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People Who Signed NDAs Are Spilling All The Secrets Now That They’ve Expired
I’m sorry, but I LOVE me some juicy gossip. I love it even more if the gossip was meant to stay totally and completely secret forever and ever, amen. 😏 GIVE ME THEM DEETS!!
If you, too, have a rabid curiosity about things that are none of your GD business, then you are in the right place, my friend. Recently, Reddit user newgen-toy asked, “What’s something you were once forbidden to talk about because of an NDA, but can finally share now that it’s expired or no longer valid?” I gulped these stories — whether they’re actually true or not — down like they were a bag of Nerds Gummy Clusters, and I hope you will too. Here’s what people had to say:
Note: These stories are completely alleged and cannot be confirmed by BuzzFeed.
1. “As part of my primary job duty, I have reviewed multiple pieces of software that purport to replace human interaction. They all claimed to use trained AI to read and interpret documents, and all of them made me sign an NDA before previewing their software. In violation of those NDAs, I now tell you all, none of them worked as well as an entry-level human with a week of training. They all produced ‘something’ in the sense that I got dozens of pages of analysis, but it was all the kind of BS filler that large language models produce without anything that substantially aided my job, let alone had the capability to replace me or anybody else.”
Wavebreakmedia / Getty Images
—u/Fenarchus
2. “I was a test audience member for the movie Cats (2019). The NDA we signed wasn’t to prevent spoilers, it was to prevent us from warning the general public.”
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3. “I was on an episode of Undercover Boss about 11 years ago. The production crew really does try so hard to convince the employees it’s a different reality show. Everyone always says it’s scripted, but it only sounds like that because they ask you to repeat what you just said so many times that it makes it sound like you’re a bad actor reading a cue card. 100% awesome experience. Wish I could be on the show again, haha.”
4. “The secret ingredient in the crab cakes is wine-soaked mustard seeds.”
Lauripatterson / Getty Images
5. “I worked on lighting for a celebrity’s wedding. They wouldn’t tell us the address until we signed the NDA. I assume it was to prevent me from selling the info to TMZ. It seemed like a very cool event. The property had three houses, a pool, tennis courts, water features, and beautiful landscaping. The ceremony was on the lawn, the reception on the tennis courts, and the after-party was on the other lawn. They had a whole arcade/carnival setup with themed game booths and a human claw machine. Like, there was a harness attached to a chain winch that would swing you over a pit of stuffed animals for you to try and grab. Seemed like a lot of fun.”
—u/Will2Survive
6. “In the summer of 2021, I witnessed a lady pass out at a large, well-known theme park because all the water fountains were off due to COVID concerns. The only way to get water was to wait in line outside restaurants. The park was woefully understaffed, and the wait for water was well over an hour with temperatures in the 90s. She passed out, fell on her face, and when her boyfriend scooped her up, her nose had completely flattened. She was in utter shock. I stayed with them until the medics came. I had to fill out an accident report as a witness and wrote, ‘The sight of her face without her nose will haunt me all my days.'”
Nicoletaionescu / Getty Images
“The next afternoon, I got an email asking me if I’d sign an NDA to never mention it on my social media channels, and in exchange they would refund my family of five’s season passes, upgrading us to a package that included never having to wait in line for any ride and getting unlimited free meals, snacks, and drinks for the rest of the year. I said yes. A week later, water bottle refill stations were installed, and restaurants had big containers of water out on the counter. We went to the park almost every day that summer, and I took meals to go for dinner. I ate an ungodly amount of soft pretzels. I do hope the lady has fully recovered and got an incredible settlement package.”
—u/IndianaAdams
7. “I once had to sign an NDA to be in a focus group for a new air freshener scent. It was supposed to be ‘campfire s’mores’, but the entire room ended up smelling like a tire fire in a Hershey’s factory. They gave us each $75 to promise we’d never speak of ‘the incident’ again. Best 75 bucks I ever made.”
8. “A former employer advertised a ‘sophisticated financial analysis software written by our own software development team’ to customers, but it was really just a spreadsheet with a custom formula he wrote using Excel’s native financial functions. He wouldn’t show me the spreadsheet until I signed the NDA.”
—u/sfbiker999
9. “A candy store I worked at as a teenager had me sign an NDA to not reveal supplier information. The main supplier was the dollar store down the street, where our manager would buy one-pound bags of candy for really cheap, which we would then empty into bulk bins and sell at like a 200% markup.”
Solstock / Getty Images
—u/BirdAdjacent
10. “I made the soil sampling drill bit that’s on the Curiosity Rover on Mars. And couldn’t tell a soul. It was maddening.”
“Something you made is on MARS!!!!! That’s incredible!”
—u/pixiemaybe
11. “I was hired into a law firm, and very shortly after onboarding, I was called into the partner’s office and told they had to let me go. I sort of laughed and said, ‘What for, I haven’t done anything yet?’ Well, a few years prior, I quit a particularly crappy job. Two years after quitting, I was subpoenaed to testify in someone else’s suit against this crappy employer. With almost no idea it was going to go this way, I ended up as a primary witness and testified for over three hours. I found out later that they were hit with a judgment of $10 million, which I was apparently pretty instrumental in making happen. Well, wouldn’t you know it, this employer was a client of the law firm.”
“I was told that my former employer said something to the effect of, ‘If you keep him, we will find a different firm to represent us and our million dollars in billables we send you every year.’ I was handed a pretty sizable check and told, ‘You never worked here,’ and overnight, all mention of me was scrubbed from the firm. There was an NDA, which amounted to ‘please don’t talk about this for a while.’ It really fucked up my life for a little bit.”
12. “I once went on an audition for what I thought was the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When I got there, I was looking around the waiting room, and I thought it was peculiar that all of the contestant hopefuls were very attractive. It got even weirder when we had to fill out an entire booklet about our lives, including neighbors, friends, and family information (as well as an NDA saying we couldn’t discuss the audition). The screen test was unsettling, and they were asking REALLY personal questions. I explained I was religious (at the time), so I didn’t have anything salacious to expose. They kept trying to direct me to take on some sort of ‘bad girl’ persona, and it all felt very disorienting. I didn’t comply. They later admitted it was really an audition for the first season of a new show called Big Brother.”
Cbs Photo Archive / Getty Images
—u/Polyamommy
13. “A man left a pipe bomb outside a building during the protests in 2020. He had his face hidden, was wearing pretty basic clothes, and had gloves on. He was caught shortly after, and everyone was theorizing that they must’ve used facial recognition to ID him and then used voter records from the machines that must’ve taken a picture of his face. What really happened: after placing the bomb, he went over to an ATM and used his debit card.”
—u/tobythedem0n
14. “In the mid-2010s, a major tech company was developing an electric car. I work for an auto supplier and sign quite a few NDAs as part of my job. Most of them are pretty standard stuff. The only one that really stood out was this company’s. They were looking to source components from us, and I was involved in the acquisition. I wasn’t allowed to know anything about the project without signing the NDA, and once I signed it, I wasn’t allowed to say literally anything about the project or the customer to anyone who hadn’t also signed the NDA. I wasn’t even allowed to tell my boss who I was spending most of my time working with. It was a wild level of secrecy.”
15. “I had a potential client force me to sign an NDA before he would allow me to consult on his revolutionary new product. It was a foam tube cut to fit over a grocery cart handle to prevent the spread of germs. Waste of my fucking time.”
Jordan Van Loo / Getty Images
—u/plumhands
16. “Worked as a knight at Medieval Times for several years. There were a couple of times reality shows came in to do a Medieval-themed episode, and we would be extras for the day. I had to sign an NDA each time saying I wouldn’t talk about the shoot. Now that they are expired, I can tell you that Project Runway, Cake Boss, and Guy Fieri and Rachel Ray’s Celebrity Cookoff have filmed at Medieval Times.”
17. “The large multinational electronics company I worked for would run database reports on who was ABOUT to vest their stocks and fire them before they vested. I’m still afraid to say who it was because they’d probably sue me.”
Kobus Louw / Getty Images
—u/sudomatrix
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18. “In the early 2010s, my job was writing about TV shows for an entertainment website. A lot of the time, I would visit a set and interview people. Once, I was on set for the MTV show, Teen Wolf. In addition to interviewing some of the actors, they let me and another writer watch the ‘after show’ they were making, where the actors discussed the big plot twists. That was how I heard — a couple of months before it was public — that they were killing off the female lead. Right afterward, a publicist came by with NDAs. Had I leaked the spoiler, MTV could have sued me for $1 million.”
—u/DocBEsq
19. “As part of a severance NDA, I agreed not to declare what is in it, which was only two weeks’ pay. I couldn’t believe that was all they put in there. I even asked a lawyer friend who works with employment contracts to read it, and they said, ‘Just don’t tell anyone you got the standard low-ball severance. Other than that, you can say whatever you want.’ Which I did. To all my former coworkers.”
20. “Polygraphs are known and understood to be unreliable. I worked in/around the intelligence community in the late 2000s. Intelligence agencies funded a LOT of research into interview and interrogation methodologies. Any federally funded polygraph study that produces damning results gets classified. Studies detailing the failures of polygraph methods exist and are tightly guarded secrets.”
21. “I worked as a mall elf one Christmas. ‘Santa’ (his name was Gary) made all the elves sign an NDA that we wouldn’t reveal he was secretly Canadian. His biggest fear was kids finding out and thinking he couldn’t get their letters because of international postage rates.”
Angela Pesta / Getty Images
Do you have any juicy details from an expired NDA? Tell me about it in the comments or use the anonymous form below! Your response could be featured in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!
Note: Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
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