Welcome to the latest edition of Breaker. We are Lachlan Cartwright and Ravi Somaiya. If this email has been forwarded to you can subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.

In today’s edition, we're all about desurfacing — the act of manipulating public opinion online by nefarious means. It’s part of a new industry we are calling “Scandal PR.”  

We dive into the world of one character who works for Blake Lively in her lawsuit and public battle against the director Justin Baldoni, and who is accused of being a kind of Keyzer Soze for the internet, managing and manipulating the narrative with skills drawn from the brutal underworld. (In this case, the Central Intelligence Agency.) 

We find out more about the incident in which Rupert Murdoch berated Emma Tucker, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, over a story about Oliver Darcy. A top political reporter exits the Daily Mail after a bizarre incident involving J.D. Vance, Jay Penske is taking on a weird new job at his monopoly of trade publications and downtown fixture Raoul’s expands.

The rise of Scandal PR

As you read this, thousands of people on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are hearing about a shadowy figure accused of having the power to shift online narratives using nefarious means learned from a stint at the Central Intelligence Agency.

He is part of Blake Lively's legal team in her ongoing legal and public battle against Justin Baldoni, a film director she accuses of harassing her and smearing her reputation (most notably in a New York Times article that is now the subject of a lawsuit from Baldoni, who is in turn being sued by Lively). 

He is a crisis PR expert, who has also worked in an Airbnb department that Bloomberg dubbed the "black box". He can, according to the accusations, have Instagram and YouTube accounts shut down or limited, subtly tweak Wikipedia pages to undermine Lively's critics, and manipulate Google's algorithm in ways that are not open to the rest of us, in an effort to launder Lively's reputation and smear Baldoni. And he's planted stories involving Casey Anthony, Haley Bieber and Meghan Markle in an effort to “desurface” Lively.

His name is...

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