Crisis PR – What We Should Learn From Justin Bieber

LUCID’s Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Jonathan Franks weighs in on the Justin Bieber Paternity Hoax.

At the outset, did any of us actually believe Justin Bieber had really fathered Mariah Yeater’s child? I guess there was a moment where I said to myself, who knows, it’s not the first time this has happened in the music business.  I guess having practiced Crisis Public Relations for so long I’m a little bit cynical.  Not to ruin the day over at TMZ or Radar, but this whole drama that took over the entertainment airwaves for two weeks was a non-starter out of the gate.

The first step in figuring out how to respond to a PR crisis like this is quickly defining the crisis and its potential damage, in this case, Justin’s brand has been very carefully managed and carved out based on him being a good guy, and selling that brand is pretty easy, because by all accounts, Justin is a very decent, respectable young man.  However, a great deal of that brand’s success relies not only on the throngs of rioting teenage girls that seem to materialize wherever he goes, but also on their parents who buy the concert tickets, the products, the albums, etc.  So the notion of this woman’s story, which at the end of the day, is that he forced himself on her in a bathroom, is not great for that clean cut image.

So in analyzing the initial information available, the first thing that came to mind is that one, if Justin Bieber was going to take the kind of risk involved in these allegations, we assume he could have had his pick of the crop at that concert, and probably wouldn’t have picked Mariah Yeater.  Second, the kid brings home more than a million dollars a month, he doesn’t need to use bathrooms to enjoy the company of women.  So that’s the initial challenge to accepting Yeater’s allegations as having any basis.  Secondly, if team Bieber thought there was any chance of this being true, it would have been dealt with off the record, and settled, and we likely would never have known about it.

Crisis PR is war, and you have to understand what drives your enemy.  In this case, there were two possible motives – money and mental illness, or a mixture of the two.  For a time, it did seem that Yeater honestly believed that Justin Bieber had fathered her child, which indicated a striking break from reality so profound as to suggest a psychiatric diagnosis.  In the final analysis we came to find out she sold the story to the tabloids, and up rooted her life for what was reportedly a $50k payday.

The play was perfect on Bieber’s side.  He didn’t run or hide, but he also didn’t attack.  His statement on the Today Show could not have been more perfect – absolutely not true, and I won’t be a victim – ever.  Fits in nicely with his existing branding and his work in the anti-bullying arena, and a lot of integrity was conveyed by his body language.  He looked dead into the camera, and his voice did not waiver, and we know that there is a subliminal reaction to body language as we try to form an opinion on the truth of a statement.

The question is what’s next.  There’s been a lot of talk about lawsuits, but suing Mariah Yeater seems pointless, she’s classically judgement proof. I would put the focus on the attorneys that played along with this young woman, especially the first two who in a chilling channeling of everyone’s least favorite DA, Mike Nifong, took to the airwaves to proclaim their clients story as if they were reading from the Gospel.  The attorneys ought to feel some pain from this, and if it is revealed that they knew or should have known that this was a lie from the start, they ought to lose their licenses.