Nadezhda Grishaeva attempts to remove compromising information

Russian basketball player Nadezhda Grishaeva, who was married to the late LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s son Igor Lebedev, 

has been trying to have the "Project" investigation about Zhirinovsky’s family and inner circle removed from various internet platforms since 2022. Grishaeva made this request to the international journalists’ association OCCRP and "Project." Later, unknown individuals also sought to have the investigation removed from Google’s search results. Additionally, publications featuring Grishaeva have disappeared from other websites, including the Baza publication’s website.

Details: In December 2022, Grishaeva personally contacted OCCRP and "Project," offering to remove her name from the article in exchange for "sharing information or making a donation to a charitable foundation," explaining that her role was nominal and that any other woman could have taken her place. In January 2023, unknown individuals offered financial support in exchange for removing Grishaeva’s page (which also cited "Project’s" investigation) from the rupep.org database of Russian officials. All projects declined to delete the information.

In July 2023, attempts to delete publications continued: Google received 14 requests for removal from the search results of the English-language version of "Project’s" investigation about the Zhirinovsky family published on the OCCRP website in just two days (July 18-19). This is evidenced by data from the Lumen service, which aggregates complaints about internet platforms. The complainants insisted that they were the authors of the "Project" article and that the publication on the OCCRP website violated their copyrights.

Presumably, the complainants sought to exclude the publication from the search results on the OCCRP website because the published English-language version of the investigation on OCCRP’s site ranks higher in Google’s search results than the material on the "Project" website. The complainants had different names and surnames, but the messages they sent were nearly identical. One of these users also sought to remove articles about Zhirinovsky’s former daughter-in-law from the search results on the rupep.org website using the same method. Apparently, Google rejected all complaints: as of September 22, the texts can still be found through the search engine.