The rule everywhere else
Run a campaign commercial and the law makes you say, on the ad itself, who paid for it. Sell a drug on television and you have to read the side effects out loud. Pay an influencer to praise a product and the Federal Trade Commission requires the payment to be disclosed. Work for a foreign government and you register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and your materials carry a label. Lobby Congress and you file reports naming your client and what you were paid.
None of these systems is perfect. But they all start from the same premise: if someone is being paid to persuade the public, the public gets to know who is paying.
There is one major exception. Pay a firm to run an influence campaign — to lift one person up or tear another down, online and in the press — and no law requires anyone to say so. Not the sponsor. Not the firm. Not the people doing the posting. There is no “paid for by” line, no registry, no filing, no label. The Federal Election Commission covers candidate advocacy; the FTC’s disclosure project covers people endorsing products; FARA covers foreign principals; the lobbying law covers contacts with officials. A paid campaign against a person falls through every one of those nets at once.
The services don’t even have settled names. Firm websites sell them as “crisis management,” “reputation management,” and “digital and social strategy.” Private texts call the same work brigading, fan engagement, and untraceable sites. We are so far behind that the vocabulary does not exist in public — and funding with no name cannot be looked up.
This gap is general. It is not one party, one network, or one industry. What follows is what the gap looks like on the rare occasions when a court pries it open.
What it looks like when the lights come on
Almost everything the public knows about one recent operation comes from a single accident of litigation: a publicist kept a colleague’s work phone, its texts were produced in a lawsuit, and a judge unsealed the exhibits. The case is Blake Lively’s suit over the film It Ends With Us — the clearest window so far into how this market works.
On August 18, 2024, Justin Baldoni told his crisis publicist, Melissa Nathan, that the accounts defending him online “feel like bots.” Her reply, quoted in the complaint from the produced texts: they “do not have bots,” because “bots look fake to anyone.” Then: “The other team is doing something very specific in terms of what they do. I know Jamey & Jed connected on this” — Jamey Heath, the studio’s co-founder, and Jed Wallace, the Texas contractor. “Any digital team these days,” she added, “is far more intelligent to utilise something so obvious.”
The complaint describes the inside of it: a staffed operation taking requests. Any team member could text a link and ask that someone “boost” the story or “engag[e] in the comments.” “I’ll have our digital side boost this in the am,” Jennifer Abel, the studio’s publicist, wrote on August 14. The same section describes media “friendlies” — human sources inside news outlets — updating the team. And the filings place a human lever inside one newsroom directly: Judge Liman’s opinion recites the complaint’s account that Nathan was coordinating with her sister — Sara Nathan, a journalist at the New York Post’s Page Six — over what should come out of the coverage. Stephanie Jones’s separate suit states it flatly: Abel “closely coordinated with Page Six reporter Sara Nathan — Melissa Nathan’s sister.”
On August 7, 2024, a detailed scope of work was emailed by a TAG staffer, Katie Case. It promised “CTR manipulation and contextual links” (engineering clicks and links so search results move), “ranking within SERPs” (where a story lands on Google), a team that would “manage the narrative… with legacy admin for each platform,” an effort to “actively sway the algorithm with one SEO charged hub/site,” and “taking down a full Reddit and all social accounts as needed.” Under oath, nobody would claim this document. Case testified she got the content from Nathan. Nathan has testified she is not tech-savvy. Wallace, asked about it at his deposition: “I don’t know. I didn’t write that.” The most technically specific sales document in the case has no author.
What is documented is the money, and what Wallace swears it bought. Wayfarer paid Street Relations $30,000 a month for August, September, and October 2024 — $90,000 total, confirmed by Wallace under oath. His sworn description of the service is one thing only: monitoring — read the media, assess sentiment, report back. “It’s an observant monitoring role.”
His own sales language, from a pitch the same season, describes more. Pitching Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s operation, Wallace wrote in his own emails: “I need to be able to throw a ton of upvotes at the stuff that is rah rah for him… and downvote everything that’s acting as a drag on him”; “our team can elevate across all algorithmically driven platforms”; and, of a story the client wanted gone, “I’ll handle that and set up an algorithm to manage concerns.” Under oath in October 2025, he walked each line back. The upvotes: “I wouldn’t know how to do upvotes.” The elevation: “Absolutely not” capable. The algorithm promise: “I was not being truthful. I think puffing.” Could he buy the service elsewhere? He would “instruct a client to Google.” Both sides agree Kennedy never engaged him: the pitch is documented; the performance is not.
The team question sits in the same gap. Abel’s August 2024 text mentioned “social manipulation (from the separate team based in Hawaii).” At her September 2025 deposition, she testified Hawaii was her own mishearing. Asked whether there was a separate team, she said: “Yes.” Asked who it was: “It’s my understanding that this was Jed and Street Relations.” Wallace swears otherwise: “I do not have a team… I have never been to Hawai’i.” One named human appears in the production layer at all: Katie Case, who testified she wrote copy for an attack website aimed at Stephanie Jones at Nathan’s and Wallace’s direction. Both deny it. No court has resolved the conflict.
Anonymous attack websites aimed at Jones, producer Amanda Ghost, Jessica Serfaty, and actress Alexa Nikolas demonstrably existed, and some ranked at the very top of Google results for their targets’ names. Who built them is denied and unproven on paper. At the pleading stage — where a court takes the complaint’s documents as they are, before any trial — Judge Liman wrote that the internal messages were “inexplicable unless the Wayfarer Parties were spreading negative content about Lively.” Lively’s claims against Wallace himself were later dismissed on personal-jurisdiction grounds — a ruling about where he could be sued, not a finding about what happened. His activity, the judge wrote, was “advice regarding publicity.”
One expert filing names the range this falls into. Professor Aron Culotta, retained by Lively, wrote that inauthentic online activity comes in three forms — fully automated, fully human, and hybrid — and that the fully human form means “hired influencers, troll farms, astroturf campaigns or paid commenters… at the behest of political, corporate, or ideological clients.” That taxonomy is not a finding about this campaign: Culotta’s case-specific findings were statistical, and the defense’s expert concluded the activity “is what organic virality looks like.” But the range itself is the point. From the public record, nobody can say which form any given operation took — bots, accounts run by people, people posting as themselves, or a “bot farm” that turns out to be a room full of humans. Nathan’s own text says not bots. Nothing outside the operation can verify even that. The machinery spans every form. No form carries a sponsor’s name.
The money, as far as paper goes
| Paid — documented | Amount |
|---|---|
| Wallace / Street Relations — Wayfarer engagement, Aug–Oct 2024 (invoices; total confirmed under oath) | $90,000 |
| Hiltzik Strategies — Epstein engagement, surviving invoices, Jun, Jul & Oct 2017 ($25,000/month) | $75,000 |
| Total documented paid across these two engagements | $165,000 |
| Quoted — asking prices, not proven paid | Amount |
|---|---|
| “Full reddit, full social account take downs… start threads of theories” — Nathan’s Quote One, 3–4 months | $175,000 |
| “Creation of social fan engagement” — Nathan’s Quote Two, per month, 3-month minimum | $25,000/mo |
| “Untraceable site — ghost server, ghost hosting, full build… full algorithmic push” — Nathan to a client, 3 months | $110,000 |
The two tables are never combined. The first is money paper proves moved, in two unrelated engagements eight years apart. The second is asking prices from sales texts; payment is not proven for any of them, so they are not summed. The Hiltzik sequence implies August and September invoices at the same rate ($125,000 for that engagement); absent from the released documents, they are not counted.
The same shape, eight years earlier
In 2017, the firm where Nathan had spent roughly a decade — Hiltzik Strategies, where she was an executive vice president — was retained for Jeffrey Epstein. The firm’s chief operating officer wrote to Epstein on May 13, 2017, proposing the structure in plain terms: “We’d like to structure our agreement through your attorney… (but you can pay us directly). This provides for stronger attorney-client privilege protection.” The engagement letter followed that design: Epstein’s lawyer’s firm was the named client; “Jeffrey Epstein shall pay” $25,000 a month. The surviving invoices total $75,000, and Epstein’s personal approval of the July payment (“yes”) is in the files.
Epstein’s calendar places a May 5, 2017 meeting at his home with the firm’s founder, a vice president — and Melissa Nathan. The documents show her scheduled as a member of the team that came to the engagement’s first meeting; they do not show work she personally performed on the account. Against that record sits a public statement by Bryan Freedman, Nathan’s later lawyer in the Lively case: Nathan “never met, engaged with, or provided services for Jeffrey Epstein.” Both are printed here because both are the record: the scheduling documents contradict the “never met” half of the denial, and the absence of any work product by her is consistent with the rest of it.
Nothing about it appeared in any registry. It became public in 2025–26, when the Justice Department and House Oversight released Epstein’s files — eight years later, through a criminal-records production, not a disclosure filing by anyone involved.
Four cases, one break point
The Lively operation is not an outlier. It is one of four documented cases with the same anatomy:
- Definers Public Affairs and Facebook (2017–18). A firm founded by a presidential campaign manager and a party research director sold Facebook what its own proposal called a “Digital Platform Echo Chamber” — an in-house site presented as independent news, opposition research on critics, material tying activists to George Soros. The sponsor’s identity surfaced through a New York Times investigation; Facebook admitted parts of it a week later. The contract amount has never been made public. The same firm’s one government contract — $120,000 from the EPA — is fully visible, because federal procurement creates a record. Private money leaves none.
- Citizens for Sanity (2022). A political nonprofit spent roughly $93 million on advertising in one cycle. Its ads carried its own name and no one else’s. The money trail behind it — grants between nonprofits — became visible only in tax filings published more than eighteen months after the election, and the individual donor reported to stand behind much of it appears in no filing at all. Even where a disclosure regime exists, it arrives after the votes are counted and stops one door short of the human being who paid.
- Hiltzik and Epstein (2017). Sponsor hidden at the first document, behind a lawyer’s name, by design.
- Lively and Wayfarer (2024). Sponsor hidden at the last step: the invoices that exist describe monitoring; the work described in the sales documents has no invoice, no byline, and no named author.
In every one, the identity of whoever paid became public, if it became public at all, through litigation discovery, a leak, or a reporter’s investigation. Never through a disclosure filing. There is no filing to make.
What we cannot show
The limits matter, because they are part of the story. No document in any of these cases names a single member of the teams that allegedly did the posting — or establishes whether the posting was done by people, by software, or by both. No platform — Reddit, X, Meta, TikTok, Google, Wikipedia — is documented to have taken enforcement action against any account tied to these operations. No document states that any campaign sent identified people to do anything in the physical world; the “beyond the internet” layer the record does show runs through newsrooms — planted stories, friendly reporters, a publicist’s sister on a newspaper’s staff. And the central either/or remains open: either capabilities were sold that never existed — sales talk their seller under oath called “puffing” — or they were performed by hands no document names. The paper record cannot close that gap — and that is itself a measure of how completely the work is designed to leave nothing behind.
Our read
This is where the government needs to start probing: public relations, reputation management, and campaign security services — the persuasion-for-hire industry that operates with no sponsor-disclosure rule at all.
Every adjacent activity has one. A campaign cannot run a commercial without naming its sponsor. A drug company cannot sell a treatment without disclosing its risks. A lobbyist, a foreign agent, a paid endorser — all of them file, register, or label. A firm hired to manufacture public opinion about a person files nothing, registers nowhere, and labels nothing, even when the same toolkit is pitched to political campaigns. It is not parallel to how every other campaign activity in this country is treated — and it is not okay, and it is not ethical, that the most deniable form of persuasion is also the least disclosed.
One question belongs here, stated as a question. Jeffrey Epstein’s operation was human trafficking: he died charged with it, and Ghislaine Maxwell stands convicted of it. The full documentary record of that network has never been released, and its release has been resisted and fought over for years. Nothing in the record connects the influence campaigns described above to that trafficking, and no such claim is made here. But while the documents that would show who moved people, and on whose instructions, remain unreleased, the public has valid reasons to ask why people are being used for influence campaigns with no documentation of who hired them either. In both places, what is missing is the same thing: records. We do not know what the missing records would show. The not-knowing is the point.
The first step is the smallest one: if you are paid to persuade the public, the public gets to know who paid. Until that rule exists here too, the country is trying to argue honestly about its own future while part of the argument is purchased in secret, by people whose names appear nowhere. We are falling behind — not because the techniques are unstoppable, but because we have not yet required the one thing that makes every other form of paid persuasion answerable: a name on it.
Sources: Lively v. Wayfarer Studios LLC, S.D.N.Y. No. 1:24-cv-10049 — Second Amended Complaint (Doc. 521, July 30, 2025), ¶¶250–258, 330; Opinion & Order (Doc. 426, July 16, 2025); Opinion & Order (Doc. 912, Nov. 5, 2025); Opinion (Doc. 296, June 9, 2025); Opposition brief (Doc. 161, Apr. 2, 2025); Wallace Deposition (Docs. 1429-2, 1429-8, Oct. 9–10, 2025); Abel Deposition (Doc. 1254-2, Sept. 26, 2025); Wallace Declaration (Doc. 650-2, Mar. 18, 2025); Expert Report of Prof. Aron Culotta (Doc. 1334-7); Jones v. Abel, S.D.N.Y. No. 1:25-cv-00779, incl. Opinion & Order (Doc. 188, Nov. 26, 2025) and the Jones amended complaint (Doc. 193-1, Dec. 8, 2025). Epstein corpus (DOJ/House Oversight EFTA releases): engagement letters EFTA00583908, EFTA00582727, EFTA00803986; Gross email, May 13, 2017, EFTA00691283; meeting scheduling EFTA00285385, EFTA00450549, EFTA00450555; invoices EFTA00617467, EFTA00803985, EFTA00621612; payment approval EFTA01042771. New York Times, Dec. 21, 2024 (“’We Can Bury Anyone’”) and Oct. 6, 2026 (Kamin, “How to Destroy a Reputation in Hollywood”); New York Times, Nov. 14 & 21, 2018 (Definers/Facebook); Business Insider, Feb. 6, 2025 (Warren & Newsham, Wallace profile); The Hollywood Reporter (Sept. 25 & 29, 2026; Apr. 30, 2026); FTC Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR 255 (rev. June 29, 2023); AFL/Citizens for Sanity Forms 990 (2022); Guardian/Documented, May 17, 2024.
Why this is on PoliVion
PoliVion exists to put names on the money behind American politics. This article is about the one corner of the persuasion business where no name is required at all — and about the argument, made here when this site began, that the public’s own intent is what the argument is supposed to be.
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