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Prominent entertainment attorney Brian Friedman, who referred to himself as “Pitbull,” has a reputation for aggression. “If you mess with my client, you get what you get,” he said. Hollywood Reporter in 2024. Last year, he was accused of throwing a fake punch at opposing counsel amid a dispute over his client Vin Diesel’s testimony.
Recently, Friedman and his business partners have been linked in court to alleged online smear campaigns on behalf of themselves and their clients — such as Rebel Wilson — against a wide range of adversaries. The discrediting effort appears to have been carried out using social media accounts that promoted anonymous attack sites.
Friedman previously said THR He and the others did not engage in this activity and ridiculed the allegations as “speculation presented as fact.”
One obvious target, actress-turned-activist Alexa Nichols, has named attorney as well as digital reformer Jed Wallace and crisis propagandist Melissa Nathan as defendants in her defamation case. The same trio also acted on behalf of Justin Baldoni in his high-profile feud with Blake Lively, which he will go to trial in May.
In a new amended complaint, Nicholas’ attorney asserts that her offensive content is linked online to negative information posted about other figures, including the former business partner of music mogul Scooter Braun and the ex-girlfriend of celebrity health expert Andrew Huberman. However, the newly emerged person who bears one of the most smeared fingerprints online is another lawyer — one who faces Friedman.
Craig Flanders is an experienced attorney at the commercial litigation firm Blank Rome. His clients are often large institutions. In 2021, he began representing Tony-nominated producer Stephen Hendel and Knitting Factory Entertainment CEO Morgan Margolis in a legal battle with the pair’s business partners at Pappy & Harriet’s, a legendary industry-favorite music venue in Joshua Tree, California. The bitter dispute between the quartet was the talk of the Sahrawi community. Friedman was Flanders’ opposing counsel.
As the lawsuit continues without settlement, anonymous websites and social media accounts have sprung up to criticize Flanders’ clients. Hendel, who made his fortune in part by co-founding an energy company, has been repeatedly described as an “oil commodities trader with a history of hostile takeovers” — a description unlikely to please tech leftist Joshua Tree. Margolis has been called a “failed business owner.”
However, Flanders has been the subject of the most notable online activity. An anonymous person threatened him with unfounded and potentially harmful allegations on custom websites. (Hendel and Margolis won the trial in December 2024.)
Nicholas asserts in court that digital data indicates an overlap between an anonymous account referring to her as a Nazi and, months later, linking Flanders’ name to the term “male escort.” According to her dossier, there is evidence of “co-authorship between accounts interested in promoting Jed Wallace and his works, and discrediting Ms. Nicholas, [and] Press charges against Mr. Flanders.
None of the individuals named in Nicholas’ lawsuit have responded THR.
Nicholas’ lawsuit says the smear campaign against her began shortly after the publication of Friedman’s sexual assault settlement from 1991, in which he did not admit liability. (The lawyer had represented her ex-husband, a prominent electronic musician, in a lawsuit from which she later withdrew.) [Freedman] “They put her directly in the firing line of the PR machine set to bury her,” Nicholas’s file asserts.
For her part, lawyers for Lively, whose case against Baldoni was recently narrowed by a federal judge to focus on the issue of revenge, said that Wallace had “armed a digital army.” [against her] …to create, seed, manipulate and develop offensive content that appears authentic on social media platforms and online chat forums. He denied it.
