There is a version of your name online that you did not write and cannot easily delete. It lives on a scam reporting forum, in a Reddit thread that ranks on page one, or in a news article that has been sitting in Google’s index for three years. For a growing number of professionals, that version is the first thing anyone finds.
A small firm out of Richmond, Kentucky, says it has figured out how to remove it.
Respect Network operates in one of the more peculiar corners of the digital economy: online reputation management, with a specific focus on negative content removal from platforms that were not designed to cooperate. The firm handles fake social media accounts, Reddit post removals, scam forum takedowns, court record suppression, and in some cases, corrections from major news organizations. The work sits at an uncomfortable intersection of SEO, legal strategy, and editorial negotiation, and most firms in the space specialize in only one of those dimensions.
The Acquisition Behind the Rebrand
Respect Network’s current form is the product of an acquisition. The original Respect Network Corporation was founded in 2011 by Drummond Reed in Seattle as a digital identity startup with over 70 founding partners. It never became a household name.
Chirag Trivedi, who now holds the title of Chairman, acquired the entity and restructured it as an LLC, redirecting its focus entirely toward reputation management. He is not involved in daily operations. His role, by his own description, is strategic.
“We saw a clear gap in the market,” Trivedi said. “Most people being targeted online had nowhere to turn that could actually do something about it – legally, editorially, and technically at the same time. Eric runs this company with real operational discipline. I wanted the right person in that role.”
Eric Rivas is that person. As CEO, Rivas handles client intake calls personally, which is either a sign of a firm that has not yet scaled or one that has decided the strategy conversation is too consequential to hand off. Rivas takes the position that it is the latter.
A Lean Operation by Design
The firm runs on a small team with clearly defined roles. Rodolfo Rodriguez handles sales and qualifies new inquiries before any campaign is scoped. Gary Rowe, serving as General Manager, runs the execution side – removal campaigns, digital press placements, media placement, and coordination with a cyber investigation partner, an Israeli firm the company works with on cases involving anonymous operators and coordinated attacks. Chemly manages accounting.
It is a deliberately lean structure for a space where the problems clients bring tend to be neither small nor simple.
The Cases That Illustrate the Pitch
Respect Network points to two categories of cases as evidence of what it can accomplish.
The first involves healthcare professionals who have moved into the blockchain or cryptocurrency space – a profile that tends to attract coordinated scam-labeling. One client found their name spread across ScamPulse, ScamForum, FinanceScam, and BigScam, with CoinDesk having picked up the thread. The firm says it executed editorial correction requests, applied legal pressure to anonymous platforms including RipoffReport and OffshoreAlert, and cut off aggregator feeds upstream. The client’s search profile was cleared.
The second involves a client named in coverage of false sexual harassment allegations across abc7.com, foxla.com, the Los Angeles Times, and realtor.com. Allegations that never resulted in legal findings. Articles that kept ranking. The firm says it engaged editorial and legal teams at all four outlets and secured removal. Cases like this are the ones the firm holds up as a differentiator, because they require navigating newsrooms with First Amendment standing, not just filing platform reports.
Both claims are difficult to verify independently, which is true of most reputation management work by its nature. Clients rarely go on record.
Why These Platforms Are Hard to Clear
Reddit is a useful illustration of why this work is harder than it looks. The platform’s moderator structure, its community norms around anonymity, and its narrow content policies mean that many posts containing materially false claims do not meet the stated removal criteria. Posts that rank for a professional’s name can stay there for years regardless of whether anyone files a report. Respect Network says it runs two simultaneous tracks on Reddit cases: on-platform removal attempts and a content publishing strategy designed to push the threads below where most people encounter them. The second track is built to work whether or not the first one succeeds.
Scam reporting websites present a different structural problem. Many of them are monetized through the traffic generated by a professional’s name appearing next to the word “scam.” Some charge for removal directly. The financial incentive runs counter to taking content down, which means legal pressure and DMCA claims tend to do more work than polite requests.
Court records are a third category most firms do not address at all. Platforms like UniCourt, Justia, Trellis, and LegalObserver index public dockets and make them searchable by name, meaning a dismissed lawsuit or an expunged record can appear on page one of search results for a professional who resolved the matter years ago. Each platform has its own removal criteria and its own relationship to applicable state law. Respect Network treats it as a separate service category requiring legal analysis before any removal request is filed.
What the Platform Layer Looks Like
Below the headline cases is the more routine work: Facebook and Instagram impersonation removals, X and LinkedIn content takedowns, review disputes on Trustpilot and Sitejabber, and forum content on ComplaintsBoard.
The global online reputation management market is projected to exceed $500 billion by 2031. Most of that market is served by firms built around a single tactic – SEO suppression, review management, or legal pressure alone. Respect Network’s argument is that the cases worth taking require all three working together, and that a team small enough to stay coordinated is a feature, not a limitation.
Whether the firm’s track record holds up across client types and case complexity is the question any prospective client would need to answer for themselves. The starting point is a conversation – which, if you call, will likely be with Rivas.
