PR Warfare: When An Enemy Targets Your Firm In the Press

From Cheryl Connor, writing for Forbes:

Does anybody remember Lori Cheek? Those who follow my columns may remember my story about the intrepid entrepreneur who was famously turned down in front of eight million viewers by all five investors on Shark Tank and used the experience to propel her mobile dating site, Cheekd, on her own.

TheObserver.com

“That was brutal.”

But her company win and her marketing chops were not enough to protect her from what happened next. In an email this week she revealed a PR horror story.

“A man I’ve never met was watching a re-run of my Shark Tank episode on CNBC a few years ago and claimed I stole his idea and now I’m rich and famous,” she said.

The twist: He claimed he told his therapist about “his idea” in 2008, and said the therapist leaked the idea to Cheek, who then built it. In June 2017, the threats began hitting her email inbox and she was served in September. The damage: It took $50,000 and 10 months to get the case in front of a judge. Thankfully, it was thrown out in a pre-trial conference last month.

“If the case weren’t dismissed we were considering filing bankruptcy and liquidating the business, as it could have gone on for years,” she said. Even more surprising: She posted her story to a private Facebook group of hundreds of other Shark Tank participants. The same situation has happened to a number of them as well, as the visibility of the show has drawn opportunists in droves. Her company is moving forward, but she is feeling the pain, not only for herself, but for the others affected as well. “It’s so unfair that something so frivolous like this is able to go so far and cost so much,” she laments.

Cheek’s experience is all too common. Reputation management firms refer to the “X-files” to describe the ex-employees, ex-spouses, ex-partners and friends with a vendetta to harm a company owner by launching malicious suits and spreading false and defamatory news in the press.

For example, a company I know released its 10 employees, all contractors, when the owner pivoted to a small consultancy. Despite their contractor status, 2 of the 10 filed wrongful dismissal lawsuits, “just to see if they’d fly.”

A former contractor for my own company who’d over-stated her qualifications responded to the end of our working relationship by attempting to sue for co-ownership of copyright to the program she’d worked on, demanding all mentions of the program be removed from the web and that I be forbidden to appear at scheduled speeches lest I mention the program or case. (Thankfully it was shut down quickly. And yes, I spoke.)

Other agencies like my own have been damaged or even destroyed when employees leaked confidential client news to the press.

A malicious former employee of a thriving company repeatedly pressed the SEC to investigate the owner. When the SEC agreed to seek more information, he went to the press (anonymously) and claimed the owner was the target of an investigation. Then he posted the resulting stories on the individual’s Wikipedia page.

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