Almost every owner I've worked with has, at some point, wanted to make something go away. A review that gets the facts wrong. A post in the neighborhood group. A former employee with a grudge and a keyboard. The instinct is fair. The tool most owners reach for is almost always wrong, because the moment you object in public, you become the story and the thing you wanted buried gets a second, bigger audience that includes everyone who'd never have seen it.
In the third season of HBO's The White Lotus, Jason Isaacs plays Tim Ratliff, a financier coming apart at a Thai resort. He and his son are written as Duke alumni, and in the fifth episode, which aired March 16, 2025, Tim spends one of his darkest moments the one with the gun wearing a Duke T-shirt.
Full disclosure: I watched every episode, and I'd bet most viewers registered the gun and not the shirt. The White Lotus is a hit, but it is a premium-cable hit. The audience that noticed the logo and cared was small.
On March 25, Duke gave Bloomberg a statement: "The White Lotus not only uses our brand without permission, but in our view uses it on imagery that is troubling, does not reflect our values or who we are, and simply goes too far."
Within days the story was in The New York Times, The Guardian and the higher-ed trade press. Intellectual property lawyers asked about it said HBO was likely well within its rights artistic expression, First Amendment. No lawsuit followed. So the statement didn't stop anything. It just announced, to a much larger audience, that the most troubled character on television was a Duke man.
The timing did the rest. The statement landed during the NCAA tournament, with Duke's men still playing, when the school's name was already in every sports feed in the country.
There's a name for this, and it's more than twenty years old. In 2003 Barbra Streisand sued to get an aerial photo of her Malibu home removed from a coastal-erosion website. Before the suit, the image had been downloaded six times, two of them by her own lawyers. In the month after the suit became public, more than 420,000 people visited the site. A writer named Mike Masnick coined "the Streisand Effect" two years later, and it's been claiming victims ever since.
Duke's cost wasn't money. It was a week of national coverage connecting its brand to exactly the imagery it said it didn't want connected to its brand. Every word of the statement made the association stronger.
Now shrink it. You run a four-office dental group. A patient disputes a bill and leaves a one-star review naming one of your dentists. Some of it is wrong. You're angry, your dentist is angrier, and someone suggests the lawyer send a letter. The reviewer posts the letter in reply to their own review. Then in the neighborhood Facebook group. Then a local TV consumer reporter calls, because "dentist threatens patient over review" is a segment that writes itself.
Before the letter, the review had been read by the forty or so people who scroll that far. After it, everyone has read it. And if you're in California, where most of my readers are, the state's anti-SLAPP law means a defamation suit over a review that fails early can leave you paying the reviewer's legal fees. You'd be paying to spread it.
Duke's best option was silence. Its second best was a joke one gracious line wishing Tim a safe trip home to Durham, which would have run for a day and made the university look like it had a pulse. It chose the only option that guaranteed a second, bigger news cycle.
For the rest of us:
There's one more reason the old instinct is more expensive than it used to be. When someone asks an AI assistant whether your practice is any good, it assembles an answer from what's public the reviews, your replies, and whatever the local news wrote. A single cranky review is one data point among hundreds. A local news story headlined with your name and the word "threatens" is exactly the kind of source these systems tend to trust and cite. You'd have taken a comment nobody read and turned it into the first thing a machine says about you.
The review was never the problem. The letter is the problem.
Adapted from a piece first published March 27, 2025.
