When Old Headlines Won’t Die: A Decade‑Old News Story.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you did what everyone does: you searched my name before deciding what you think of me.

You probably saw some very dramatic headlines from CBS, NBC, ABC, and a couple of local Florida favorites like the Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald. You might have thought, “Wow, this is a lot.” Fair. Those articles certainly paint a picture. The problem is, it’s an incomplete, outdated, and in a few places flat-out inaccurate picture that refuses to die.

This is how search works. Your life story is told by search engines. That might be good, bad, or nothing at all. Either way, to many people, that’s who you are.

The Day Google Became My Spokesperson

Over ten years ago, a case that the United States Attorney’s Office was pursuing hit the news cycle. The outlets were big, the language was colorful, and as far as the internet is concerned, that’s who I became to strangers.

The reality is more complicated:

• Some things in those stories are true.

• Some things are technically true but framed in a way that would make your grandmother clutch her pearls.

• Some things are just… not correct.

But search engines don’t do nuance. They don’t say, “Here’s one interpretation of events from 2015, and here’s the context and everything that happened after.” They say, “Here’s the spiciest thing we have. You’re welcome.”

How It Shows Up

The weird thing about old headlines is that they are often more familiar to strangers than your actual life.

Some people meet you in three steps:

• They hear your name.

• They type it into Google or ChatGPT or Claude.

• They silently decide what they think of you.

Potential business partners, investors, employees, vendors, neighbors, parents from kids’ schools—most of them will never tell you they looked you up. They just form an opinion. Luckily, based on my life today, I’m often given the benefit of the doubt. But I have to assume there are times when I’m not—and I’ll never know, because no one says it out loud.

I’ve sat in meetings knowing that at least one person at the table has seen those articles and is trying to match that version of me with the person sitting in front of them. It’s like having a very loud, very dramatic cartoon character in the background yelling crazy things while you’re trying to have a normal conversation.

This Isn’t About Hurt Feelings

Let me be clear: this isn’t a “poor me, the media said mean things” story.

I’ve made decisions in my life and businesses that had consequences. Some of those consequences were deserved. Some of them I’d handle very differently if I could go back. This isn’t about pretending I’ve done everything perfectly.

But there’s a big gap between:

• A fair, accurate accounting of what happened, and

• A simplified, sensationalized story that freezes you in one moment and then sticks around forever.

My challenge isn’t that anyone ever criticized me. My challenge is that the loudest, most permanent version of that criticism is also the least nuanced, least updated, and least interested in what actually happened.

Ten Plus Years Later, Same Headlines

Time heals a lot of things. Your relationship with Google’s first page is not one of them.

Nearly ten years later, those links are still sitting there, happily occupying prime real estate. Meanwhile, everything that’s happened since—companies built, people helped, lessons learned, and the boring “I’m just living my life and being a decent human” stuff—doesn’t exactly make the news.

If you’ve ever done something that got attention and then spent the next decade not doing that thing anymore, you understand how strange it is to be defined to strangers by your past greatest hits.

Why I’m Writing This

I’m not trying to rewrite history here. I’m trying to add context, update the record where it’s wrong or exaggerated, and give you a chance to hear from the one person who wasn’t interviewed when those articles were written: me.

I’m also trying to put more content out there so that—even if it doesn’t outrank a story on ABC News—it’s available for anyone interested enough to look deeper.

If you’ve gotten this far, you probably dug past the main headlines.

In the next post, I’ll talk about something every “online reputation expert” loves to say—“just publish positive content and push the bad stuff down”—and why that doesn’t work when you’re up against CBS, NBC, ABC, the Sun Sentinel, and the Miami Herald.