It’s been over three months since explosive documentary Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal landed on Netflix, yet the divisive app is still very much a hot topic of conversation as the controversial dating service continues to thrive.

The three-part series soared straight into the top 10 most watched programs shortly after dropping on May 15, as viewers were gripped by the subject of infidelity, the 2015 hacking scandal, and the revelation that Ashley Madison employees had catfished men who were looking to cheat on their spouses by creating fake profiles.

Now, the chief strategy officer for Ashley Madison has shared his honest thoughts on Netflix’s retelling of the drama, which resulted in a slew of famous faces being exposed when the dating service was hacked by a group who referred to themselves as The Impact Team.

When asked if he’d rather the series hadn’t been made at all, Paul Keable exclusively told DailyMail.com: ‘No, anytime someone wants to talk about our business, so long as they’re being honest… misrepresentations would bother any organization, but I don’t think there was any full misrepresentations.

‘I would quibble with some of the things, but nothing over the top. The only thing was seeing some of my former colleagues talk about their viewpoints as though it was an official viewpoint.’

Keable continued: ‘[It] was comical because certain individuals have delusions of grandeur in terms of their importance in our history, and so be it. But yeah, it was an interesting company and I think people who are no longer with the organization miss the excitement of working for a company that is a cultural icon.’

The series features interviews with ex Ashley Madison employees, including the company’s former vice president of sales Evan Back, and former creative director Marc Morgenstern.

It also features various first person accounts with individuals who have used the app in the past, including Christian YouTube star Sam Rader, who cheated on his wife Nia and was exposed thanks to the 2015 scandal.

When asked what he really thought about the documentary, Keable referred to the hack and said: ‘You have to accept criticisms that come and I’m always welcome to have that conversation, but I think that the Netflix series was a bookend to that period of time.

‘It doesn’t mean it’s never going to be talked about again, but I think it did a very good job of summing up how people viewed it, what happened, the outcomes from it to a certain degree.’

He added: ‘I’m wildly biased because I worked for the company, but the one piece that was missing is that they didn’t really talk as much about how everyone assumed that was the end of our business, and yet here we are eight plus years, standing and thriving.’

Netflix stated that Ruby Life, the owners of Ashley Madison, had declined to comment on the claims made in the docuseries – and Keable was keen to explain why they had done so.

‘They did not want us to discuss how we’ve evolved and where we were growing, they only wanted to discuss our past and I said, “you don’t need any comment from us to discuss what happened,”‘ he said.

That was the interesting part, they were looking back and retelling a story that’s already been told so there was nothing new. And again, that’s not a criticism, but we don’t need to add anything to our past because we lived it, we’ve been through it.

‘Again, I’m biased, but I think it’s hard to talk about 2015 without having some cognitive recognition that not only did we survive, we thrived, and we are a sought out expert on the subject matter of adultery, infidelity and monogamy,’ he claimed.

Keable, who has worked for the brand since October 2013, also commented on the fact that the Netflix series explored Ashley Madison’s use of AI and the fake female profiles that were created in order to entice male subscribers.

‘So, all I’ll say to that is it was already out there, there’s nothing new about that, all [of] that story was told,’ Keable stressed, before adding: ‘Clearly we made mistakes in our past, but what wasn’t discussed is that that program was already being shut down prior to 2015.

‘It had been turned off in the States and in Canada and Australia, so we were decommissioning that because it was not right, it didn’t belong there,’ he continued.

‘All aspects of that program are gone, no longer on the platform, and it will never exist in any form ever again because that was part of our commitment to being authentic and true to who we are.

‘But yeah, it was a mistake, we learned from that, but we’d already learned from it because we were shutting it down and the interesting thing is, we’d shut it down – I believe it was in 2014 in the States – and our business still continued to grow.

‘So that’s the thing, we didn’t need it and anyone who thinks we’re doing that now is ludicrous. It’s part of our story, we’re not going to deny that that happened, it’s out there, it was a mistake, we learned from it but it wasn’t what drove the business, and that’s the part people want to believe.

People want to believe that because, again, they don’t believe women have agency over their sex life. They don’t want to believe that women come to Ashley Madison looking for sex because it just hurts that their wife could possibly seek sexual satisfaction elsewhere,’ Keable added.

Despite currently having over 85 million members, Ashley Madison still faces constant criticism and backlash for what it promotes and Keable claims people are ‘hating on the idea’ because they’ve been ‘trained that way.’

‘We can shut down our business tomorrow and not a single affair is gonna stop,’ he insisted. ‘In fact – and I believe this fundamentally – we save more marriages than we end because people find what was missing and they do it in a discreet way versus going to the office or going to the bar or some horrific way to do and then getting caught.

And people are like, “oh, that’s horrible,” and I’m like, “but is it? Because otherwise they’re going to get divorced anyways,” so we’ve created a scenario where both partners are happy. Yes, it’s based on a falsehood, but at least they’re still happy.’

(Armani)