The Democratic nominee for Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, Mitchell Berman, is running against Republican incumbent Bryan Steil as a “devoted husband.” But records made public through the high-profile data breach of the affair-seeking website Ashley Madison indicate Berman was an active user who made two transactions on the site around the time he got married, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
The account was associated with the email mitchell_berman_rn@yahoo.com, which Berman, a registered nurse, used when making a complaint to the Wisconsin Elections Commission in 2022. The account made a $268 transaction on February 24, 2015, and a $19 transaction on March 26, 2015, according to data exposed by the breach, which occurred in August 2015. Berman married his wife Jillian in January 2015, according to social media posts marking their 8th and 10th anniversaries.
The transaction amounts are aligned with services Ashley Madison offered at the time. The website—which used the slogan, “Life is short. Have an affair”—offered a money-back “affair guarantee” to “premium customers who paid $250,” Wired reported in the wake of the data breach. It also charged users $19 to delete their personal information. Data from the breach, then, came in “two databases: one with all of the email addresses for people who logged onto the site, and a second with the company’s payment and transaction information,” according to Wired. Transaction records were not included in the $19 deletion service, meaning some users who did not appear in the account database did appear in the transaction list.
“Ashley Madison’s deletion service was $19, and nothing else costs that exact amount. In the payment database, we see users who spent $19,” a spokesman for the online private investigation site Trustify told Wired in 2015. “They don’t show up in the account list, but these were obviously former active users. Why else would they have spent $19 on Ashley Madison’s website?”
Berman, 40, also maintained an account on the casual hookup site Adult Friend Finder, according to records released as part of a separate November 2016 data breach, which show an account associated with Berman’s email address that was last active on October 15, 2016, when Berman was 30. His campaign confirmed that the accounts belonged to Berman, telling the Free Beacon, “As a nurse who worked night shifts, Mitchell used online dating websites in his 20s — eventually meeting his wife on eHarmony, for which he is grateful. These were old accounts from well before his marriage that he had forgotten about, and cancelled.”
The defense could, in theory, apply to Berman’s Adult Friend Finder account had Berman accessed it in 2016 to delete it. The $268 Ashley Madison transaction, however, appears to reflect the purchase of “credits” used to message people on the site before paying for its deletion service. Berman’s campaign did not respond to follow-up questions on that transaction and on why Berman would have used a site explicitly marketed to people looking for affairs while single “in his 20s.”
The ordeal has the potential to upend Berman’s campaign against Steil in Wisconsin’s first district, which backed President Donald Trump by 5 points in 2024 and which the Democratic Congressional Committee considers to be “in play” in 2026.
Berman, a former nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs who won his August 11 primary with 44 percent of the vote, presents himself as a “devoted husband, father of two girls, and Packers season ticket holder who still believes in the promise of the American dream.” His campaign site includes a photo of his wife and young children next to the caption, “Wisconsin’s competitive 1st district — one of the top flip opportunities in the country.” Berman also regularly posts photos of his wife and children to his campaign’s Instagram page. He holds endorsements from Reps. Pat Ryan (D., N.Y.) and Gwen Moore (D., Wis.).
Berman is not the first public official to appear in the leaked Ashley Madison and Adult Friend Finder records.
Florida state attorney Jeff Ashton, who was known for his work as a prosecutor in the Casey Anthony trial, admitted to visiting the Ashley Madison site. He apologized to his wife and children during an August 2015 press conference, saying he was “curious” about the site and “was wrong.” The Associated Press, meanwhile, reported in 2024 on an Adult Friend Finder account tied to an email associated with Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno. The AP “could not definitively confirm whether it was created by Moreno,” and a former intern to Moreno said he created the account as “part of a juvenile prank.”
Ashley Madison found itself in legal trouble over the data breach. Its parent companies agreed to a $1.6 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2016 over deceptive business practices—the agency found, for example, that while the site promised access to “thousands of women,” 16 million of its 19 million U.S. users were men, and staff members created fake female profiles that were used to message men and entice them to purchase credits. One year later, in 2017, Ashley Madison’s owner paid $11.2 million to settle a class action suit over the data breach.
The site remains in operation, having rebranded earlier this year as a “discreet dating platform” for those who are “single looking for dates, in an open relationship, exploring polyamory or ethical non-monogamy, interested in casual dating, or seeking alternative dating experiences.” Adult Friend Finder is also up and running. A June profile from Vice’s “sex and wellness staff writer” Gigi Fong called it “one of the OG hookup sites” and “the online hub for swingers” that’s “aimed at people who want casual hookups, kink exploration, swinging, and ‘let’s just see what happens’ connections” and “feels more like a horny, chaotic message board.”
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