Nobody named here has been charged with any offence in connection with Epstein, and crisis public relations is a lawful profession. Blake Lively’s allegations are allegations, contested by the defendants: their counsel says The Agency Group “operated as any crisis management firm would when hired by a client experiencing threats by two extremely powerful people with unlimited resources.” This page documents a professional lineage and the tactics described in court filings — not a finding of wrongdoing.
Why this belongs in the archive rather than in an entertainment column.
This site documents the machinery that let the operation run in plain sight — the money, the introductions, and the reputation management. The PR layer is usually treated as the least serious of the three. It may be the most durable.
What Epstein was buying in 2017. Not silence about a conviction nine years old — that was public. He was buying narrative management at the precise moment Giuffre’s litigation was drawing journalists back to the story.
What makes the lineage significant. The same firm, and then the same individual, went on to be retained by men facing abuse allegations — and, per the Lively complaint, to deploy techniques designed not to rebut the allegations but to make the public stop looking at them.
The through-line is a method, not a conspiracy. No document suggests Epstein had any involvement in the Depp or Baldoni matters; he was dead before either began. What transferred was a practice — and the practice was refined on his account.
Why a site about trafficking should care about a Hollywood lawsuit. Because the filings describe, in operational detail, how an accusation of sexual misconduct can be made to disappear from public attention. That is the mechanism survivors in this archive faced for two decades, documented here with the texts attached.
In the DOJ’s Epstein Library: three invoices from Hiltzik Strategies to Jeffrey Epstein.
Amount: $25,000 per month.
For: “communications counsel and public relations services.”
Months billed: June, July and October 2017.
Hiltzik appears hundreds of times across the released files. Melissa Nathan is named in them too.
Section 01
The Lineage
Three invoices in the DOJ’s Epstein Library show Matthew Hiltzik billed Epstein $25,000 a month for “communications counsel and public relations services” — rendered in June, July and October 2017. Hiltzik is mentioned hundreds of times in the released files. The timing is not incidental: journalists were re-examining the allegations, which had resurfaced in Virginia Giuffre’s defamation suit against Ghislaine Maxwell.
Melissa Nathan spent nearly a decade at Hiltzik Strategies, rising to executive vice president. She is also named in the Epstein Files. Several Hiltzik colleagues later followed her to her own firm.
Hiltzik and Nathan represented Ivanka and Tiffany Trump during Trump’s first campaign. In 2017 Hope Hicks moved from Hiltzik Strategies to become White House communications director.
Hiltzik and Nathan represent Johnny Depp through his defamation trial against Amber Heard — a case widely credited with reshaping public sympathy in a high-profile abuse dispute.
She launches The Agency Group (TAG), taking Depp and other clients with her. Reported majority stake co-owned by Scooter Braun.
TAG is hired by Justin Baldoni during the It Ends With Us release, as reports of a rift with Blake Lively surface.
Lively sues, alleging a “retaliatory social manipulation campaign” orchestrated by Nathan. Filed texts include one attributed to Nathan: “You know we can bury anyone.”
Section 02
The Techniques, As Described in Filings
All of the following come from Blake Lively’s complaint or the related Jonesworks suit. They are allegations, denied by the defendants — and they are unusually specific about method.
Per the complaint, Nathan and Jennifer Abel “leveraged their teams to create and perpetuate negative content” on Reddit and TikTok. Texts propose “full social account take downs” and “threads of theories” to redirect public attention.
A separate suit by publicist Stephanie Jones alleges the team used “more than a dozen fake social media accounts and dark web accounts” to defame her firm.
Texts reference speaking off the record to a journalist at the Daily Mail, using sources at Variety to push a claim that Ryan Reynolds was “anti-feminist,” and Abel citing a friend of twelve years at People magazine.
The stated aim in the filings was to generate discussion threads that would distract from the sexual-harassment allegations themselves — not to rebut them.
This archive documents a Manila operation paid to strip “jail” and “pedophile” from Epstein’s Google suggestions, publicists placing favourable coverage, and a lab director proposing to route his gifts through another foundation to conceal their origin.
The Lively filings describe the same category of work with the receipts attached — which is why they are useful evidence about how reputation defence actually operates, independent of who is right in that dispute.
The Laundry →
Section 03
The Press Relationships
The outlets named in the Lively complaint are specific, and one correspondence is worth setting out carefully.
The filings reference a Daily Mail journalist spoken to off the record, sources at Variety, a contact of twelve years at People, and coordination around New York Post and Page Six coverage.
Sara Nathan has been editor-at-large at the New York Post since 2018. Before that she was executive editor at People, and before that MailOnline’s US showbusiness editor-at-large until 2015.
Her career runs through three of the four outlets named in the complaint.
The relationship is established in a federal court filing. Case 1:24-cv-10049-LJL, Document 107-5, filed 28 February 2025, records Melissa Nathan’s relationships as including "her sister, Sara Nathan, a journalist at the New York Post and contributor at Page Six." Primary source
The filing records the channel in use. Melissa Nathan texted Jennifer Abel a link to a Page Six article bylined by Sara Nathan — "Truth behind ‘It Ends With Us’ feud rumors: Justin Baldoni made Blake Lively ‘uncomfortable,’ sources say." It published on 9 August 2024, while Nathan’s engagement as Baldoni’s crisis publicist was not yet public.
The same filing records that Nathan remarked Baldoni’s religion should be taken "out" of media coverage, and that she discussed suppressing two stories — placement and suppression from the same desk.
Lively’s publicist described the channel contemporaneously. Leslie Sloane, denying she had planted stories: "I was contacted on 8/11 by Sara Nathan (Melissa Nathan’s sister) forwarding an anonymous tip that Page Six received, regarding allegations of HR complaints on the set." Secondary
What is established including the family question. The complaint alleges a publicist coordinating placement across named outlets, and the career record shows a senior editor whose tenure spans those same outlets. Those two facts stand on their own, and neither requires the other.
Not established: that any journalist named or unnamed acted improperly, that any outlet knowingly published planted material, or that Epstein had any connection to the Depp or Baldoni matters.
Established: the invoices, the employment history, and the fact that these outlets are named in filings.
Section 04
Open Questions
Section 05
Sources
The Epstein Connection to Depp and Baldoni
Feb 2026. The three invoices, the $25,000 monthly billing, the hundreds of mentions, and the Hiltzik–Nathan lineage.
spitfirenews.com →The Publicists in the Lawsuit
Nathan’s career — EVP at Hiltzik Strategies, the founding of TAG, and the colleagues who followed her.
newsweek.com →The Jonesworks Suit
The allegation of “more than a dozen fake social media accounts,” and the defendants’ response that TAG acted as any crisis firm would.
nbcnews.com →The Crisis Team’s Other Clients
Depp, Drake and others — and the “we can bury anyone” text cited in the complaint.
huffpost.com →The Hiring
Aug 2024. Nathan hired by Baldoni, after “a decade with Gotham based crisis PR guru Matthew Hiltzik.”
deadline.com →The Press File
Wolff, Thomas, the #MeToo tracking, and the four outlets named in the filings.
Read the report →Platform Manipulation
Reddit, TikTok, the fake accounts, and the Manila search-suggestion operation.
Read the report →“We Can Bury Anyone”
What crisis PR firms actually do — astroturfing, untraceability, and the money route.
Read the report →The Frame
The four-part formula Epstein wrote down — and why not one word of it addresses whether anything happened.
Read the report →The Manila Operation
He paid $10–20k a month to delete “pedophile” from his own autocomplete. Google was never asked.
Read the report →The Guild
A few dozen people hold the entire working knowledge of suppressing a story — and none of it is registered.
Read the report →Peggy Siegal
The guest list — who put a convicted offender back in the room, and what she got for it.
Read the profile →Ramsey Elkholy
~3,000 documents, in his own voice — and the AI-dossier hazard around private names.
Read the profile →Michael Wolff
The advice, the 100 hours, and what journalism ethicists said about it.
Read the profile →Matthew Hiltzik
The full profile — Weinstein’s spokesman, Epstein’s publicist, and the Trump White House pipeline.
Read the profile →The Laundry
The Manila search-suggestion operation, the publicists, and the foundation-routing proposal.
Read the report →The Epstein Library
Where the Hiltzik invoices sit in the DOJ release.
justice.gov/epstein ↗Section 06
The Page Six Record, Counted
A compiled index of every Page Six article naming Blake Lively between October 2023 and October 2026 runs to 528 items. Plotted by month, it does not look like coverage. It looks like a campaign with a start date.
August 2024 alone carries 52 articles — roughly one every fourteen hours for a month. That is the month It Ends With Us opened, and the month Lively alleges a retaliatory publicity campaign was run against her.
The volume does not subside afterwards. 136 articles precede her December 2024 complaint; 392 follow it. 2025 alone accounts for 258 — an article naming her roughly every thirty-four hours, for a year.
The framing is lopsided in a measurable way. Headlines carrying adversarial language — battle, feud, war, backlash, slammed, smear, desperate, dropped — outnumber those with positive framing 117 to 15, a ratio of nearly eight to one. The single most common word in the set is "battle," appearing 58 times; "feud" 13; "war" 11.
And the tactic the complaint describes is visible in the headlines themselves. On 23 August 2024: "Blake Lively slammed for claiming pregnant women ‘lie’ about symptoms in resurfaced interview." Resurfacing old material to generate fresh negative coverage is precisely the method the unsealed communications describe.
Adversarial framing rises after she files. 18% of headlines before the complaint; 24% after — so the response to a legal filing alleging a smear campaign was proportionally more hostile coverage, not less.
Date, headline and source link for every article in the index. Download and check the figures above against it.
It does not establish that any individual article was placed, paid for, or solicited. A celebrity outlet covering a film release and a lawsuit heavily is also what ordinary commercial incentives produce. The pattern is evidence of intensity and slant, not by itself of coordination. Unresolved