I've been thinking about Reputation Defender, and it's origins. It didn't spring up without some forebear, and I'm trying to discover more about it. It's only speculation, but I think large companies have used a similar service for quite a while, and RD decided to bring it to the masses.
Peninsula Village was written up in a very critical expose in Metro Pulse, a local free paper, the kind found in most large cities (City Paper in D.C., the Scene in Nashville, etc.). That article has vanished from Metro Pulse's archives, it's like it never existed and yet people have read it and described it to me.
Also, PV had a patient named Andrew Klepper, who was convicted at age 15 as an adult for sodomizing a female escort with a baseball bat, robbing her, and threatening to kill her if she reported the incident. PV took the kid, and it became a PR nightmare for them, especially since PV's admissions policy excludes violent sexual offenders. Any search engine I use will not return results if I enter "Andrew Klepper Peninsula Village". I get results for Andrew Klepper alone, however, and a lot of details about his transfer to Peninsula Village in the returned results. But the two can't be found connected.
It's a mystery, but since I've learned about RD, it starts to make sense. Months ago, I asked my wife how anyone could control search engine results, and now I know. The Nazi reference above is apt. How can any parent make an informed decision about a program or an educational consultant when negative opinions are excised completely by a paid service, and people are threatened with lawsuits for relating a negative experience or criticism?
