Hard lessons of a reputation manager

The Internet is like fire. It is a force that can sustain life or destroy it, and it nearly destroyed mine.

This is a cautionary tale to anyone who thinks their online reputation is not important, that things that are said online will stay online, or that information can’t shift quickly back and forth between the virtual world and the real one.

It’s also a lesson on what to do when you are the target of character assassination. And along the way you’ll learn how I became an online reputation management consultant.

Lesson 1: Anything that is not known only to you may one day be disclosed to the world, whether you’re ready or not

Thirteen years ago, I started my professional career as a psychotherapist. After about a year and a half into my career I took a job supervising a group home for homeless teens. After sanctioning a 15-year-old resident of the home for possession and use of illegal drugs, she retaliated by falsely accusing me of hugging and kissing her while alone with her.

I had indeed gone for a walk alone with her, which was not against the rules in a residential counseling environment: residential counselors are screened and approved by the state specifically for this. I came into the house that evening to find her sitting on the stairs crying. She told me she had just learned her father had a terminal illness so we went to the backyard of the house and spent an hour discussing her issue.

Then I escorted her back inside and drove home. Two days later my boss called to deliver the devastating news of her allegation. I denied that anything improper had taken place, but with no witnesses, it was my word against hers, and my employer decided it was best to err on the side of caution: they released me and reported the matter to the state.

After such an ordeal, I had little desire to work with clients like the one that had falsely accused me, so instead of taking another counseling job, I sought employment outside the field of counseling.

I worked in retail management by day and ran an entrepreneurial venture with some friends in the evenings and on weekends. Months later, the state scheduled an administrative hearing to be conducted over the telephone regarding the issue, so I began searching for a lawyer to represent me. I couldn’t find one for less than US$5,000, so I had no choice but to represent myself.

Prior to the hearing, the state’s attorney helpfully informed me that the standard for evidence was lower in an administrative hearing than it was in a criminal trial: they didn’t need proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and the teen’s word might just be good enough. However if I’d be willing to agree to have my counselor registration revoked, they’d be willing to remove from the complaint the allegation that I had kissed her. That old adage “A man who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer,” ran through my mind.

Intimidated and unsure of my chances at the hearing, I reasoned that pleading guilty to going for a walk and hugging a 15-year-old girl was better than being out-lawyered and found guilty of kissing one. I took the deal I was offered with the added stipulation that they include in the final order the line “respondent does not admit and specifically denies” the allegations.

At the time I saw my registration revocation as a personal embarrassment at most, known only to those involved, and the friends and family I told. I moved on, not suspecting that it later would be the basis for the destruction of my public name, lead to the loss of a job and my fiancée, and force me to leave the country I lived and worked in.

The documents (along with hundreds of other peoples’ documents) were eventually placed into an online database where they became publicly accessible. Enter the online reputation management problem.

Lesson 2: Whoever tells your story first has the advantage, so make sure it’s YOU

For years the documents remained there, unnoticed, until I got into a position that placed me in the public eye: I became the spokesman and PR director for a professional association of English educators in South Korea, a country I had been working in for a couple years. Knowing that the issue could come under public scrutiny one day, I disclosed it to the organization’s leadership. The organization president’s response was “You are a central figure in the organization…So I’m not prepared to dwell on this matter unless it compromises the association’s existence, and even then I’d still hope to be able to defend you.”

Transparency is compelling. If they had heard the story from someone else, the fact that I didn’t disclose it would have been taken as de facto evidence that I had something to hide. By coming to them and telling them about it, I demonstrated that I had nothing to fear because I had done nothing wrong.

But I didn’t go public with it as I considered it a private matter. This turned out to be a critical error, because when an angry ex-girlfriend brought the matter to the attention of my political opponents, I went from being someone wrongfully accused of crossing professional boundaries to being a child molester.

Every group that takes a stand on an issue has dissenters, and ours was no different. Our political opponents were a handful of foreigners that began a campaign of character assassination against the organization’s leadership. One of the other association leaders was branded a communist radical and anti-Semite. As the spokesman, I was the focal point.

Lesson 3: Tracking down an anonymous online slanderer is possible, and recommended

Someone “anonymously” sent an email to the university I taught at stating that I “had sex with two underage girls.” A Google search on the email address used showed it was used by an account on an online community forum.

Looking at all that user’s posts revealed enough information for me to identify him. He was a British national teaching English in Seoul. In Korea, defamation is against the law, and I had him arrested. He was read his rights and subjected to multiple police interrogations before finally landing in front of the prosecutor. A law professor had advised me that only a conviction would exonerate me, so when he asked to settle, I refused.

I thought my evidence was so compelling, that he’d be taken to trial. I was surprised that he eventually escaped conviction because I was no longer living in Korea and the prosecutor didn’t think losing my job was significant enough harm to warrant a criminal conviction.

Lesson 4: If it’s a long story, summarize before someone else does

Links to the hearing documents were posted online. However most people scanning a forum won’t take the time to read lengthy legal documents. Instead, a few people will read them and post summaries for everyone else. The summaries were misleading at best, and outright fabrications at worst. People (most of whom had not read the documents but relied on the distorted interpretations of those that had) began a collective hue and cry against a “child molester” that they had “discovered” in their midst.

Some were surprised when the Korean press reported that upon investigation I had no criminal record in Korea or the United States. In retrospect, I should have provided my own summary as soon as the links were posted (see Lesson 2).

Lesson 5: The court of public opinion is not fair

People attempting to further blacken my name began impersonating me in the comment section of blogs. At least one person used my avatar to create fake accounts on popular blogs and posted responses to comments that ranged from admissions of guilt to angry diatribes designed to make me look shameful.

In Internet forums I was called a “violent pornographer,” a “child molester,” and a “serial rapist.” I began receiving hate mail. One of my detractors had this to say: “We will have won when you leave this country broken, blacklisted and when your name is a symbol of deceit, lies and a perfect example of what NOT to be in Korea. Only when your name is ruined will I be satisfied.”

The British man who slandered me, while never admitting to creating the dummy account and writing the stories, did say in the comment section on a popular blog: “I admit that I wanted him out of the public eye, and I used some low tactics to achieve it.  I am not an unreasonable person, and I hope I never resort to such tactics again but I felt I had no other option.”  

I neutralized the impersonations by posting in each comment section where I found one, a message stating that none of the comments left in the thread were by me, and that I would not be commenting further, so any that came after were also not me. This gave the blog owners the ability to discern fact from fiction, and they deleted them.

Many people who commented were well-meaning citizens that were alarmed by what they were seeing, and did not have the capacity (or the wherewithal) to verify the rumors. The court of public opinion has no rules for the proper admission of evidence, and rumors can be as good as facts. Often they are indistinguishable.

Lesson 6: Character assassination online can destroy support that you thought you’d never lose

I had no idea that someone I had at one time loved (the ex-girlfriend) would one day take revenge by disclosing something told in confidence. Further, the promise of support I had received from the organization’s other leaders went unfulfilled; they quietly watched, afraid that what was happening to me might happen to them as well.
It was clear to me that I was now a distraction to the organization, and the negativity and controversy was detracting from the organization’s mission, so I resigned.

A few days later I was informed by the university I worked at that I would not be eligible to renew my teaching contract when it expired four months later. The department chair explained that even though he believed the rumors were not true, the department could not afford to be the center of negative attention.

A year later I found myself in the Philippines, engaged, and CEO of a research consulting firm owned primarily by my fiancee. I thought the nightmare was over. However, my fiancée’s family eventually Googled my name and found the nasty attacks against me.

How would you react if you read (from multiple sources) that your sister’s fiancee was a child molester? They reacted the same way: with shock and horror. They were even more shocked to learn that my fiancee already knew of the issue and that it had not swayed her from my side (see Lesson 2).

And when they learned that I had changed my name from my birth name to my Buddhist name, after undergoing Sugye (a Korean Buddhist initiation ritual), they assumed it was to hide from the authorities, and paid no heed to my fiancee who produced a document that showed I was given my Buddhist name a year before the scandal broke.

Family is central to Philippine culture and she could not handle the ostracism that she began to endure from them; it was an affront to the family name. Eventually the issue became unbearable. She ended her personal and business relationship with me at the same time.

Lesson 7: To clean up your reputation online, you must use a variety of tactics

After I got word that members of my extended family back in the USA were starting to notice the terrible accusations online, I knew I had to take action. I couldn’t allow this situation to take anything else away from me, so I started the process of getting every untruth, every distortion, and every lie expurgated from the internet. I had libelous material removed from blogs, sometimes through a personal request and sometimes by initiating legal action. I had defaming comments removed from forums, often by flagging them as defamatory. Most blog owners want to tell the truth, so after sharing my side of the story they were willing to remove the nasty stuff.

However, not all sites were willing to remove the defaming material, so I had to resort to other tactics. Four blogs were created just to attack me (they were cut-and-pastes of each other), and blogspot (Google) would not remove defaming material without a court order, so I read the blog’s terms of service carefully and found that if a blog owner did not post in a certain timeframe, the blog was subject to deletion for inactivity.

So I reported it as inactive and it was deleted. I learned other methods as well and got 98% of the material removed. The 2% that remained was pushed so deep into Google’s search rankings that it would only be noticed by someone specifically looking for it who was willing to sift through pages and pages of irrelevant links, or who was using highly targeted keywords.

I went on to a career as an online reputation management consultant, opening my own firm which helps other people and companies experiencing online reputation management problems. I have learned to harness my previous trials and tribulations as a strength, and I share my story with clients who are experiencing similar feelings of anguish and helplessness as they watch their good names torn apart.

It felt a lot like drowning. There were a couple of people holding my head underwater and a hundred people standing on dry land just watching, but nobody would throw me a rope.

Now I’m the one throwing the rope. – Rappler.com

The author runs Tony Ahn & Co., a Manila-based company which focuses on social media, digital marketing and reputation management.