Happy Monday, I’m Eriq Gardner.

Welcome back to The Rainmaker, my private newsletter focused on the legal maneuvering inside Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street.

This week, I’m taking a closer look at the James O’Keefe trial playing out in Washington—a legal saga that could set new boundaries between what constitutes journalism and what counts as spying. Plus an update on Disney’s anti-vax legal headache, a Fifth Circuit thought bomb, and how a Making a Murderer defamation suit offers a rare look inside Netflix.

But first…

It’s easy to forget these days that Hollywood once was the epicenter of vaccine hesitancy. Yes, in the years leading up to the Covid pandemic, stars like Robert De Niro and Jim Carrey complained about government overreach when California lawmakers, alarmed that student vaccination rates had dropped in wealthy Los Angeles enclaves, targeted parents trying to wriggle out of school mandates. Led by the controversial activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., some like Jessica Biel even began appearing at California’s capitol to lobby against a bill meant to crack down on doctors who issued phony exemptions.

This chapter of celebrity medical history has become newly relevant as Disney’s ABC unit fights with Ingo Rademacher, the longtime General Hospital actor who was fired last year for...

Project Veritas was founded by O’Keefe in 2010 to capitalize on his blockbuster undercover video recordings targeting ACORN, a liberal grassroots organization, that were selectively edited to discredit their work helping low-income communities. The videos, which O’Keefe promoted by dressing up as a pimp, transformed the then 25-year-old activist into a star of the Fox News cinematic universe. ACORN filed for bankruptcy soon afterwards...