Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but there is nothing in Mr. Padrick’s professional history or the public record that I found to suggest he is any of those things. He was appointed as a trustee by the court, he was subjected to an F.B.I. background check, and there have been no criminal investigations into his conduct. About 85 percent of the funds have been returned to the creditors, which seems to be a good result.

Annie Buell, the chairwoman of the Official Unsecured Creditors Committee who was appointed by the United States Trustee’s Office, said in an interview by phone that there was no basis in fact for Ms. Cox’s scabrous postings about Mr. Padrick.

“He did a very good job for the creditors,” she said. “He was above-board, had all of his cards on the table and was competent and fair. If I ever was in the same situation again, he would be my first choice.” Lawyers I spoke with who had done business with Mr. Padrick used similar adjectives to describe him.

Mr. Padrick, a lawyer who is a member of the bar in four states and has never been disciplined or investigated from anything I could find, said he spent a lot of sleepless nights wondering how he ended up as Ms. Cox’s bête noire.

“A woman who I did not know, who had no connection to me or my company or with this case she has been making statements on, has turned my business life and personal life upside down,” he said. “Companies who are considering doing business with us do a routine search on Google and there is page after page of these allegations. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.”

And it has. Ms. Cox, who calls herself an “investigative blogger,” has a broad range of conspiratorial/journalistic interests. She has written that Bruce Sewell, the general counsel of Apple, “aids and abets criminals”; that Jeffrey Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, is “a proven technology thief”; and that various Proskauer Rose lawyers have engaged in a pattern of “conspiracy.” And don’t get her started on the local officials in and around her hometown, Eureka, Mont.

When she gets in a fight with someone, she frequently responds by creating a domain with the person’s name, some allegation of corruption, or both. Many of the negative posts about Mr. Padrick appeared on obsidianfinancesucks.com and there are many more like it. In order to optimize visibility to Web crawlers, she often uses the full name and title of her target, and her Web sites are filled with links to her other sites to improve their search ranking. She has some 500 URLs at her disposal and she’s not afraid to use them.