It's not always sunny and warm while working as media. Some people whose job is working as public relations reps aren't always the most friendly, or even that good at their job so their outlet to use their perceived power is to bully and make threats onto the media. Unfortunately, these types of things are not brought out into the public eye as often as they should because it could burn bridges for future opportunities at interviews, quotes, etc.
There is no reason to hide these types of terrible professional encounters as this happened during an interaction The Daily SuperHero had with a PR rep of a celebrity. Here's a little inside view at how the media can get abused, bullied and even threatened by reps.
During any given weekday The Daily SuperHero gets lots of emails. One day within the last 12 months an email from a celebrity's PR rep was received asking if there would be in interest in an interview opportunity. Due to a scheduling conflict, it was agreed upon that questions would be sent to the rep and then given to the celebrity, who would then return them to the rep and back to The Daily SuperHero for an article.
This process happened exactly as described except the rep only forwarded the interview answers straight from the celebrity. Thus, revealing the celebrity's email which is not how this is supposed to happen. A big red flag because the way journalism works, if you send answers without any instructions for holding back certain parts then it's fair game to publish everything. It's the job of the rep to provide specific instructions when it comes to publishing and in this case, there were no instructions.
So an interview post was crafted from the answers and, out of courtesy, The Daily SuperHero reached out to the celebrity, via private message on social media, to simply thank the person. The celebrity responded with a bunch of instructions. Weird, since no instructions were provided by the rep via email. The celebrity then reached out to the rep who emailed The Daily SuperHero and that's when the threats started.
Here's a quote from that rep's email to The Daily SuperHero:
"I have just been sent a conversation you are having with [redacted]... If you mention [redacted] in your headline article I will have the article killed by [redacted] and I will make sure you never speak to [redacted] or any other [redacted] talent again. We gave you something no one else has had in full answers from [redacted]. Please don't be rude and try to get sensationalism out of this as he did not give you anything sensational. Thank you."
Funny how nothing was being sensationalized as this rep claimed because info was being reporting as provided by the rep from their celebrity client without any special instructions. In other words, the rep didn't bother reading the responses from their client as a rep is supposed to do. A rep is a filter in these types of email interview exchanges. In order to compensate for their lack of due diligence in with their job, the rep decided to issue a threat. This way, if their boss saw any of this email thread, it would look like the rep was doing their job even though they never did it right in the first place.
This isn't the first rodeo The Daily SuperHero has been a part of when it comes to working with celebrities and reps for interviews and to acquire quotes. Sure, these types of opps are not as many as other websites, but that type of rapport takes time to build.
But the problems with this rep did not end here as The Daily SuperHero complied to the sudden demands made by the rep to hold certain quotes until instructed to at a later date. Then, an interview was posted with the same celebrity and unfortunately the same quotes that were instructed to be held by the rep were given to another website and right there in a different online post.
So while the rep claimed sensationalism and made threats, the moral of the story here is to say this rep is a shit rep who totally burned a bridge with The Daily SuperHero by giving another website the same quotes. Also, to this very day, it is still uncertain if the celebrity even knows the full story here.
While there is definitely a big want to use actual names in this post, out of respect of Karma and to be the real professional here, they will not be used. Karma has its own way of dealing with assholes anyway.