According to Hollywood Reporter, ex-"It Ends With Us" publicist Stephanie Jones has moved for sanctions against Hollywood publicist Melissa Nathan, arguing she committed perjury and hid evidence about anonymous smear websites, including one built to take down Jones herself. Nathan denies involvement; her firm, The Agency Group PR, is a defendant.
Nobody here is surprised that "reputation management" is a thing with an invoice. The filings, courtesy of a former employee of Nathan's own firm, read like a product spec: the staffer who drafted the site copy got instructions from Nathan to make the material "a lot more meaty" and "good enough for us to be able to point a journalist towards." That is the mechanism. You do not hand a reporter a statement. You point them at a website and let them do the typing.
The business model is simple, and the paper trail is in the filing itself: a client with a problem gets billed, and two days later a concerned anonymous site appears. The product was engineered to be untraceable, which makes the funniest document in the case an internal email titled "Items I'm working on at the moment." It lists projects like a helpdesk queue: a convicted sex trafficker's old real estate firm, a movie producer, an Italian sunglasses dynasty, a children's vitamin brand.
That vitamin line item is the meatiest. Hiya was weeks from a $205 million acquisition when a lab found lead in its kids' multivitamins, and the woman who ran the test found an anonymous site waiting for her. Discovery does not do anonymous.
Nathan infamously wrote to a colleague, "you know we can bury anyone," per the New York Times, and the court record is now billing for it. The Ghostwriter's invoices just came due.
YOUR TURN: If your deliverable is a website no one can prove you built, what is the refund policy when a court finds the receipts?
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