Alexa Nikolas, founder of advocacy organization Eat Predators and former Zoey 101 cast member, secured a key court victory in a defamation lawsuit against prominent entertainment attorney Bryan Freedman. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Whitaker rejected Freedman’s motion to dismiss the case, determining that Nikolas has presented sufficient evidence to potentially prove the alleged smear campaign against her was defamatory.
The dispute stems from Nikolas’s long-running conflict with Freedman, who represented her ex-husband musician Michael Milosh in a sexual abuse lawsuit she filed against him. After Nikolas organized protests outside Freedman’s offices in 2022 following accusations against Milosh, a smear website emerged targeting her activism and making unsubstantiated claims about her current husband. Nikolas’s defamation case draws connections to lawsuits filed by Blake Lively against It Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni and related cases involving publicists Melissa Nathan and Jed Wallace, who have been accused of operating a network of smear websites targeting women.
In his ruling, Judge Whitaker found that Nikolas sufficiently demonstrated the probability of proving statements on the smear sites were false, including claims that she partnered with former California senator Joe Dunn to encourage false sexual assault accusations. The court rejected Freedman’s argument that the statements constituted opinion rather than provable fact, noting that the allegations “all imply provably false assertions of fact” about Nikolas’s alleged criminal conduct.
The judge identified a pattern connecting multiple websites allegedly created by the same parties, including common authorship indicators and website optimization tactics across sites targeting Nikolas, musician Amanda Ghost, and other individuals with adversarial connections to Freedman’s clients. Whitaker concluded this evidence suggests a potential conspiracy to defame various individuals and indicates possible involvement by Freedman in directing or executing the alleged campaigns. Freedman and Nathan declined to comment, though they have previously denied any involvement in creating the smear sites.
Article Attribution | Read More at Article Source
Article summary produced by Claude AI