This is part two of my investigation into a smear campaign against a woman who was expelled from her esteemed music school after reporting her orchestral conductor for sexual harassment. You can read the first part here. This work is possible thanks to the generosity of Spitfire News members!

Last June, Rebecca Bryant Novak emailed an investigator and Title IX coordinator at the University of Rochester to report that anonymous accounts identifying as her former Eastman School of Music peers were attacking her work, appearance, mental health, credibility, and more. In comment sections on blogs and social media, they called her things like a "narcissistic psychopath,” a bully, an attention-seeker, and a “little girl” who never grew up. Some of the comments contained private information that she says only could have come from faculty members.

These comments were in response to Bryant Novak filing a complaint against the school with the New York State Division of Human Rights and speaking up about it, in interviews and on her own Substack. In 2023, after reporting her classical music conducting professor to the Title IX office for sexual harassment, Bryant Novak says she began facing retaliation from the school, faculty members, and her fellow students. As one of few female graduate student conductors in a male-dominated industry, Bryant Novak was used to sexist treatment. But at Eastman, fighting back against the system led to her getting expelled. 

After Bryant Novak sent screenshots of the harassing comments to the university’s in-house investigator, he replied that they didn’t fall under his purview. Bryant Novak sent over an excerpt from the school’s Title IX policy a few weeks later that specifically detailed online harassment as a violation. She never got a response. 

Instead, a few weeks later, a lawyer representing the university sent a letter to the New York State Division of Human Rights that cited some of the comments as “counter points of view” to Bryant Novak’s allegations. The university’s counsel argued that Bryant Novak writing about the anonymous comments on Substack constituted her targeting them. 

In part one, I wrote about how demeaning Reddit comments have topped Bryant Novak’s Google search results, making them the first thing anyone interested in her or her case against the school sees. But this wasn’t the only forum where she was smeared by anonymous users. The university’s lawyer linked to the comments on a post about Bryant Novak from a classical music blog called Slipped Disc. That blog was launched by a writer named Norman Lebrecht, whose 2007 book about maestros was withdrawn by his publisher after he was found to have made numerous libelous claims. More recently, the BBC severed ties with him just weeks ago after a pianist accused him of “derogatory misogynistic bullying.” The Slipped Disc culture is extremely reminiscent of its creator. 

In the Slipped Disc comment section about Bryant Novak that the university cited to a state commissioner, the top comment says her face and appearance reflect someone who is “self satisfied and addicted to attention.” A few comments down, another poster derides feminism. Many of the comments take on the same tone as the school—undermining Bryant Novak and the seriousness and credibility of her claims, despite the school’s own findings confirming that her professor violated policy. When she first read these comments, Bryant Novak said she was “blindsided” by both the obsessive intensity of her haters and her lack of recourse.

“It’s the internet, I can’t control it. It’s Googleable. And there’s nothing to do about it,” she told me in an interview. “As I apply for jobs, is this going to come up? I think if I were looking at this, I would not find it credible. But I don’t know how people think about these things.” 

Novak has joined the type of club no one wants to be in, those who have been smeared online as retaliation for reporting sexual harassment. She joins A-list celebrities like actress Blake Lively, as well as a growing group of everyday people—typically women—who find their digital footprints have been overshadowed by mud-slinging.

Tech giants like Google and Reddit have become instrumental tools for patriarchal institutions to maintain a status quo where the credibility of victims is undermined and abusers are rarely tarnished. Responding to my requests for comment, the tech companies declined to do anything about Bryant Novak’s case. Her university never responded. But she isn’t alone.

If you read Spitfire News a lot, you already know about DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), the rhetoric perpetrators use to deflect and blame victims. Institutions frequently use DARVO against victims to shield perpetrators who have power within them. In Bryant Novak’s case, the school and her fellow students deny that her professor’s conduct warranted punishment, despite violating policy. They attack Bryant Novak in a variety of ways and identify her as the problem, someone who students and faculty hated, versus a victim of a plainly unjust expulsion process. As is often the case with DARVO narratives, even if the attacks against Bryant Novak were true, they still wouldn’t have any bearing on what the university did.

“I wish people understood this is actually a pretty hard rule. You don’t get to retaliate against people just because you don’t like them,” said Jessie Appleby, an attorney who works with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “It doesn’t matter if people don’t like Rebecca or they think her original complaint wasn’t appropriate for whatever reason. The school still does not get to retaliate against her for submitting a complaint and then for speaking publicly.”

FIRE is working with Bryant Novak to help bolster her case, and Appleby has written multiple letters to the university’s president in Bryant Novak’s defense, arguing that she should be reinstated as a student immediately. FIRE argues that the university did not follow its own policies or satisfy its own criteria for expulsion, which it contends is retaliation against Bryant Novak’s lawful speech. 

“I think people often choose sides or think that it’s okay, because we think she’s awful. That’s just not true. You can think she’s awful, but she still doesn’t deserve—and the school doesn’t have the right—to retaliate against her,” Appleby said. “Not to give credence to people saying bad things about her, because she’s lovely.”

When I reached out to Reddit about the comments smearing Bryant Novak, the platform responded that it didn’t find any evidence of automated activity. But comments don’t have to be from bots to harm survivors or perpetuate DARVO and other forms of bias and victim-blaming. A lot of real people hate survivors, too. 

But considering that these are anonymous comments, the university’s counsel citing them as student testimony to a state commissioner is troubling. Anyone could have posted these comments and identified as a student, regardless if they really are.  

Above all, a pattern of students attacking Bryant Novak in person and online, as the university conveys, does not invalidate Bryant Novak’s allegations. They support them. This is the exact culture of misogyny and retaliation she is blowing the whistle on. 

Ironically, when women approach their institutions with concerns about online harassment and smears, they’re often told to ignore the problem and “don’t feed the trolls.” But when the institution and anonymous online smears share the same agenda, those trolls can be treated as credible sources in the institution’s defense. 

This reminds me of another celebrity parallel in the case of Depp v. Heard, when actor Johnny Depp’s legal team brought a surprise rebuttal witness to the stand. The witness was the owner of a luxury desert trailer park that Depp and his ex-wife, actress Amber Heard, vacationed at with friends. The trailer park owner testified that he didn’t see Depp abusing Heard, but saw Depp “cowering” from Heard during an argument. The trailer park owner had also been posting on social media about the trial before Depp’s team pulled him in at the last minute. He had referred to Heard as “jealous and crazy” in his comments, but was still allowed to testify, despite Heard’s team’s objections. Of course, the jury ended up agreeing with him, handing Depp the win—for defamation. Despite Heard being smeared, she was held liable for harming Depp’s reputation.

Whether online commenters think these women are “jealous and crazy” should be beside the point. It’s a baseless, gendered smear that shouldn’t have any bearing on their credibility or whether they were harmed. But attacking victims’ mental health, their personalities, and even their appearances does impact how judges, juries, and the public treat them. It can affect the outcomes of their cases and seriously harm their reputations. And it can wreak havoc on their actual mental health and general wellbeing. Calling a woman crazy can actually make her feel crazy. It can tarnish a woman’s previously perfectly normal reputation, too.

“It added muddiness,” Bryant Novak said. “Even if people were trying to help, it was like, ‘Well, even if she was a raging bitch, we don’t know that for sure.’’ Before reporting her professor, no one was calling Bryant Novak these things on the internet. Now, she says, “it’s all introduced into this discourse.”

This isn’t just an issue affecting Bryant Novak and celebrity women like Heard and Lively. Ever since the internet allowed people to post anonymously, online forums have enabled the proliferation of smears. But these types of comment sections have only grown bigger, more wide-reaching, and more consequential for victims. 

Nicole Bedera, a sociologist who has studied the failures of the Title IX system, told me that these kinds of anonymous forums have long sullied the names of women in academia across disciplines. Bedera has even endured this herself. In the byzantine depths of university processes for graduate students, where academics are pitted against each other for positions and resources, online smear campaigns can be a way to push women and other marginalized candidates out of the running for certain opportunities—and harass them for trying.

“It’s just gotten more and more toxic and hostile with time. It sort of started from maybe a good place,” Bedera told me. “This is sort of the broader culture of these online anonymous academic spaces. It’s kind of trickling into Reddit.”

Through cases like Bryant Novak’s and the modern, social media-driven legal battles between high-profile figures, it has become clear that online smear campaigns are not just ways to torment victims. They are tools for institutions like universities and courtrooms to tilt the balance even further against victims in what are supposed to be neutral, transparent processes. But that should not come as a surprise. These outcomes have never been fair or just. Perpetrators are now adding another sphere to the injustice, using digital tools that have the power to help victims when built and moderated by people who actually care about them.

In the meantime, we have voices like Bryant Novak, who continues to raise hers. In late November, on a briskly cold evening in Rochester, FIRE sponsored a concert where she conducted a volunteer orchestra. There, Bryant Novak was surrounded by in-person supporters, a sharp contrast to what faceless commenters online suggest about her reputation. 

“The people who are going to have the strength to keep standing up when they’re all alone, like Rebecca did, it takes a strong personality,” Appleby said. “Strong personalities are also going to be the ones people don’t like, but that’s exactly who is going to stand up, who is going to have the strength to do that, because it is really, really hard.”