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Top entertainment attorney Bryan Freedman, who’s referred to himself as a “pit bull,” has an outsized reputation for aggression. “If you fuck with my client, you get what you get,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2024. Last year, he was accused of throwing a mock punch at opposing counsel amid a dispute over his client Vin Diesel’s deposition.

More recently, Freedman and his business associates have been connected in court to an alleged playbook of online smear campaigns on behalf of themselves and their clients — such as Rebel Wilson — against a wide range of adversaries. The effort to discredit appears to have been carried out using sock-puppet social media accounts that promoted anonymous attack websites.

Freedman previously told THR that he and the others were not involved in this activity and derided the allegations as “speculation presented as fact.”

One apparent target, the actress-turned-activist Alexa Nikolas, has named the lawyer as well as digital fixer Jed Wallace and crisis publicist Melissa Nathan as defendants in her defamation case. The same trio has also worked on behalf of Justin Baldoni in his high-profile dispute with Blake Lively, which heads to trial in May.

In a new amended complaint, Nikolas’ attorney asserts that vilifying content about her is linked on the Internet to negative information posted about other figures, including a former business partner of music mogul Scooter Braun and the former live-in girlfriend of celebrity wellness guru Andrew Huberman. Yet the freshly surfaced individual who bears one of the most salaciously smeared online footprints is another lawyer — one who’s squared off against Freedman.

Craig Flanders is a seasoned litigator at the commercial litigation firm Blank Rome. His clients are often major institutions. In 2021, he began to represent the Tony-nominated producer Stephen Hendel and Knitting Factory Entertainment CEO Morgan Margolis in a legal fight with the pair’s two business partners in Pappy & Harriet’s, a legendary industry-favored music venue in Joshua Tree, California. The quartet’s bitter feud was the talk of the desert community. Freedman was Flanders’ opposing counsel.

As the litigation proceeded without settlement, dedicated anonymous websites and social media accounts materialized to criticize Flanders’ clients. Hendel, who made his fortune in part by co-founding an energy firm, was repeatedly described as “an oil commodities trader with a history of hostile takeovers” — a characterization unlikely to win admiration in artsy, lefty Joshua Tree. Margolis was termed a “failed business owner.”

Flanders, though, was the subject of the most notable Internet activity. An anonymous individual threatened him with unsubstantiated and potentially damaging claims on dedicated websites. (Hendel and Margolis prevailed at trial in December 2024.)

Nikolas asserts in court that digital data indicates overlap between an anonymous account referring to her as a Nazi and then, months later, associating Flanders’ name with the term “male escort.” According to her filing, there’s evidence of “common authorship between accounts interested in promoting Jed Wallace and his business, smearing Ms. Nikolas, [and] making accusations about Mr. Flanders.”

None of the individuals named in Nikolas’ suit responded to THR.

Nikolas’ litigation notes that the smear campaign against her began shortly after she publicized Freedman’s own sexual-assault settlement from 1991, in which he didn’t admit liability. (The attorney had represented her ex-husband, a prominent electronic musician, in an action she later withdrew.) “Attacking [Freedman] put her directly into the line of fire of a PR machine prepared to bury her,” asserts the Nikolas filing.

For her part, lawyers for Lively, whose case against Baldoni was recently narrowed by a federal judge to be focused on the issue of retaliation, have contended Wallace “weaponized a digital army [against her] … to create, seed, manipulate, and advance disparaging content that appeared to be authentic on social media platforms and internet chat forums.” He denied it.