With the recent headlines of the Cornell 7 college rape case, it is relevant to revisit Justin Baldoni’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman’s own gang rape allegations which he settled. The back story:

**The Accusations:** A civil lawsuit was filed in 1986 by a 17-year-old high school student. The plaintiff alleged that she was drugged when Bryan Freedman and his fraternity brothers from the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity repeatedly sexually assaulted and battered her.

Now Baldoni’s smear team (Freedman, Jed Wallace and Melissa Nathan) are being implicated in multiple online smear campaign against women.

YOU ARE THE COMPANY YOU KEEP.

How to Destroy a Reputation in Hollywood, as Told in 5 Women’s Lawsuits

Five women have said they were the targets of malicious public relations campaigns that were spearheaded by three influential players.

In recent years, at least five women have filed lawsuits describing malicious public relations campaigns intended to destroy their reputations.

While the lawsuits differ, they all claim the smear campaigns were carried out through anonymous websites, fabricated social media posts or promotion of unflattering articles and posts on the internet. They describe a new lane in the field of crisis management where public relations, legal services and the dark web converge.

The highest-profile lawsuit came from the actress Blake Lively, who said a campaign was waged against her in 2024 in retaliation for accusing the actor Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment. Mr. Baldoni denied the claims and filed a countersuit, which was dismissed.

Ms. Lively, in her lawsuit, which was settled earlier this year with no payout of damages, described a coordinated social media campaign orchestrated by three businesspeople — a Los Angeles lawyer, a New York publicist and a Texas digital strategist.

A network of three professionals was instrumental in running an operation to destroy reputations, several lawsuits claim. It was a mostly untraceable combination of tech services, crisis communication and legal firepower.

To examine the allegations, The New York Times interviewed more than 60 people, reviewed court documents and chat transcripts, and analyzed hundreds of anonymous websites and fabricated social media profiles. A pattern emerged.

The campaigns were launched within months of each other and were designed to be untraceable, but digital bread crumbs remained: The same language echoed across multiple websites, and invisible links drove traffic back and forth among them. Text messages and legal depositions filed as part of lawsuits support the allegations that all three individuals were working together.

The lawyer, Bryan Freedman; the publicist, Melissa Nathan; and the digital strategist, Jed Wallace, have dismissed the allegations as defamation and harassment, and in several cases have countersued to clear their names.

The Times sent detailed requests for comment to Ms. Nathan, Mr. Wallace and Mr. Freedman. “Allegations are not facts and these allegations are neither truthful nor accurate,” Mr. Freedman wrote in an emailed response. “Just like the Blake Lively matter, anyone asserting this nonsense will end up with nothing.”

Ms. Nathan and Mr. Wallace did not respond.

The women who have sued describe the shaming campaigns as an internet wrecking ball, forever changing how the public views them.

“I don’t know who to trust anymore,” said Paige Jimenez, a model and chef who was targeted by a campaign in October 2024 and filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday evening. “It’s a really lonely life.”

The ‘Pit Bull,’ the P.R. Agent and the ‘Hired Gun’

The three people at the center of the allegations have very different public profiles and business approaches.

Mr. Freedman, the lawyer, is a household name in celebrity circles and has a packed roster of high-profile clients. Ms. Nathan, an expert in crisis communications with well-known clients of her own, has spent years cultivating close relationships with journalists. Mr. Wallace, who runs a company based outside Austin, Texas, that describes itself as a crisis public relations firm, keeps a low profile and rarely speaks to the media. His most revealing public disclosures about himself have appeared on LinkedIn, where he once described himself as a “hired gun.”

The lawsuits, as well as text and email messages obtained in discovery, suggest that Mr. Freedman, Ms. Nathan and Mr. Wallace began working together as early as 2023.

All three began receiving attention when The Times reported in 2024 that Ms. Lively was suing Mr. Baldoni, his studio and his public relations team in their dispute over her allegations of sexual harassment and retaliation.

Ms. Lively’s complaint highlights a text message noting that Ms. Nathan, Mr. Freedman and Mr. Wallace knew each other before she filed her lawsuit and that Mr. Wallace and Mr. Freedman are “very close.” TAG, Melissa Nathan’s public relations group, and Mr. Wallace are both defendants in her suit against Mr. Baldoni; Mr. Freedman, who is not named as a defendant, is Mr. Baldoni’s lawyer.

Her claims of sexual harassment were dismissed on a legal technicality: She was an independent contractor, not a full-time employee, on the set of the film, meaning federal employment anti-discrimination laws could not be applied. But in April a judge in New York federal court allowed three claims — including two centered on the allegation of a smear campaign — to proceed to trial, although the actress opted instead to settle the case in May.

Hundreds of pages of depositions and discovery materials in her case point to links with other campaigns. In a sworn deposition filed days before the settlement in Ms. Lively’s case, Katie Case, a former vice president at TAG, stated that TAG and its staff were asked by Dwayne Johnson, known as “The Rock,” to create a website about his former publicist, Stephanie Jones. It described Ms. Jones as someone who leaked her clients’ secrets and mistreated her employees, the deposition said.

Ms. Case also said she wrote the text for a website that disparaged women who had accused three brothers, Tal, Alon and Oren Alexander, of sexually assaulting them. The brothers, well known in wealthy party circles in New York and Miami, were convicted of sex trafficking earlier this year.

Mr. Johnson, in a statement from a representative, denied that he had ever ordered a website against Ms. Jones, calling the allegations “categorically false,” and added that he would never “commission any company to disparage Stephanie Jones or anyone else.”

Jim Case, who is Katie Case’s father and her lawyer, said in a statement that Ms. Case did not know that what she was being asked to write may have been false. When she asked to do work she felt at odds with, he added, “she left TAG.”

Lawyers for the Alexander brothers declined to comment. Juda Engelmayer, their press representative, said in an email that “the Alexanders do not control or operate anonymous third-party websites” and declined to comment further.

The legal discovery conducted by Ms. Lively’s team helped the other women who sued realize their campaigns were connected, they all told The Times.

‘Alexa Nikolas Exposed’

Alexa Nikolas, 34, is a former child actress who starred in Nickelodeon’s “Zoey 101” in her early teens. She is now an activist against sexual violence who has staged public protests against sexual assault, including at a concert by the D.J. and producer Diplo over sexual misconduct claims, which he has denied. She appeared in the documentary “Quiet on Set” about the abuse child actors faced at Nickelodeon in the 1990s.

In 2021, she was in the throes of a lawsuit against her ex-husband, the Canadian indie musician Michael Milosh, whom she accused of sexual battery and abuse after they split. Mr. Milosh was represented by Mr. Freedman.

She said she found news clippings that showed that Mr. Freedman had been accused of participating in the gang rape of a 17-year-old at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. The teenager sued Mr. Freedman and two of his fraternity brothers; Mr. Freedman paid her a $40,000 settlement, according to the Nov. 8, 1991, case file in California’s Alameda Superior Court. Mr. Freedman denied the allegations and was never criminally charged in the matter.

Ms. Nikolas organized a protest against Mr. Freedman outside his offices in Los Angeles to bring attention to the assault allegations. Her protest prompted an article in Business Insider publicizing Mr. Freedman’s history of paying a settlement to a woman who accused him of gang rape.

She filed a defamation suit earlier this year in Los Angeles, accusing Mr. Freedman, Ms. Nathan and Mr. Wallace of spreading a retaliatory digital campaign about her filled with “damaging lies.” In her lawsuit, Ms. Nikolas says the site appeared to be retaliation for her protest.

One week after the Business Insider article, in late November 2022, a website describing Ms. Nikolas as a “sinister and criminal force” was published: “Alexa Nikolas has threatened to ‘leak’ and outright manufacture claims of sexual assault against people, exes and executives since the Nickelodeon days!” the website read. “Revenge and control are what drives her.”

“The timing of this website is no coincidence,” she wrote in her complaint. “At this point, Defendant Freedman knew Ms. Nikolas was exposing his past allegations of gang rape and the website explicitly sought to discredit her.”

The website was then amplified by at least 16 social media profiles and more than 70 Wikipedia posts with similar language, a strategy that all the women who have sued say manipulates internet search results to give more credence to lies and smears.

“The campaign planted all these seeds of doubts within my community. It was designed to harm me,” Ms. Nikolas said. “It’s psychological torment.”

In August, a judge rejected Mr. Freedman’s bid to dismiss her case; her suit is now moving to discovery.

Ms. Nikolas, who has two young children, said the website and its allegations made her entire family unsafe.

“It creeps up around you,” she said. “The target is, first and foremost, psychological impact on the victim. But then other people start to feel at risk, too, and they are people that you love, and you don’t ever want them to feel unsafe.”

Invisible Signals

Anya Fernald, a sustainable food expert and former “Iron Chef” judge, founded a high-end organic meat company, Belcampo. In 2021, it was revealed that Belcampo had been passing off factory-farmed meat as sustainable and organic. Ms. Fernald, who was no longer chief executive at Belcampo during the scandal, contends she was made a scapegoat in the fallout. She hired Mr. Freedman to defend her and, with his help, received a multimillion-dollar settlement.

By 2024, she thought she had put the experience behind her. She was also moving on from another difficult experience in her life — a long-term relationship with Andrew Huberman, a pop-culture neuroscientist.

Mr. Freedman was also Mr. Huberman’s lawyer — Ms. Fernald introduced them before the couple split.

In March 2024, months after the couple broke up, Ms. Fernald spoke under a pseudonym to New York magazine about her relationship with Mr. Huberman, accusing him of infidelity and verbal abuse. Within days, she was outed online as the source of the allegations. An anonymous website and a fake X profile appeared online, making unfounded allegations about her role at the company and in the fallout. The posts painted her as a fraudster who had driven the company into the ground.

She had no idea where the site had come from. But then she received a call from a lawyer for Ms. Nikolas, who had reviewed a digital forensics report detailed in Ms. Nikolas’s lawsuit. Sites about Ms. Nikolas had backlinks — invisible signals that drive internet traffic — to YouTube videos about the Belcampo scandal. Ms. Nikolas’s suit also alleges “common authorship” on Wikipedia pages smearing both women. Other websites verified by The Times had backlinks to both Ms. Fernald and four more people interviewed for this story who said they were targeted by campaigns. Ms. Fernald said she still isn’t completely clear about who created the sites targeting her, and is not among the women who have filed a lawsuit.

But either way, she said, she doesn’t regret speaking publicly about Mr. Huberman, and added, “I knew he was going to counterattack” in some way.

Mr. Huberman did not respond to a request for comment.

‘The Ketamine Queen’

Ms. Jimenez, 28, got her start as a teenage model and became a culinary influencer after appearing on “MasterChef” at 18.

On Oct. 17, 2024, she was living in Los Angeles and newly in love. She was waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up for dinner — they were planning to go to the Georgian Room in Santa Monica, where she loved to order the dry aged steak, mashed potatoes and creamed spinach.

She and her boyfriend had grown up together on the same island in Hawaii, but “my family was from the poor side,” she said in an interview. The couple had recently reconnected in Los Angeles and had only been dating a few months, but “we were inseparable,” she said. “We were so deeply in love.”

A number she didn’t recognize flashed on her phone. The man on the other end of the call identified himself as Mr. Freedman, her lawsuit states, and told her he had been hired by her boyfriend’s wealthy parents. Her romantic relationship was over, Ms. Jimenez recalled his telling her.

A few hours later, the man who identified himself as Mr. Freedman sent her a text message that included a link to a website entitled “Paige Jimenez, the Real Ketamine Queen,” the lawsuit states. The Times reviewed the text message. The site posted her full home address and described her as a ketamine dealer who was wanted for questioning in the death of the actor Matthew Perry — a completely fabricated allegation, according to her lawsuit — as well as crimes in several cities. “She will be behind bars very soon,” it said.

It was filled with other unfounded accusations: She was a prostitute and gold digger, it said, but also resurfaced several true points from Ms. Jimenez’s past that she had worked hard to overcome, most notably that she had briefly made adult content for OnlyFans in her early 20s.

Ms. Jimenez said the website — which had suddenly become the top Google result for her name — pushed her into a depression. She was forced to seek inpatient psychiatric treatment and she and her boyfriend eventually broke up for good.

“There are some weeks where I just don’t want to get out of bed,” Ms. Jimenez said in a recent interview.

Her lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court against Mr. Freedman, Mr. Wallace, Ms. Nathan and their companies, accuses all three of intentional infliction of emotional distress.

‘An Actual Prostitute’

Jessica Serfaty, an actress and model who has appeared on “America’s Next Top Model,” was engaged to Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, heir to the $47 billion Luxottica fortune, when she went on Instagram Live in July 2024 and claimed he had hit her and made her head bleed.

There is no blood visible in the video, but Ms. Serfaty appears visibly distraught.

She recanted the allegation a few days later after several face-to-face meetings with both Mr. Del Vecchio and his lawyer, but only did so because she was pressured, she told The Times. She maintains that her fiancé did in fact hit her.

Shortly after Ms. Serfaty’s accusation, websites and social media profiles describing her as an “actual prostitute” who “resorts to lies to endanger the people that love her” appeared on the internet.

In September, Brad Beckworth and Christina Yarnell, two lawyers working with Ms. Jones, the publicist, filed a lawsuit on her behalf against Ms. Case, the former vice president at TAG. The Times obtained several profanity-laced audio recordings related to that case; Mr. Wallace sent them in the summer of 2024 to Mr. Del Vecchio and TAG employees. Mr. Wallace references the work of Ms. Nathan as he explains how he will bolster the popularity of fake websites targeting Ms. Serfaty.

“Hundreds and hundreds of links go up every single day to get this to track and to tell the algorithm this has credibility,” he said in one, referring to the allegations posted about her. In another note, he said the process was not just about creating a fake storyline, but making sure people viewed her as a “hooker, liar and a prostitute.”

In a third note, he notes that “people are already starting to pound on her as being a lunatic” on Reddit, the giant online social media forum, “which is exactly what we wanted.”

Mr. Del Vecchio and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Con Artist’

Ms. Ghost, a Grammy-nominated songwriter, was one of the producers of “The Deb,” the directorial debut of the actress Rebel Wilson. Text messages and emails unearthed by her lawyers offer up the most visible paper trail yet of how the various campaigns are connected and have played out.

The first public signs of conflict between Ms. Wilson and Ms. Ghost appeared in July 2024 when Ms. Wilson told her nearly 11 million followers on Instagram that Ms. Ghost and other producers had embezzled the movie’s funds and tried to block its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Ms. Ghost sued, accusing Ms. Wilson of defaming her because she had wanted both screenwriting and songwriting credits on the film, which Ms. Ghost had claimed belong to other artists.

The first public signs of conflict between Ms. Wilson and Ms. Ghost appeared in July 2024 when Ms. Wilson told her nearly 11 million followers on Instagram that Ms. Ghost and other producers had embezzled the movie’s funds and tried to block its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Ms. Ghost sued, accusing Ms. Wilson of defaming her because she had wanted both screenwriting and songwriting credits on the film, which Ms. Ghost had claimed belong to other artists.

Text messages and emails first reported by The Times and included in Ms. Ghost’s lawsuit show Ms. Nathan, who was a publicist for Ms. Wilson, then walking her through how a disparaging website would unfold and how much it would cost.

Another text message shows Ms. Nathan telling one of her employees, “Rebel wants a [sic] one of those sites.” In August 2024, a website surfaced calling Ms. Ghost “the Indian Ghislaine Maxwell” and a “con artist, a thief and a pimp.”

Within a week, Ms. Nathan received an email from Ms. Case, the former employee. Mr. Wallace is copied.

“Let me know if this works better :)” Ms. Case wrote at the top of email, whose subject was “Draft for your review.” The email, which is also included in Ms. Ghost’s suit, contained the same paragraphs of disparaging language that would be posted on the websites.

Melissa Nathan Allyson Thompson, a lawyer for Ms. Wilson, in an emailed statement, did not deny that Ms. Wilson had sent the texts in question or asked Ms. Nathan to create the website. But she insisted Ms. Wilson, not Ms. Ghost, was the victim. She added that Ms. Ghost had enlisted public relations representatives who had “sought to damage Ms. Wilson’s reputation in the press,” and cited a separate lawsuit in Australia where Ms. Wilson had been accused of defamation, and charges were dismissed.

“Ms. Wilson did not personally and intentionally retain Melissa Nathan of the TAG Group to destroy Ms. Ghost’s reputation,” the statement reads. “Those allegations are false. If anything,” it added, Ms. Ghost’s “own conduct harmed her reputation.”

Ms. Case said in a text message to a colleague and a deposition under oath in California’s Los Angeles Superior Court that she wrote text for several “takedown sites” while at TAG and that those sites were built by Mr. Wallace.

An email from Ms. Case to Ms. Nathan in October 2024 had the subject line, “Items I’m working on at the moment.” The email lists “site drafting” for projects including Jessica Serfaty, Amanda Ghost and the Alexander brothers.

Those documents also included a text chain where Ms. Nathan directs Ms. Case to invoice $20,000 for additional work from Mr. Wallace; she provides Ms. Case with an account name and address.

“Who knew drafting a few things would be this lucrative,” Ms. Case responds.

“Stick with me, kid,” Ms. Nathan replies.