Tamara Rubin is an Oregon-based consumer product safety advocate who runs a popular online resource called Lead Safe Mama which focuses on exposure risks. She’s bewildered to have found herself apparently targeted by the same Hollywood smear machine that has allegedly specialized in entertainment industry players, from a film producer and a former child star to a music financier and a soap opera actress. As she puts it, “one thing is not like the others.”
In February, she told The Hollywood Reporter of discovering a defaming website about her in October 2024, as well as related slanderous edits to her Wikipedia page. She didn’t know who was behind them. “It’s a game of Clue,” she said at the time. “The people who own these companies that we’re calling out try to discredit us.” Rubin explained that the attacks had “substantially impacted my business, which is based on donations. It also bleeds over into my personal life,” elaborating that “I’m behind in my mortgage and my car payments, and my family is dealing with food scarcity. It’s exhausting to have a target on my back.”
In September, Rubin believes she learned who was, in fact, secretly targeting her: the zero-sugar vitamin brand Hiya Health. The company’s name emerged as a client of TAG PR, with a TAG staffer referring to work on a “Crisis Scenario Plan” in October 2024, in evidence which has since emerged in an ongoing defamation lawsuit brought by publicist Stephanie Jones against TAG’s head Melissa Nathan and other defendants.
Rubin reported on Lead Safe Mama the previous month — in September 2024 — that Hiya’s products had tested positive in a lab result for lead and other heavy metals. The company, in turn, had disputed her findings. “It’s a relief to finally know, to have that closure,” Rubin told THR in September. “It’s also horrific, the length that a children’s vitamin company would go to discredit me.” At the time, Hiya was in the process of being acquired in a deal with another nutritional supplements company that would close in December 2024 for $260 million. “They were trying to protect the bottom line.”
Rubin says she’s since learned of what she thinks is the connection between Hiya and Hollywood. It turns out that Benita Litt, the company’s chief community officer as well as the wife of Hiya’s cofounder and CEO, had once served on the board of actor-director Justin Baldoni’s since-shuttered nonprofit BeLove.org, aka The Wayfarer Foundation, which has described itself as “a Bahá’í-inspired philanthropic organization.” (Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios backer Steve Sarowitz are prominent adherents of the religion.)
Baldoni hired TAG in August 2024, just before Rubin’s conflict arose with Hiya, for Nathan’s crisis management services amid fallout over It Ends With Us with Blake Lively. Court documents in that case — which featured Lively accusing Nathan, Baldoni and other defendants of orchestrating a smear campaign against her — included a Baldoni-recommended nutritionist’s emailed advice to Lively. Among the suggestions was taking Hiya: “This is a wonderful chewable multi-vitamin that is super clean and fantastic for kids.”
Litt, a lawyer turned entrepreneur, is known for her longtime friendship with Meghan Markle. Harper’s Bazaar wrote about the Litt family’s participation in the Duchess of Sussex’s royal wedding to Prince Harry.
Neither Baldoni nor Hiya responded to THR’s inquiries. Nathan hasn’t returned requests for comment about her ongoing legal cases.
Rubin says that when she first learned of the attacks, she felt a bit like Karen Silkwood, the real-life nuclear lab technician and whistleblower played by Meryl Streep in 1983’s tragedy Silkwood. “Now with this Baldoni thing,” she says, “I’m telling my friends it’s more absurd, like a Coen brothers movie.”