Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

One afternoon in June, I visited 347 West Thirty-Sixth Street, a New York office building with a jumble of businesses. Among the names on the doors were Pleroma Media, the International Business Times, and a law firm called Anderson & Associates. I had been looking into these companies, which I’d come to understand were connected in one way or another to a pattern of contributors not being paid for their work, for months at a time. The people with whom I spoke—nine in total, journalists and others, all of whom had been independent contractors, until they stepped away—told me that they understood themselves to be working for Pleroma Media; at various points, some of their paychecks came from Pleroma MGMT or, in the case of one person, from “IBT MGMT” and “IBTimes.” As of December of 2025, they said, they were collectively owed around forty thousand dollars. 

When I arrived at the building, I provided the names of the companies and the law firm to a security guard, who let me in. I rode the elevator up, trying to find my way—I hadn’t seen a directory in the lobby. On the sixth floor, a man who identified himself as Titus emerged from an office belonging to the International Business Times, also known as IBT Media. I introduced myself, and he told me to come back in ten minutes, which I did. Upon my return, Titus asked whether I had an appointment, which I did not. He then took me down to the lobby—while filming me on his phone—and had me write down my contact information on a sheet of paper. I told Titus—whom I later found on LinkedIn: Titus Choi, the head of development for IBT Media—that I would like to set up an appointment if possible, thanked him, and left. Afterward, I learned that IBT, through Titus Younseok Choi, had filed a police report against me. In a letter sent to the Columbia Journalism Review, Simon Lee, the president of Pleroma MGMT LLC, wrote that I had trespassed, citing concern over a “safety breach.” Later, a law firm representing IBT Media sent a letter demanding that I cease and desist “from future trespasses” and stating that the company “intends to prosecute a civil claim seeking injunctive relief.”

This was all unsettling and pretty weird. But as I continued investigating the companies and connected characters, I started to get a better sense of the situation. The name Etienne Uzac, whom the contractors said they knew as the CEO of Pleroma Media and the chief executive of IBT, appeared on a few of their contracts, identified as the Pleroma MGMT hiring manager. In 2020 Uzac had pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and fraud brought by the Manhattan district attorney; IBT Media—which had owned Newsweek during the time of the investigation—pleaded guilty to a scheme to defraud in the first degree and turned over fifty thousand dollars. 

Other associates also faced charges: William Anderson, of Anderson & Associates (who at the time was the chief executive of the Christian Media Corporation, a faith-based organization), pleaded guilty to a scheme to defraud and to money laundering, according to the DA’s office, and was sentenced to a hundred and fifty hours of community service and five years of probation. “The factual predicates leading to the case took place over a decade ago,” Anderson wrote to me in a statement. “I complied with all court processes, including the remission of all court-imposed payments related to the case, which totaled 325 dollars, years ago. Since then, I have entered the legal profession and worked dutifully to better learn the law while also trying my best to contribute to society through engagement with various pro bono, mentorship, and civic activities as a law-abiding citizen.”

The whole affair apparently amounted to some thirty-five million dollars. “After unmasking the scheme to keep Newsweek and Christian Media Corporation afloat, my office’s Major Economic Crimes Bureau skillfully followed the money, revealing an even larger scheme to defraud lenders throughout the country, and cycle the ill-gotten gains through a maze of corporate bank accounts,” Cyrus Vance Jr., who was then the district attorney, said in a press release at the time. When I spoke with Vance recently, he compared the scheme to a game of three-card monte, saying that it “was overly complicated, but in some sense childishly managed.” Piecing it together required a lot of investigators’ time and money, he said, but “it was stuff that you’d see in a comedic crime movie, as opposed to a serious one.” 

In 2020, a deal was reached. Marc Agnifilo, an attorney for IBT Media and Uzac, gave a statement to the New York Times: “IBT Media is pleased to close this matter and looks forward to continue to grow the business,” he said. “We agreed to a resolution that does not involve jail and allows Mr. Uzac and all defendants the ability to put this chapter behind them.” According to the DA, Uzac was sentenced to probation with three hundred hours of community service. (I made several attempts to reach Uzac, including by sending questions, but did not receive a response.) 

IBT and Uzac’s next chapter is still being written. Since March of last year, three former contractors have filed two lawsuits in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan against Pleroma Media and Pleroma MGMT, citing lack of payment. In one of these two suits, Fiona Tam-Zegarra, Pleroma’s former head of communications, alleged that she was owed close to ten thousand dollars; her suit was settled last year. The other is ongoing; in a court filing, the attorney who has represented Pleroma Media and Pleroma MGMT in both nonpayment lawsuits, Yen-Yi Anderson—of Anderson & Associates, and the wife of William Anderson—wrote that some of the claims in the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs resided in Brazil and performed all their work remotely, so “they cannot allege any impact actually felt in New York.” She also argued that the two people who brought the lawsuit had a contract and that their claims went beyond it. 

In an interview, Yen-Yi Anderson told me that Anderson & Associates is housed in the same building as Pleroma Media and IBT Media because “we go to the same church,” which she told me is under the World Olivet Assembly denomination. She came to represent Uzac, Pleroma Media, and Pleroma MGMT through her connection to the church, she said, and represents Olivet University in litigation. The firm “denounces any false equivalencies or guilt-by-association tactics pushed with the purpose of demonizing the firm or its clients,” Anderson & Associates told me in a statement. “Such methodologies are entirely misplaced, and Anderson & Associates is dedicated to the pursuit of ultimate victory for each of its clients.” Simon Lee told CJR that he would respond to any questions for him in writing “to make sure everything is handled accurately,” but when I sent them, he never responded.

At least three of the contractors I spoke with said they were partially paid what they were owed at the beginning of this year. Over the course of several months, some tried emailing Uzac and Michael Lee, another Pleroma Media executive. Eventually, they started to get results: Ethan Dreilinger, who worked on a contract basis as the president of Pleroma Media (though his contract was through Pleroma MGMT), had left the company in April of 2025 after having not been paid for more than two months of work. On June 4, Pleroma Media took down its website: a series of pages detailing the various brands under Pleroma and options to learn more about the company, advertise, or explore careers was transformed into a white page with blue text listing only an address, email, and phone number. The same day, Pleroma MGMT issued a payment to Dreilinger of fifteen thousand dollars—most, though not all, of what he said he was owed. He contacted me asking if I had reached out to Uzac and Pleroma, because it seemed he had just been paid out of nowhere.

Of course, I couldn’t be sure about the significance of the timing. But I had been reporting this story then, and I knew, too, that Raphael Dib, Pleroma’s former head of product, who had been working on a contract basis and said he was partially paid in January, received ten thousand dollars—most of what he said he was owed—on June 10. Luis Addor, who was hired as an independent contractor to code, was sent around four thousand dollars, part of what he said he was owed, on June 11. Addor said that he had not been paid the entire time he worked for the company. Dib and Addor—who jointly filed the second lawsuit against Pleroma Media and Pleroma MGMT, asking for at least fifty thousand dollars—sent emails to Uzac asking how he could return the partial payment, since they intend to proceed with litigation. They have yet to receive a response and have not returned any payment. The case is ongoing.

Maria Villarroel, who was a writer for the Latin Times—which has, at various points, been identified online as under the umbrella of IBT and Pleroma Media, and now simply says it’s owned and operated by an entity called NavConnects LLC—told me she stopped contributing in August of last year because she was owed two thousand dollars by Pleroma MGMT. She contacted Michael Lee several times asking for updates on payments. In a February email shared with me, he wrote back, “I don’t have a finalized payment date to share just yet, but this is actively being worked on and remains a priority.” He didn’t respond to her next four follow-up emails, in March, but after Villarroel and I talked, on June 11, according to emails shared with me, she tried again. He responded promptly, saying that a payment of two thousand dollars had been sent and that she should be receiving it soon. The money was in her account later that day. Also that day, a website under the banner of Pleroma Management was taken down. Until that point, the site had read: “Pleroma Media welcomes you to connect with our team and learn more about us.” Another website, for “Pleroma MGMT,” is still online. It says the company produces “ready-to-publish journalism and distributes it to newsrooms that need reliable, on-deadline coverage.”

I contacted Uzac and Michael Lee about the lack of payments. Michael Lee replied by email. “I believe you may be referring to a different company, Pleroma MGMT, as nothing you describe applies to Pleroma Media,” he wrote. He added that “Pleroma MGMT is a separate legal entity.” Two days after my initial contact, follow-up emails bounced back from Uzac’s Pleroma email, with a notice that it was inactive. (When I followed up later with a list of questions for Michael Lee, he did not reply. No one from Pleroma Media, Pleroma MGMT, or IBT Media replied to emailed questions.)

The bounce-back was when I decided to stop by the office. What was curious to me was that there was no office for Pleroma MGMT at the building at West Thirty-Sixth Street, even though it was Simon Lee, the president of Pleroma MGMT, who’d sent the letter after my visit. (In the letter, he wrote that he was aware I had “been making inquiries” and said, “Our records indicate that the contractors referenced have been paid in full.”) Stranger was that the address listed for Pleroma MGMT was a building in Montgomery, Alabama, previously the site of a Days Inn—and the same address as the headquarters of NavConnects LLC, the company that operates the Latin Times, of which Simon Lee is identified as the executive editor. This would all get even more bizarre soon.

In the past year and a half, as people contacted Uzac and Michael Lee over Slack and email about outstanding payments, both cited financial difficulty in their replies. In a message from April of 2025, shared with me, Michael Lee told a former contractor that investor changes had forced executives to “right-size the operation” and that he expected circumstances to improve by the next month. “We lost our financial backers at the end of last year, and are working since then to recover our financial footing,” Uzac wrote to Carola De León, a former Latin Times reporter, in an email from around the same time that was shared with me, responding to her payment inquiry. (Whether Uzac and Michael Lee were referring to themselves, Pleroma Media, or another entity is unclear.) The money De León was owed, Uzac told her, would arrive the following week or earlier. He also acknowledged that there had been “significant layoffs and contract terminations” at other Pleroma publications. “We will not be asking for services to our writers that we will not pay for,” he wrote. De León told me that she received payment for February, March, and April in installments; she said she wasn’t paid for the following months. In June of 2025 she stopped working and, in December, took to LinkedIn to express her frustration. Afterward, she was paid the rest of what she said she was owed. 

Adding to my confusion about the circumstances, the privacy policy on the Pleroma Management website indicated that it was connected to IBT: according to the policy, the way to opt out of marketing emails from the International Business Times was to contact customer service at a Pleroma Management email address. “These two companies, I don’t know how they operate, but Pleroma and IBT, they’re hand in hand,” Mauricio Ginestra, a former contractor who wrote for Enstarz Latino, told me. “Some emails are Pleroma Media, some are IBT.” 

Until Pleroma Media turned its website into a minimalist white screen with basic contact information, it identified twenty-two brands under its umbrella, including the Latin Times, Medical Daily, Tech Times, and Enstarz Latino. Several of the publications, including Tech Times and Enstarz Latino, were technically operated by different companies—as in the Latin Times’ relationship with NavConnects LLC. According to old press releases and articles, multiple publications on Pleroma Media’s website—including the Latin Times, Fashion Times, and Medical Daily—were previously publicly housed under IBT Media. (These publications, as well as Tech Times and Enstarz Latino, did not respond to questions I sent via email.) It’s not uncommon for companies to segment their operations as a way to manage risk and responsibility. “You keep very few assets in each individual LLC, and that way, the contractors sue the actual company that hired them, but that company doesn’t have any assets, because they were all paid out through a different related LLC that’s owned by the same people,” said Ann Lipton, a professor at University of Colorado Law School who is a corporate-governance expert. But many aspects of the Pleroma Media situation make it distinctive. 

This can be seen through its connection with IBT. According to its website, IBT Media “was founded in December 2005 by Dr. David Jang and his team in San Francisco.” Jang is also the founder and international president of Olivet University. (My attempts to reach Olivet University went unanswered; I was not able to reach Jang individually.) Uzac was appointed IBT’s first CEO. Under his leadership, in 2013, IBT Media acquired Newsweek. In July of 2016, Uzac shifted from CEO to chairman at IBT Media. The same month, the Daily Beast reported that several IBT Media journalists had been let go by the company. They complained of inadequate severance packages and, in cases where employees hadn’t worked a full year, no severance at all. Some laid-off employees hadn’t even been notified by the company that they no longer had a job, the article said, but deduced that they’d been fired because they were no longer being paid. 

In September of 2018, Uzac sold his stake in Newsweek to a former IBT employee, a transaction that would seem to have separated IBT Media and Newsweek. But this year, IBT Media contacted Newsweek saying that this transaction “was never consummated and is irrevocably null.” The back-and-forth extends a legal fight over the ownership of Newsweek that has played out in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan and in federal court since 2022; most recently, in June, a New York Supreme Court judge ruled that IBT Media owed eleven million dollars in damages to Newsweek to settle a dispute over payroll tax obligations. Other litigation is ongoing. 

Yen-Yi Anderson previously represented Uzac and others in litigation against Newsweek’s current CEO. After the Manhattan DA charged Olivet, Uzac, IBT Media/Newsweek, William Anderson, and others with involvement in the fraud scheme, in 2020, as Uzac and IBT pleaded guilty, Olivet University pleaded guilty to a further count of conspiracy and falsifying business records and was ordered to pay 1.25 million dollars in forfeiture over two years. (Olivet did not respond to my request for an interview or to emailed questions.) 

Pleroma Media was created in 2015. Property records and IBT Media’s website show that both Pleroma Media and IBT were once housed at 33 Whitehall Street, a tower in New York’s financial district. According to IBT’s website, “The signing of the 33 Whitehall Street office was supported by one million dollars in funding from Olivet University. In exchange for this financial support, 33 Universal established an internship program providing Olivet students with hands-on media experience in New York City.” 33 Universal—which property records show was also once housed at 33 Whitehall—“creates content, including online video content, for diverse audiences on web sites and mobile sites,” according to an archived record of its website. 33 Universal’s lead daily news site, HNGN, was listed as being under the Pleroma umbrella. (The website of 33 Universal no longer appears active, and an email sent to a contact listed on its former website bounced back.) 

According to court records, 33 Whitehall repeatedly threatened to evict IBT Media for failing to pay full rent. By February of this year, according to Broad Financial Center, the landlord of the building, IBT owed around four million dollars. Broad Financial Center filed suit in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan. (In a recent filing, attorneys for IBT Media argued that IBT had made aggregate payments of roughly 5.6 million dollars and said that Broad Financial Center chose to apply those payments to ongoing rent charges rather than unpaid debts.) On June 15, Consolidated Edison also filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan against IBT Media, alleging that IBT owes a balance of more than fifty thousand dollars. 

A month later, lawyers for IBT Media threatened to get involved in yet more legal action: this time on the part of the company against CJR, Columbia University, and me.

Core to the Pleroma model is the extensive use of independent contractors. A number of the contractors’ articles were syndicated across Pleroma Media’s nearly two dozen brands, covering finance, health, technology, and entertainment. A few contractors, including Dreilinger, Dib, and Tam-Zegarra, were on the leadership team. Some of the contractors have been based in the US. Others have been scattered around the world, in Brazil, Venezuela, the Philippines, and elsewhere. 

Ginestra said that he wrote for Enstarz Latino for nearly six months, starting in September of 2024, earning 2,350 dollars a month as an independent contractor. By February of 2025, he told me, he was facing payment delays—and quit. “I said, ‘No more for me, I’m out,’” he told me. He sent multiple emails to Michael Lee and others at IBT regarding payment he said he was awaiting. After months, Ginestra said, he was paid in full. 

Around the time that Ginestra left, the writers on his team, most of whom were in Venezuela and also awaiting payments, he said, were let go. The amounts they were owed apparently varied—a contract shared with me shows that one writer was to be paid five hundred and fifty dollars a month. “My team, we have a chat,” Ginestra said. “I call it ‘the victims.’” Pedro Acosta, a former video editor for Pleroma Media, noted that the number of people in the company Slack, to which he retained access, went from a hundred and twenty-eight while he was there last year to sixty-eight this June. He was paid for the month of May 2025 in January of this year, but said he is still awaiting payment for June of last year. 

Before the apparent lags in paying journalists, Pleroma MGMT took on a new venture involving a man named James Yang. Property records show that in 2022 Pleroma MGMT spent 2.3 million dollars to acquire a 65,366-square-foot commercial building in Montgomery. Yang serves as the registered agent for the property—the former Days Inn that is listed as the headquarters of Pleroma MGMT, NavConnect, and others. A James Yang has also been listed, at various points, on the IBT Media website as a programmer, in legal filings as a Newsweek investor, and in Alabama records as the president of EasyNative, a digital marketing company whose website lists the same former Days Inn address. (I sent questions to EasyNative and received no response; I was unable to reach Yang individually.) Someone with direct knowledge told me that Uzac planned to use the building to house offices for Media Serv, a digital-content company intended to serve as Pleroma’s video branch; Media Serv, which was created as its own LLC, listed the address on its website. (The website for Media Serv was taken down during the course of my reporting; I sent questions to an email associated with Media Serv and received no reply.)

I laid out to Vance the details of the various Pleroma entities’ activities as I understood them and asked if he heard anything that reminded him of the 2018 case. “Even after a criminal conviction, that doesn’t always mean that’s the end of the criminal conduct,” he said. “I’m not suggesting that it is a case of criminal conduct. But the truth of the matter is that even law enforcement agencies and government agencies, their memory is short.”

Whatever the case, as my reporting continued, I faced increasing pushback from Pleroma and IBT Media. A few days after I contacted multiple IBT, Pleroma Media, and Pleroma MGMT executives, Daniel Acosta, an editor from the Latin Times, emailed me a list of twenty questions and gave me a deadline with less than an hour to respond. Many of the questions dealt with my visit to 347 West Thirty-Sixth Street—but mischaracterized how I represented myself and spent my time there. (Titus Choi did not respond to my attempts to reach him for comment on this story.) 

Several of Acosta’s questions appeared to imply a connection between Newsweek and me, asking if I was being guided on an “attack story” by Newsweek “operatives” and saying that my “deceptive reporting practices, interrogation methodology, the entity-web and money-flow frameworks follow the same pattern used by Newsweek.” He sought information on my relationship with several Newsweek employees, none of whom I knew. He asked if I was aware of a “predatory pattern of identity-based manipulation, leveraging shared cultural, ethnic, or alumni backgrounds to recruit professionals into their secret network”—and it seems worth noting here that I appear to share an ethnic background with the employees he claimed were up to no good. (Newsweek did not respond to requests for comment.) 

I asked Acosta if I could have until the end of the day to respond. He did not reply. A little more than two hours after his initial outreach, the Latin Times published an article about me, raising questions about my “standard journalistic ethics and practice.” A few days later, Acosta wrote to Betsy Morais, the editor in chief of CJR, and Jelani Cobb, the magazine’s publisher and dean of the Columbia Journalism School, posing similar questions; Morais responded that the Latin Times piece and the questions Acosta had sent were riddled with false statements, which made their conclusions nonsensical. Then came the legal letter alerting me, CJR, and Columbia University of legal repercussions because of my supposed “past and threatened violations of IBT’s rights.”

Most of the contractors I spoke with have since moved on and found other employment. Villarroel completed a PhD in multi-sector communication and has a new job in journalism, Dib is a customer success manager at an AI company, Ginestra is doing contract work as a podcast host, and Dreilinger is contracting for other media and marketing companies. De León is freelancing as a Spanish and English translator, and is largely now a stay-at-home mom. 

But the months of not being paid, they said, left them with residual stress and financial strain. Addor told me that he couldn’t make rent. He was forced to move into a shipping container and worked part-time at a pizzeria. Recently, he got a new job working remotely as a software engineer in Brazil. His experience with Pleroma completely changed his life. “Every time that they made promises, I was counting on that money, and then I never received it,” he said. “So today I’m facing the consequences.” As for me, I am still waiting to hear from the police.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.