By Anna Silman,Mark Peterson,Martina Tuaty,Michelle Groskopf

Copyright gq

It might be the hardest time ever to be a celebrity—but hoo boy, it’s a good time to be in crisis PR. If you have the power to tame the influencers, game the algorithm, and turn the online mob into your private army, your services have never been in higher demand. As Emily Reynolds Bergh, who runs a Nashville-based communications firm with a crisis public relations arm, puts it, “When cancel culture entered the equation, my job honestly skyrocketed.”
Often referred to as “strategic communications” experts, this rarefied group of publicists stands just beyond the shiny world of junkets and red carpets, devising new, high-ticket-price ways to clean up Hollywood’s biggest messes. “The more expensive it is, the less likely you are to call it PR,” as one such practitioner puts it to me. “Reputation enhancement, reputation development, crisis avoidance—these are all things that I sell.” Gliding easily between the worlds of business, politics, and celebrity, these reputation developers often boast law degrees and government résumés. They represent not just wayward A-listers but corporations and nation-states, and they do not want to arrange a quick interview about a celebrity’s new organic lip balm line.
While all the top entertainment PR firms generally offer crisis services for an added fee, much of this work is outsourced to specialists like Matthew Hiltzik’s Hiltzik Strategies (clients: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp), Risa Heller’s Heller (Anthony Weiner, Mario Batali, Jeff Zucker), and Michael Sitrick’s Sitrick and Company (the Michael Jackson estate, Dartmouth, Twinkies). Many of the next generation now branching out to form new boutique agencies cut their teeth at one of these firms (Justin Baldoni’s rep Melissa Nathan worked at Hiltzik for years before founding her own shop). At the helm of the reputational warfare squadron are a recurring handful of entertainment lawyers—if you’re smart, “you either hire Marty Singer or you hire Bryan Freedman,” one publicist tells me—who retain the crisis PR services once things escalate.
Splashy legal cases, after all, are crisis PR’s bread and butter. Through public filings, massive dumps of new information about high-profile figures become fodder for amateur sleuths online. A publicist’s job is to steer that flow of information; during the Diddy trial, Sean Combs’s crisis PR specialist Holly Baird made sure influencers and journalists had access to daily court transcripts, allowing TikTokers to broadcast quotes from the untelevised testimonies. But lawsuits can also be a component of PR unto themselves, thanks to something called fair report privilege. This allows journalists to repeat claims made in official public records with less risk of a defamation claim—and has produced lawsuits that sound more like magazine articles. (When Justin Baldoni countersued Blake Lively in January, his team published the lawsuit online. It read like a dark fairy tale, starting with “The following is not a story Plaintiffs ever wished to tell,” and then telling the shit out of it.)
In 2025, our already celebrity-obsessed culture has been turbocharged by the incentives of algorithmic social media, creating a new vanguard of digital detectives, conspiracy theorists, and armchair pundits who make a living off the nonstop churn of celebrity drama. PR professionals realized they needed to shape the opinion of the unaffiliated media influencer—a person who doesn’t care whether the publicist they might be pissing off also controls access to the star of the next year’s biggest Hollywood franchise. “I never believe anything a publicist tells me,” says the operator of the popular anonymous celebrity-gossip account Deuxmoi. “On a daily basis they have to manipulate the truth, and I don’t know how that’s not the most stressful job in the world. Sometimes I feel sorry for them.”
A firm called Principal Communications Group was representing the Academy of Motion Pictures back in 2018 when old homophobic tweets surfaced from the next scheduled host of the Oscars, Kevin Hart, causing him to pull out of the gig. Shortly after, the team launched Foresight Solutions, a “reputation management firm” whose staff includes two former FBI profilers. It safeguards studios and networks against reputational damage by performing comprehensive sweeps for any publicly available incriminating information, including on the dark web, where “you can buy anything, from organ transplants to Bob Iger’s home address,” as one person put it. (Unfortunately, having access to black market spleens wasn’t helpful for Netflix in early 2025, when the emergence of racist tweets from Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón likely tanked her leading actress Oscar chances.)
Veteran crisis PR firms have also beefed up their digital operations. With outlets like CNN or Reuters, “we’ve been able to get stories changed and corrections made at midnight,” says Michael Sitrick, whom Gawker once referred to as the “Ninja Master of the Dark Art of Spin,” which he proudly links out to on his website. But, he notes, “you can’t do that with Instagram or X or any social media. There’s nobody to call.” Four years ago, Sitrick brought on Yael Bar tur, formerly a press liaison for the Israeli army and head of the New York Police Department’s social media team, to run the digital arm of the firm. Now, Sitrick says, the company employs social–listening tools that continuously monitor online chatter in case something problematic breaks online in the middle of the night.
As a reporter who graduated from lightweight celebrity interviews to investigative reporting—which often involved sparring with crisis professionals hired to push back on my reporting—I figured I mostly understood the crisis PR playbook. If I saw an anonymous quote from “a source close to Drake/Leo/Meghan and Harry” in Page Six or on TMZ, I understood that what I was reading might not be some random friend mouthing off to the tabloids but the well-chosen words of a highly paid crisis rep working out of a situation room in Century City. My guard was up. Or so I thought.

Sometime in the spring of 2024, I started to notice a bad vibe around Blake Lively. Which was weird, because up until then I wasn’t paying attention to the brewing controversy around her movie It Ends With Us, nor did I have a specific sense of the various gaffes that were trickling out, like her telling people to “wear your florals” to the movie, which is about domestic violence. Still, just being on social media, I got an ambient sense that the “narrative” around her—that amorphous morass of public sentiment in which reputations are built and destroyed—had curdled. And, somehow, by some subtle osmosis I wasn’t entirely aware of, my perspective had changed in turn. I no longer thought of Lively as the well-dressed woman I had enjoyed in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Something—or someone—had given me the impression she was out of touch and entitled.
Then, in late December 2024, a story dropped in The New York Times. It detailed a lawsuit Lively was planning to file against her It Ends With Us costar and director, Baldoni, and his crisis PR team, helmed by Melissa Nathan. In the suit, Lively accused Baldoni of misconduct on set. The suit also alleged that Baldoni’s crisis team had “weaponized a digital army” to smear Lively. It cited a quote Nathan gave Baldoni’s company, Wayfarer Studios, for—among other options—a $175,000 “social manipulation” plan that included things like “social account takedowns” and “threads of theories.” This plan went “well beyond standard crisis PR.” The suit detailed extensive text messages that purported to show how they deliberately turned public sentiment against Lively. This was more than just planting anonymous quotes in the tabloids or quibbling over details with journalists. This sounded like some dark-arts shit.

But then Baldoni and Wayfarer fired back. Their countersuit claimed the alleged smear campaign was nonprovable and nonexistent. They denied Lively’s claims of sexual misconduct and alleged that Stephanie Jones, whose firm, Jonesworks, had previously represented Baldoni, leaked unflattering private texts in order to smear Baldoni and Wayfarer publicist Jennifer Abel. According to Jones, the texts had not been leaked but rather provided as evidence following a subpoena. They also sued The New York Times, claiming that the article—based on a legal complaint that hadn’t been filed when much of the reporting had been gathered—was actually Lively’s attempt at a smear campaign, waged in the paper of record. They finished off the counterattack by publishing, on a website called thelawsuitinfo.com, a huge tranche of text messages between Lively, Baldoni, and others. (A judge dismissed Baldoni’s suits, but not before Baldoni’s allegations were read and dissected by millions.)
Following these developments was like whiplash: annoyance morphing to sympathy, skepticism swinging to doubt, allegiances seesawing with every new dump of messages or awkward on-set video. Figuring out what had actually happened seemed impossible—and “what happened” was quickly being overshadowed by the metastory of crisis PR’s role in it all. A number of the crisis PR professionals I spoke to said my confusion was the result of poor crisis PR. Working their angle as usual, they argued that Baldoni’s and Lively’s representatives weren’t trained crisis publicists but regular publicists thrust into a crisis. “They look like amateurs,” says one top rep. “Who says that stuff in a text?” (Lively, meanwhile, hired Nick Shapiro, the former CIA deputy chief of staff, who previously led the Obama administration’s response to the Boston Marathon bombing and the Fukushima nuclear disaster.)
Some crisis PR representatives explained that the industry operates along an ethical spectrum, and that they have adapted their offerings for a media environment that privileges attention-grabbing, inflammatory, and first-person content. “Just as journalism has devolved, so has our profession,” says the head of a top celebrity PR firm. “It’s a race to the bottom and no one benefits from it.” But a number of leading figures in the field, like Susie Arons, president of strategic communications at 42West, said that their firms absolutely didn’t engage in the “social manipulation” work that Lively alleged and would fire any client who asked them to do something unethical.
I don’t really care about the ups and downs of any single celebrity’s reputation, if I’m being honest. What I care about is whether my thoughts are my own. Who are the people, the new tip of the spear, working behind the scenes to persuade us to feel a certain way about certain people? What’s it like to take some of the most reviled people in the country and try to convince the public that, Hey, you know what, maybe they’re not so bad?

It’s the middle of June, a few weeks before Sean “Diddy” Combs will be acquitted of the most serious charges in his sex-trafficking and racketeering trial, and I’m sitting 10 feet behind the defendant in a Manhattan federal courtroom. Combs shifts uncomfortably around in his chair in front of me. He’s looking rough, with gray hair and deep bags under his eyes. Next to me, pristinely put together in a black ribbed sweater dress and red lipstick, with a mane of sleek black hair, is Holly Baird, Combs’s Los Angeles–based crisis PR.
That morning we’re hearing testimony from a special agent who conducted a search of Combs’s estate. Baird sits poised and alert, occasionally leaning forward to pass notes to Combs’s mother and son in the row in front of us or underline things in a notepad with a purple highlighter. At one point, the prosecution has the agent unbox a rifle he found while searching the house and display it for the court. Baird rolls her eyes. “It’s for show,” she tells me. “Mr. Combs wasn’t walking around toting a gun.”
When the trial breaks for lunch, multiple YouTubers and content creators come up to say hi to Baird and give her hugs. A woman in a wheelchair, who says she comes to court every day to support Diddy and “make sure he’s getting a fair trial,” offers her encouragement. “Lots of people have kinky sex!” she says to Baird, who smiles politely in response. “I was at the Ghislaine Maxwell trial too. Did she do it? Hell yes, she did. But she did not get a fair trial.”
Compared to the somber scene inside the courtroom, the mood outside is oddly festive. People have been lining up since 4 a.m. to get spots inside. There’s a guy in a “Free Puff” trucker hat handing out buttons and a man in a “Legends Never Die” shirt yelling about how Diddy was framed, and also how we need world peace. I almost bump into a guy moonwalking across the sidewalk sipping a minibar–size bottle of rosé. Streamers are scattered across the pavilion monologuing into iPhones propped on tripods. Influencer Tisa Tells, who has amassed over 550,000 followers for her daily YouTube livestreams with titles like “Prosecution CHECKMATE on Diddy Defense Makes DISTURBING Confession,” fluffs her hair for the camera and speculates whether Trump might offer the rapper a presidential pardon.
Baird worked on Danny Masterson’s rape trial, RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign, and is currently working with the Menendez brothers, yet this is a whole new level of chaos. “I’ve never seen anything like this with the content creators,” Baird says, noting that she got brought onto the Diddy trial last October after two other crisis firms didn’t work out. “When I started doing crisis PR, no one knew about it. There wasn’t a show called Scandal. There wasn’t Ray Donovan,” she says. “This was back in the day when we were faxing press releases.”
She says it was Harvey Weinstein, a former client from her previous job at the firm Sitrick and Company, who ultimately encouraged her to go out on her own. (“He’s like, ‘Look, kid, look at the bills.’ ”) She casts her job as finding empathy for people society has written off as unredeemable. “It’s not like publicity, where everyone’s kissing someone’s ass,” she told me on a call a few weeks before the trial. “You’re really dealing with people at their darkest moment.” This requires “working with grace and just being understanding and listening to them, because no one’s listening to them.”
In conversation with Baird, what once seemed clear gets more muddled and opaque the deeper you get. We’re no longer talking about someone caught on camera assaulting their girlfriend and accused by women of coercing them into sex. We’re talking about kink-shaming, cancel culture, and a right to privacy. In Baird’s view, the accusation of sex trafficking is “a far-fetched and unreasonable way” to classify what she calls Combs’s “lifestyle.” (The jury, at least in part, agreed.)
“The adult-lifestyle scene is huge in Southern California, and so what people do in the privacy of their bedroom, I do not shudder, I’m not clutching my pearls,” she says.
Is there anyone she wouldn’t represent? “I’m not here to represent a racist. I don’t do murderers. I don’t do child abusers. I don’t deal with anyone that kills kids, touches kids, none of that kind of stuff,” she says. In the case of Diddy, she points out, a rape suit involving an underage girl was withdrawn.
Still, Baird acknowledges that she is feeling pretty frustrated right now. Toting a plastic cafeteria tray in line for today’s courthouse chicken-and-potato lunch special, Baird says that Combs has a very conservative legal team when it comes to PR, and everyone in the trial was recently put under a gag order. “I can’t say anything, I can’t talk to media, which is tough as a public relations person,” she says. She wishes they would allow more journalists and content creators into the courtroom to get “different perspectives, more perspectives.” Last night, she says, she was so frustrated that Diddy himself ended up giving her a pep talk over the phone from jail—a role reversal, since she’s usually the one playing therapist. “I think he could tell I was fatigued and frustrated,” she tells me. “He said: We’re in the home stretch.”
A brief morale boost did arrive the morning I was there, in the form of Kanye West, now going by Ye, who showed up at the courthouse to pay his respects. (The marshals refused to let him in the courtroom, so he left before I could get a glimpse of him.) West, who had just released a pro-Nazi song called “Heil Hitler,” might currently be the only person in the music industry as toxic as Diddy, but Baird doesn’t think it’s a bad thing that he is lending his support. “A lot of these people in media and entertainment don’t have a backbone, so if you’re willing to put your neck out for a fellow artist you admire, I’m all for it,” Baird says, shrugging, as she slices up a rubbery piece of chicken with a plastic knife. “And when the pendulum swings back up, everyone’s back at your White Party sipping Cîroc.”

I first encountered Mitchell Jackson’s work when I was writing a story about female conservative influencers for The Guardian featuring his client, the right-wing pundit Candace Owens. At the time, we traded emails back and forth about how I would characterize some of Owens’s more controversial views. “Candace absolutely never said Judaism was a pedophile-centric religion that believes in demons and child sacrifice,” he emailed me in April as we were fact-checking the piece. (Owens actually said this specifically about the Jewish mystical practice Kabbalah, which was noted in the published article.)
On a rainy day in June, I meet him for brunch at a restaurant near Lincoln Center. When I get there, Jackson—who is sardonic and bearded, sporting a suit jacket and an L.L.Bean tote with the word “Cancelled” embroidered on it—is paging through a 1994 issue of Vibe magazine. It features Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of TLC dressed as a firefighter, not long after Lopes had burned down her boyfriend’s house.
Jackson says he brought the magazine along to show to a client he’s meeting later, as an example of crisis PR done right. “She didn’t apologize, she mocked the situation. But then in the actual interview, she talks about how she does have mental health problems, and other people talk about how she’s a victim of domestic violence. So it really covers all the bases,” he says. (Lopes’s ex-fiancé had been charged with aggravated assault after a fight with Lopes, though the case was dismissed.)
Over tea and avocado toast, Jackson tells me about growing up in a town where his neighbors were a drag queen, a sheriff who had been jailed for embezzlement, and “a one-legged lesbian.” “It was South Florida,” he says. His mom, he tells me, ran a pet store that had been accused of buying from puppy mills, and she developed gonzo tactics to fight back at the animal activists who were a mainstay outside the shop, like hosting a petting zoo for PETA members and paying homeless people and teenagers to heckle them. This, Jackson claims, served as his first crash course in crisis PR. Later, Jackson worked at Vice, where he was fired after emails leaked to BuzzFeed showed him contacting right-wing influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos to repost Vice content, something Jackson says his coworkers asked him to do because it drove traffic. (As a journalist, Jackson was effective, in his way. “He was good at getting access and obviously had no ethics,” a former Vice colleague tells me.)
Jackson views his new job as a “calling with its own ethics.” He says he declines business if asked to “smear people for no reason” and “will fight to the end of the earth” to defend his clients. “Ask any publicist who has attacked my clients, and they will tell you that I beat them,” he says. “They lost. I won, partially because I’m a media savant but also because I have ethics.”
Jackson’s experience of being fired—canceled, he would say—made him comfortable working with people in crisis. “Israel is my dream client,” he says. Does he have any tips for the state of Israel right now? “I’m not giving away free advice!” he says. (Later he emails, asking me to “please just clarify I don’t endorse the violence.”) At his firm BCC Communications—which bills itself as “a new strategic communications firm for a new media environment”—his actual clients include Owens, right-wing influencer Brett Cooper, dirtbag-left podcaster Adam Friedland, writer and queer activist Sarah Schulman, influencer-author Caroline Calloway, and One Direction star Liam Payne’s ex-fiancée, Maya Henry. Jackson says that when Payne died last fall, he was one of the first people TMZ called, because the site was hoping he could get Maya to identify the body in photos it had.
Jackson is part of a new class of social- media-savvy crisis PRs who understand that you ignore influencers at your peril. “I will meet up with a TikToker and give them documents the same way I would meet up with a reporter and give them documents,” he says. Having relationships with traditional journalists is all well and good, he notes, “but if 100 girls on TikTok start saying something different, the 100 girls on TikTok are going to power the narrative.” His staff consists mostly of “former reporters and former Redditors,” the latter of which he sees as essential to shaping reputation: “Reddit is where so many of these narratives start. To me, Reddit is no different than a newspaper.” He spends five hours a day on calls and meetings with lawyers, clients, reporters, and influencers, and recently took Substacker Emilie Hagen to the opera. “She went from the Diddy trial to The Barber of Seville.”
One LA-based PR rep agreed that navigating online stan outrage is a “big, big part of the calculus” nowadays. He learned this after a few clients had brushes with a certain pop act’s fans, largely considered a global superpower in the digital fandom world. The first step in containing backlash from a fan community of that size and fervor, he says, involves figuring out if the artist’s camp is involved and trying to get them on board to rein in their fans. “I’ve never met a celebrity at their level that doesn’t know the people who keep the main fan sites,” he says. The next is assessing who are the key players in the fan landscape: the “generals” leading the charge versus the “guerrillas” agitating from the outside. A “proactive situation” might involve leaking material to one of the top generals, while a “reactive situation,” wherein one of these generals is spreading something you want to squash, requires a coup. “If there’s a general in the waiting that isn’t getting the attention they think they deserve, we kind of harness them to try to take over the community and knock them off their mantel,” he says.
Hoping to understand these generals, I spent a week reaching out to some of the most vocal Baldoni-Lively influencers. Only one got back to me: Katie Paulson, who goes by the Instagram handle @WithoutACrystalBall. On her YouTube she posts frequent videos with titles like “Blake Lively GOES BANANAS” to her 438,000 subscribers. She responded warily and asked to know my angle, noting that there are a lot of outlets “pushing out content to discredit creators.” I decided to spend some time thinking about how best to respond.
By the next morning it was too late. WithoutACrystalBall had put me on blast to her more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, noting that when she asked about my angle I “didn’t respond—left me on seen.” Pointing out this magazine’s connection to various celebrities, and other celebrities with the same publicists, she concluded that I was planning a “hit piece” intended to move the needle on Lively vs. Baldoni.
The interaction left me chastened. At least most of the crisis PRs I called up still saw the value of talking to an old-timey traditional journalist. But to WithoutACrystalBall and her followers, I was apparently the scary vector of misinformation, the paid shill in the pocket of Big Celebrity. It made me realize how quickly things could spiral out of control.
At this point, there were already nearly a hundred comments on her post dragging me. Meanwhile, a subreddit focused on criticizing WithoutACrystalBall had also latched onto the drama; one commenter theorized I couldn’t actually be on assignment for GQ because I’d never written for the publication before. I tried to send Paulson a DM and explain myself, but she had already blocked me.

Last year, British investigative reporter Alexi Mostrous came out with a podcast called Who Trolled Amber? looking at what was widely considered a digital hate campaign against Amber Heard during her court battle with Johnny Depp in the spring of 2022. Close your eyes and picture it: There you are, bopping along to Harry’s House, checking your NFT collection on OpenSea, scrolling through not Elon Musk’s X but Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, only to be engulfed in a tidal wave of furious hashtags proclaiming #AMBERHEARDISANABUSER and #AMBERTURD and #WEJUSTDONTLIKE YOUAMBER. At the time, Depp was pursuing a winning defamation lawsuit against Heard based on an op-ed she had written about domestic abuse, and it became impossible to go online without seeing thousands of people saying the worst things you can imagine about Amber Heard. But why?
Mostrous wondered whether some of this hatred was artificial. He described showing a cache of a million pro-Depp tweets to disinformation experts and data scientists, who analyzed the data and found that around half were bot generated. Ultimately, his reporting indicated that many of the accounts originated in Saudi Arabia, where bots known as “the Flies” have long been used to spread government propaganda, including about slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman had acknowledged in a deposition that he had relationships with what he called internet journalists. These included Depp superfan accounts like @ThatUmbrellaGuy, which leaked previously unseen witness statements to its 380,000 YouTube followers, and @ThatBrianFella, which posted leaked audio of the couple fighting (which turned out to have been edited).
But I was curious whether something like the Pirates of the Caribbean star’s divorce could inhabit the same digital universe as political propaganda and state killings. So I called up a friend who works as a researcher in political disinformation. “We’ve seen accounts that began as part of pro–dictator networks be repurposed to promote celebrities in the US and the UK,” she tells me.
Could I get anyone to acknowledge actually using the so-called social manipulation tactics that Lively alleged in her lawsuit? That turned out to be more difficult.
Some acknowledged that it was an unavoidable part of the game now, though they officially denied doing it themselves. “I’m not saying we don’t use those people, it’s just, how far will you go with this, right?” says one top crisis rep. The real dirty work, they claimed, happened at shadowy firms in India and Malaysia and Eastern Europe that nobody could tell me the names of. “It’s not really aboveboard. You don’t really see companies like that in the US, and nobody would advertise ‘We do astroturfing’”—fake grassroots movements—“‘we do bots.’ And if they do, they’ll use, like, weird language,” says a digital specialist for a leading PR company.
And some were less equivocal still. “We’re not here to be ethical journalists. We’re here to provide the most damning portrayal of our opponents that the facts can back us up on,” says one top NYC-based crisis comms specialist. “If you’re going to say, ‘I’m only going to do things that the most ethical journalists would do,’ then you’re not really engaged in any kind of media strategy.” Was the specialist also outsourcing this mysterious work abroad? They give me a half-nod. “In a situation in which money is generally not a concern, you can hire the best mercenaries.” What exactly did these mercenaries do? They pause. “Can we resume in an hour or two? I wanna be a teeny bit smarter on this. I want to get solid on one particular client of ours, and what we did and didn’t do,” they say. The person never calls me back.
Yet when I asked my sources whether a large portion of the hatred against Heard might have been artificially generated, they were skeptical. (Depp’s crisis PR at the time, Matthew Hiltzik, declined to comment, but a person with knowledge told me they had nothing to do with any sort of digital campaign and there were “no black arts” involved, just a team that was “really disciplined, fact based, and consistent in collecting and sharing the details from the courtroom.”) The PRs I spoke with noted that Depp was one of the world’s most beloved movie stars, that Heard was a particularly easy target, and both became swept up in a moment of rising #MeToo backlash. A smart crisis PR may know how to exploit these dynamics, helping the creator class reap the engagement money, but they can’t magic them out of thin air. “You can fan the flames that are already there, or you can light the match, but you can’t create,” the digital specialist tells me. “You have to have something to hold onto.”

It’s a hellish 87 degrees out when I head to midtown Manhattan to meet Harvey Weinstein’s publicist, Juda Engelmayer, in his temporary office on a high floor of the Empire State Building. In keeping with his brand as crisis PR’s resident bad boy, the top few buttons of his pink checkered shirt are undone, revealing the glint of a silver chain and just a smidgen of chest hair. (He recently sold his motorcycle. “I will, at this point, kill myself on it,” he says. “How do you take a phone call from Harvey while he’s screaming at you, riding down the highway at 70 miles an hour?”)
Engelmayer says he took on Weinstein as a client back in 2018, after a bunch of other firms turned him down (including Hiltzik, who had previously worked with him at Miramax) or severed ties (Sitrick). He says he did so partly because he believes in due process. When Engelmayer and I first spoke on the phone, Weinstein was being retried in New York based on three separate instances of alleged sexual assault. In a rapid-fire monotone, he rattled off what he saw as the weaknesses of these accusations. “I’m never going to tell anyone that ‘Oh, he’s really a good guy,’ ” said Engelmayer. “But I say he’s not guilty of the crimes he’s being presented with.”
When Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment, rape, and assault back in 2017 and 2018, launching the #MeToo movement, it was hard for anyone—including Engelmayer—to imagine that narrative would ever shift. (Back in 2020, The Cut reported that Engelmayer was sending journalists a 57-page PowerPoint that touted Weinstein’s “huge heart.”) “There was an understanding that they just weren’t going to write what I had to say,” said Engelmayer.
But soon, Engelmayer found a foothold. “You start looking for alternative media sources—the ones that claim they want to report real news. Those have been, unfortunately for the rest of the world, more conservative venues,” he said. While he wouldn’t go into specifics, Engelmayer has said in previous interviews that paying influencers, at rates of $5,000 to $100,000, has become part of the crisis playbook. “It doesn’t take much to whisper a little doubt, a little distrust into their ears, and have them run with it,” he said. “If you want to get an opinion out there quickly, whether it’s right or wrong, you use manipulative social media practices. Maybe you pay a couple of influencers. Maybe you use paid media and advertising to send messages that support your claim across the spectrum.” Eventually, “it starts going from manufactured digital stuff to real people actually repeating it. Then at some point, you don’t even know where the story came from.”
In the past year, he has seen conservative influencers take up Weinstein’s cause, holding him up as an emblem of #MeToo’s excesses. In May, Mitchell Jackson’s client Candace Owens ran a series defending Weinstein, including a long jailhouse interview available for $4.99 on her website. “After looking over this case,” Owens said, “I’ve concluded that Harvey Weinstein was wrongfully convicted and basically just hung on the #MeToo thing.” Owens’s narrative was then picked up by Joe Rogan.
Engelmayer is feeling pretty pleased with himself today. This morning the judge in Weinstein’s case declared a mistrial; the jury deadlocked on the third rape charge after a heated disagreement among jurors. While it’s not an outright win—they had previously found him guilty of the first charge and not guilty of the second—Engelmayer feels Weinstein is getting a different reception this time around, something he attributes partly to shifts in public opinion outside the courtroom. More news and alternative narratives emerge from nonlegacy media, then get picked up by traditional media, offering a counterpoint to what he calls “social media mobs.” “People are now looking at the shades of gray and the nuances, which I think are very important.”
What constitutes a crisis—and who we are ultimately able to forgive—is determined in large part by the cultural context in which it takes place. There are certain atmospheric conditions needed to set the inferno of public opinion ablaze. Sure, you can light the fire (influencer outrage), stoke it with kindling (bots and astroturfing), but ultimately, there’s only so much you can do if the wind isn’t blowing in the right direction. What this ends up meaning is that sometimes there is no better way to recast a celebrity’s reputation than by opportunistically piggybacking off existing culture wars. That doesn’t always work (remember when Kevin Spacey decided to come out as gay?), but if you time it right, you can ride that sweet slipstream of public opinion straight to Comebacktown.
And in recent years, the wind has been blowing, well, to the right. After a decade of people co-opting feminism to self-promote, the consensus around #MeToo has now weakened to the point that smashing “wokeness” has literally become government policy. Meanwhile, the rise of a powerful alternative right-wing-media landscape has further fragmented our shared existence along partisan lines. Crisis PR is all about control of narratives, and we live in a time when narrative has never been more up for grabs—where we can’t even agree on basic definitions of what constitutes reality. All of which has been great for business.
“The era of ‘just because someone says it, we believe it’s true’ is ending,” Engelmayer says.

Crisscrossing the city from crisis to crisis had left me disoriented, unsure of myself and what I believed in. In the moral-relativist universe where crisis PR often dwells, it was starting to feel as if there were no such thing as right or wrong, only competing stories. It seemed no offense was too big to be forgiven, no sinner too far gone to be redeemed—for the right price. The scary thing is that the crisis PRs might be right.
These publicists couched their language in moral frameworks, about truth, about justice, about the right to have one’s story told. They said they were adding important nuance, sticking up for people who had been targeted by law enforcement and railroaded by the media, and standing up for the underdog. They sounded like lawyers who take on the most heinous cases out of a belief in everyone’s right to legal representation—except not everyone has the right to a crisis PR team, and most people certainly can’t afford one.
Finally, I spoke to someone who was matter–of-fact about the business he was in. KG Summer (a pseudonym) founded TrollToll when he was working in a more traditional marketing job a few years back. At the time, a client was losing business to a competitor. “He’s like, ‘The only thing I really want to pay someone for is to tell the entire world that my competitors are lying about being made in America,’ ” he recalls. Summer spent the next 30 days posting in Reddit forums and Facebook groups, letting the world know that this rival product was made in India, and by the end of the campaign, TrollToll was born.
TrollToll promises to “put you in charge of your own internet Troll army.” For the bargain basement price of $55, you can hire a “social media troll” to post comments supporting you, while for $2,250 you have access to a 30-day service that includes social media trolling, as well as features in blogs, articles, videos, and more.
I learned about TrollToll after Business Insider published a story about how the site had been involved in amplifying information related to the Lively-Baldoni case online. In Baldoni’s countersuit against Blake Lively, his lawyers claimed Lively’s suit misrepresented texts between the crisis PRs. Yes, Jennifer Abel had texted Melissa Nathan a link to a Daily Mail article titled “Is Blake Lively set to be CANCELLED?,” saying, “Wow. You really outdid yourself with this piece.” But the filing had omitted that Abel ended that sentence with an upside-down smiley–face emoji, suggesting that the exchange—and the notion of Nathan’s involvement in the article—had been a joke.
Summer said that he had been paid $120 by an anonymous source to amplify content around this upside-down-smile emoji. He doesn’t know who reached out. “They were so good at cleaning up their tracks,” he says. Now, Summer claims that he has over 20 clients on a monthly retainer and 2,200 willing “trolls” on an email list. He says some have become “big-time informants” for Deuxmoi, Reddit snark pages, TMZ, and Perez Hilton. He claimed that one PR firm with a crisis department reached out to him because an actor it was representing had just gone to rehab and the agency wanted to cover it up by flooding the zone with PDA photos of him and a well-known influencer. “I spent seven days on that with the team, just getting that in front of the right tabloids and the right kind of Instagram accounts that shared that garbage,” he says.
Talking to Summer was refreshing, in a way. He’s a gun for hire, and he’s happy to admit that. “It’s not our job to police what’s right and wrong or what’s correct or what’s factual,” he says. In his view, we’re all being spun and manipulated constantly. Why shouldn’t everyone harness these tools for themselves? As he puts it, “There’s a whole generation of angry men that see Captain Jack Sparrow, that see this filmmaker with a ponytail”—Baldoni—“getting bullied by Hollywood’s power couple, and they’re saying, That’s me. I identify as that. And that’s what’s giving fuel to all of this stuff.” He points to the cultural populism of Trump’s 2016 election as the genesis of it all. “It’s just going to keep replicating itself, because there is an audience for this. There’s a path for this. There’s a rinse-and-repeat mentality here.”
When I started this story, I was freaked out by the idea that some Machiavellian crisis PR operative far away in a boardroom somewhere had the power to tell me how to think and feel about Blake Lively (or the war in Ukraine, or the presidential election, or Twinkies). But my peek into the digital vortex made me realize that the world we live in is far too complex, chaotic, and multifaceted to truly be controlled by anyone. Strategic communications specialists aren’t godlike master programmers, expertly manipulating the world from behind a control panel. They are more like frazzled engineers, blindly trying to pull the right levers of an infinitely complex machine whose inputs and outputs are constantly changing. As Mitchell Jackson puts it: “I think the days of having total control are over.”
Which doesn’t mean they aren’t hard at work twiddling knobs and pushing buttons trying to bend the universe to their will. It was frightening for me, during my reporting, to envision being on the wrong end of crisis PR. But, a few days before this story publishes, I receive an email, out of the blue, which prompts me to imagine what it might be like to have a digital army on my side, working to help me amplify my message. “Good morning,” TrollToll writes. “Does it benefit you if a lot of site traffic spends time on your article?”
Anna Silman is a writer and editor in Brooklyn.