Celebrity wellness podcaster Andrew Huberman is the latest prominent figure who looks to be connected to a sprawling Internet mud-slinging scheme that’s been exposed in the wake of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us legal feud.
In March 2024, New York Magazine published an investigative cover story about what it termed Huberman’s “mechanisms of control,” detailing “the private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist.” The piece, centered on the allegations of a group of anonymous women with whom he’d been in overlapping and in some cases long-term romantic relationships, asserted a pattern of concealment, manipulation and rage.
The key source was “Sarah,” which the tabloid In Touch soon after revealed to be an ex-girlfriend named Anya Fernald. At the time, he was working with Manhattan crisis communications firm Scale Strategy to help navigate the fallout from New York’s allegations. The company didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Before Huberman became a star during the pandemic, she had achieved her own fame in the food world for her role as CEO of Belcampo, a California-based meat company lauded for its sustainable, ethical operation. “She wants to restore meat to its status as a luxury,” The New Yorker reported in an admiring 2014 profile. (Fernald also spent several years as a judge on Iron Chef America.)
Around the time that New York released its Huberman coverage, anonymously authored web activity — including a dedicated website, social media account and Reddit discussion thread — materialized about Fernald. The contention was that she bore responsibility for Belcampo’s collapse in 2021 after a scandal involving the mislabeling and sourcing of its products.
Now, a new court complaint suggests that Huberman’s camp may be tied to such efforts. The filing advances a separate lawsuit first brought in February by actress-turned-activist Alexa Nikolas, who has alleged defamation over multiple smear websites denigrating her and named among the defendants in the case the prominent Hollywood litigator Bryan Freedman and his fixer Jed Wallace.
The Hollywood Reporter has separately learned that Freedman has in the past represented both Fernald and Huberman. The attorney negotiated a 2022 settlement for Fernald against Belcampo. During this process, Fernald introduced her then-boyfriend to Freedman as legal counsel, and the men subsequently became close. (THR has separately reviewed materials indicating that Huberman maintained a direct line of communication with Wallace.)
Nikolas’ suit points to digital forensics findings of “common authorship between [online] accounts interested in promoting Jed Wallace and his business, smearing Ms. Nikolas … and smearing the woman who allegedly was behind the New York Magazine Andrew Huberman Article.” (Nikolas’ litigation also asserted that another apparent target was a businessman who’d notably feuded with the music mogul Scooter Braun.)
None of the individuals named in Nikolas’ filing would comment for this story.
Jed Wallace, Melissa Nathan and Bryan Freedman.
Illustration by Christopher Hughes
Nikolas is one of a group of disparate individuals who previously were linked in separate litigation, itself downstream from the Baldoni-Lively dispute, as purported targets of online discreditation campaigns. Some of these people were known nemeses of Hollywood figures.
The alleged perpetrators in each instance are one or more members of Baldoni’s team — Freedman, Wallace, crisis publicist Melissa Nathan. (She is not affiliated with Scale Strategy.) Freedman has previously denied to THR that he and the others are responsible and characterized the assertions as “speculation presented as fact.”
After the federal judge in the Baldoni-Lively matter dismissed many of Lively’s claims ahead of their May trial, her lawyer sought to reframe her own case, which is now focused on retaliation. “For Blake Lively, the greatest measure of justice is that the people and the playbook behind these coordinated digital attacks have been exposed and are already being held accountable,” the attorney said. Lively’s agency WME later added that she “helped expose the devastating harm caused by covert digital takedown campaigns designed to intimidate, discredit, and drown out the truth.”
