayals no matter what happened, so she stopped looking for clues in the hope she was utterly wrong. She thus never went through or even paid much attention to the Ashley Madison hacker leak of user details when it came to light despite having a gut feeling she might see John’s name there. She had no idea the subsequent loss of his job and the stain on his reputation would affect him to such an extent he’d take his life by carbon monoxide poisoning six days after the list became public.
It was August 24, 2015, when John Gibson died by suicide in his New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary’s on-campus home’s garage, and his wife Christi found him upon coming home from work. This then-church staffer was also the one to locate his candid suicide note, wherein “He talked about depression. He talked about having his name on [the Ashley Madison list], and he said he was just very, very sorry… What we know about him is that he poured his life into other people, and he offered grace and mercy and forgiveness to everyone else, but somehow he couldn’t extend that to himself.”
Christi Gibson is Trying to Move On
Although it’s undeniable that the loss of John’s life still hangs over Christi’s head like a dark cloud, it appears as if she’s currently trying her best to move on from the past while keeping his memories alive in her heart. She does blame both Ashley Madison plus its hackers for how everything went down, especially because over 32 million lives were affected: “These were real people with real families, real pain and real loss,” she once said. But “don’t underestimate the power of love. Nothing is worth the loss of a father and a husband and a friend. It just didn’t merit it. It didn’t merit it at all.” That’s why this New Orleans, Louisiana, resident and god-loving woman now likes to speak about it.
Read More: Stephanie and Rob: The Ashley Madison Users Are Still Happily Married
