The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson

Brad Pitt gave Esquire a Monday. Molly McPherson breaks down what he actually bought with it. The September cover profile reads like an ordinary man letting a writer into his house — the dogs, the Perrier, a charcuterie board he builds himself. Molly walks through what each of those details is doing, why the drinking line was volunteered rather than asked for, and why a story that spikes and vanishes inside a week is exactly the outcome a reputation reset is aiming for. With Dr. Abby Medcal...

A self-help influencer with nearly nine million followers is being sued by her own business partner, who is also one third of her marriage and, according to the filings, the person who wrote her books. That is the story everybody is going to tell. It is not the story worth your time. Molly's read is narrower and harder to shrug off. The throuple is not the crisis. The lawsuits are not the crisis. Nicole LaPera — The Holistic Psychologist — built a brand on one asset, and it was not her writing.

The CEO of Cracker Barrel lost her job this week, and the tell was sitting in an interview she gave months earlier. A year after the logo backlash — the one that generated a wall of press, then a second spike now, bookending the whole affair in Muck Rack's data — Julie Fels Masino is out. She did not need to be. Almost everything she decided was right. That is what makes this one worth your time. This is not a story about a dumb company doing a dumb thing. Cracker Barrel was right about the num

Taylor Farms got the apology it wanted. The FDA told the company that one iceberg lettuce product from Central Mexico had a “confirmed positive” cyclospora test, then said the next day it had made a mistake and the result was a false positive. As of the FDA's own account, no positive product test for cyclospora has been identified. Taylor Farms then built an entire statement around that apology, led with it, and left the people who got sick in the last paragraph under "our thoughts remain." Tha

Justin Baldoni hadn't said a public word in almost two years. Then last week he propped up a phone, sat down next to his wife Emily, and posted a video to his own Instagram — no publicist, no People magazine. I told NBC News the most strategic thing about the video is how unstrategic it looked, and in this episode I show you the receipts. I walk through every move the way I teach my own clients: the owned-channel play (stop fighting Meta's algorithm — bring the crisis to your channel), the o...

Molly stood in the back of a Maine town hall, watching an oyster farmer from Sullivan hold a room with no notes, and texted her kids that they might be looking at the state's next senator. On Monday morning, her algorithm fed her story after story about the same man — now a loser, a liar, a warning. This episode lives in the space between those two feeds, because as Molly puts it in the first fifteen seconds: a crisis begins before the headlines. By the time the video goes viral, the conditions