The Anatomy of a Digital Smear

How our “spooks” snared the Westlake Smear Cartel

By Aaron and Ivana Silva

The text message from a close friend arrived at 10:00 PM on April 30th, piercing the quiet of an otherwise ordinary evening. "Aaron, have you seen the shit being sent around about you on those anonymous campaign instagram accounts?"

My friend’s message would mark the beginning of a nightmare that would consume my family's life and begin to expose a shadowy network of community misfits we now call the Westlake Smear Cartel. As my wife Ivana and I scrolled through the screenshots he sent, our blood ran cold. Before us lay documents we'd never seen before - nearly two decades old - strategically altered and weaponized for maximum damage just days before the Eanes ISD school board election.

We didn't sleep that night. By 8:00 AM the next morning, I had made two calls that would set in motion a legal and clandestine investigation spanning multiple continents. The first was to my attorney, Jack Stick. The second was to an old friend - a private investigator I'll call "Jeff" whose Las Vegas-based firm specializes in tracking down victims of international sex trafficking rings operating through anonymous social media accounts. For the past decade, Jeff's work had put predators behind bars in over 30 countries. Now, his team of international cyber-investigators - whom he calls his "spooks" - would turn their considerable talents toward unmasking the digital assassins targeting my reputation, my election hopes and most importantly my beautiful family.

Within hours, Jeff's team had established monitoring stations in five countries - India, Germany, Norway, England, and Argentina. Their target: two anonymous Instagram accounts, @Character_Counts46 and @EanesKids1st. The first account was newly created in my honor in March as my campaign got started, while @EanesKids1st has been around for many years.  The daily attacks from @Charcter_Counts were incredible.  Silva is a racist; hates LGBTQ kids; a liar, a fake, wants to hurt SpED children…on and on.  It was disgusting and over time my wife and I became desensitized to it with a “What are they saying now?” attitude to start each day.  That is, until they crossed the line and attacked my family.  Nobody messes with my family.  Nobody.

Jeff and his team would track every post, every hashtag, every direct message, every IP address related to those accounts for the next weeks, creating a digital breadcrumb trail that would eventually expose years of orchestrated character assassinations in our community perpetrated by fellow parents, teachers, administrators and community leaders across Texas.  Sad.

The attack's next phase came swiftly. At 10:00 AM on May 1st, without any attempt to verify the anonymously posted documents' authenticity, school board candidate Kelly Marwill released a full throated statement warning parents about the "safety of our students" if I were elected (inset). The statement's polish and suspicious timing - just three days before the election - raised red flags for our investigators.  Marwill claimed she was compelled to make a public statement because she was ‘heartsick and concerned’ and that she had heard from ‘so many’ community members (yea right, ‘so many’ between 10PM April 30th and 8AM the next morning). We smelled a rat.

By 3:00 PM that same day, we had our first breakthrough. A legal courier in California verified that the original court documents had been ordered on April 17th by - you guessed it - Kimberly Taylor of Taylor Collective Solutions (TCS) - Marwill's campaign manager. Marwill and Taylor then laid in wait for 13 days before making the post on the last day of early voting.  More disturbing still, a comparison of the complete 15 page legal file against the posted altered version(s) revealed careful editing to remove at least 4-5 pages of exculpatory information showing the allegations were untrue; had been dismissed without ever being substantiated 18 years ago and I never even knew about it.   Marwill and Taylor marketed the altered documents as current, active and true - framing me as a criminal, stunning my children.

What emerged from the investigators’ reports was a technological and forensic pattern of smears that stretched back years. The same anonymous @EanesKids1st Instagram account and at least 10 other social media sites (unnamed for now) had been used to attack previous candidates: Nigel Stout, Jennifer Stevens, Jay Lamy, and Jim Withers.  All of these good people, parents like the rest of us had all fallen victim to similar character assassination attempts. But this time, the perpetrators had left digital fingerprints and we were there to find them.  They had no idea the “spooks” were following their every move.

On May 4th, I lost the election by 103 votes but we kept watching the Smear Cartel clowns for weeks more just to be sure we had the right suspects.  For Ivana and I, it was a bitter sweet feeling to know we had lost the election in such an underhanded and despicable way while also catching these bullies with their pants down.

Kim Taylor Talks 2 Kim Taylor

Jeff's team uncovered something extraordinary, pathetic and arrogantly cruel at the same time: Taylor had been engaging in conversations with herself across multiple social media accounts, creating the illusion of widespread community outrage. It was a sophisticated shell game - using anonymous accounts to launch attacks, then other smear accounts to repost and comment favorably on the attack, while maintaining plausible deniability for the actual perpetrators.  Evil and weird.

Smear Fencing

What our investigators uncovered was a masterclass in digital deception - a technique they called "smear fencing," divided into several steps.

Step 1: The operation began at Taylor Collective Solutions (TCS), where the Marwill campaign team crafted their ammunition. Court documents were carefully altered, memes were professionally designed (by Eanes parent Kimberly A.), and audio files were prepared - all engineered for maximum damage to my reputation and my campaign. 

TCS and Taylor were too smart to release the content directly. Instead, they employed other smear clowns to execute a sophisticated laundering operation that would make El Chapo proud. The newly created @Character_Counts46 Instagram account served as their "smear fence" - a digital clean room with minimal followers where the defamatory content could be planted (planting is Step 2). This seemingly innocuous account created perfect plausible deniability, allowing everyone to maintain an arm's length distance from the source material secretly being manufactured by TCS.  Posting the venom to @Character_Counts was like ringing a dinner bell signaling fellow cartel clowns that fresh meat had been prepared for distribution to the rest of the voters.

Step 3: Kim Taylor's @EanesKids1st account, with its established following of more than 700, would then "discover" and download the self-manufactured content from @Character_Counts46, presenting it as a concerned community member sharing disturbing information.  Marwill’s campaign would repeat the same “ruse of discovery” (Step 4) and spread the smear to all of their supporters and voters.  This four-step process was brilliant in its simplicity - it allowed Marwill's campaign to claim they were merely "sharing" concerning information they had "found," rather than admitting they both had conspired to orchestrate its creation and distribution.

Jeff's team tracked the digital fingerprints between these accounts, revealing a damning pattern. The same three devices were accessing both accounts, often from the same IP addresses.  The graphic design elements in the memes matched TCS's signature styles. Jeff discovered metadata in the digital images, further linking them to parents in the Westlake Smear Cartel.  Even the timing of posts and shares followed a pattern over and over again. 

In response to their unethical and morally bankrupt tactics, we were left with no choice.  On May 21st, at the EISD Trustee Meeting, Ivana and I announced our $1,000,000 lawsuit against Marwill and Taylor for conspiracy to defame and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Within hours of our announcement (maybe minutes), the @Character_Counts46 account vanished, and Taylor's @EanesKids1st account was scrubbed clean - but the digital evidence had already been preserved by the spooks.  (Sorry, Kelly and Kim. Nice effort covering your mess, though… kind of like a cat in a litterbox.  You can hide the smell, but the evidence is still there.)

The sophistication of this operation reveals something deeply troubling: this wasn't just a campaign gone negative - it was a well-oiled machine that had likely been perfected through years of practice. This was premeditated by political hitmen. The same technical signatures, the same "smear fencing" techniques, and some of the same anonymous accounts had been used to attack many others in our community over too many years. It was a playbook, refined and repeated, that had successfully silenced good people for far too long.

WestlakeSmearCartel.com - A Free Service for Our Community

But politics in America is just too important to play games like this.  You can find legitimate reasons to support or oppose candidates on your own. The community does not need self appointed "influencers" to make decisions for it, let alone decisions based upon evidence those influencers manufacture. Why would anyone give up their vote, their right to determine a portion of their future, their family's future, and this nation's future, to a person unknown, but known to be a liar and a manipulator?

That's why we have launched a FREE community service WestlakeSmearCartel.com. Our team of international investigators stands ready to help anyone targeted by these digital smears, offering the same sophisticated tracking and exposure techniques that unveiled our attackers. Because while the Cartel may have perfected the art of the smear, we've now perfected the art of unmasking it. No charge, no catch, no qualification.  If you’ve been screwed by this kind of garbage attack, whether you’re conservative or liberal, tall or short - it doesn’t matter.  Nobody deserves to be treated like this and my wife Ivana and I are committed to making sure we don’t have another election plagued by this cancer.

In the end, their greatest weapon was shadows - the ability to hide behind anonymous accounts, pseudonyms and plausible deniability. Our greatest weapon is sunlight, and we intend to let it shine. 

END.