Months after a resolution to the sprawling legal battle over the filming of It Ends With Us, Hollywood power lawyer Bryan Freedman is still dealing with fallout from the case.
Zoey 101 alum Alexa Nikolas won a key ruling on Wednesday in a defamation lawsuit against Freedman, with a court finding that she’s established a probability of prevailing on defamation claims accusing him and those in his orbit of marshaling a smear campaign against her.
Nikolas, founder of advocacy organization Eat Predators, has a long and contentious history with Freedman, who had represented her ex-husband Michael Milosh when she sued the musician for sexual abuse. She had organized protests outside of his offices in 2022 after discovering that he had also been accused of sexual assault in a case that resulted in a no-fault settlement in 1991. Around the time of these protests, a smear site that aimed to undermine her activism — including through assertions that her current husband was a predator — popped up about her.
Nikolas didn’t connect Freedman to the site until Lively sued It Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer. The thrust of Lively’s lawsuit focused on alleged sexual harassment on the set of the film, but it also accused Baldoni and his public relations team — led by top crisis publicist Melissa Nathan and digital fixer Jed Wallace — of spawning a smear machine that threatened her reputation. This led to sister lawsuits, including one from publicist Stephanie Jones, who claimed that Nathan and Wallace have long engaged in creating smear sites targeting women. That gave Nikolas the ammunition to file a lawsuit, which points to alleged data identifying Freedman as involved in the generation of some of the sites.
In Wednesday’s ruling, Los Angeles Superior Court judge Michael Whitaker rebuffed Freedman’s bid to dismiss the case. He concluded that Nikolas has produced enough evidence to potentially prove the alleged campaign was defamatory.
Among the findings: Nikolas sufficiently demonstrated a probability of proving the allegedly defamatory statements were untrue. This includes a claim on a second smear site about her that she partnered with former California senator Joe Dunn to push others into making false accusations of sexual assault.
Whitaker also pointed to court records across multiple cases in which several plaintiffs describe a “similar modus operandi and common website traffic optimization tactics.”
Freedman had argued that Nikolas can’t prove the assertions advanced in the sites were false and that some were simply statements of opinion, which can’t give rise to a defamation claim. On this front, the court said that the allegations in the site “all imply provably false assertions of fact” that Nikolas is “either a criminal who has committed criminal acts, or she is not.”
Multiple smear sites identified in the case between Jones and Baldoni appear to have evidence of common authorship, including Alexanikolas.net, which claimed she extorted multiple ex-boyfriends by threatening them with manufacturing sexual abuse claims, among other things. In Jones’ case, a cybersecurity expert submitted an expert report indicating that those who created the site about Nikolas may have also created ones about Amanda Ghost, who’s engaged in a defamation battle against Rebel Wilson.
“There is a tangled web of connections between these sites and numerous others in addition to that authored about plaintiff,” Whitaker wrote, noting a “conspiracy to smear various individuals” who had adversarial connections to Freedman’s clients. That not only suggests a motive, the court found, but also indicates that the lawyer may have been “involved in directing or otherwise effectuating all of those alleged smear campaigns.”
Earlier this year, Wilson’s crisis public relations team — comprised of Nathan and Wallace — was heard discussing plans to create anonymous sites that accused Ghost of sex trafficking as part of an alleged smear campaign solicited by the actress against The Deb producer. In a recording obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Wallace instructed Nathan to assert without evidence that Ghost is a “madame” whose work involves procuring young women for wealthy and powerful men.
“We can’t just do, like, oh, she’s a bitch, she sucks,” Wallace says in the recording. “It’s, like, it’s got to be really, really heavy and connected to something that heavy.”
At one point in the conversation, Wallace referenced the involvement of Freedman, Wilson’s then-counsel in the case. Freedman and Nathan didn’t respond to requests for comment, though they’ve previously denied involvement in the creation of the smear sites.
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