Chapter 455

For a moment, Layla failed to react to that statement. It took another moment for her to understand what Luke meant.

Luke was truly an old hand at this. He was a slippery and cunning businessman.

After Layla’s own marketing campaign, Caroline had negative press hounding her steps. As long as they tied Sonia to Caroline, Sonia’s sterling reputation would dissipate into nothing.

Thinking of this, Layla rushed the advertising department to have Sonia’s sponsorship announcement on Twitter go viral.

Because of the comparison with Daphne when the sponsorship announcement was made, Sonia had gotten on the list of trending topics before. However, that had been two weeks ago.

Now, after her latest boom in popularity, everyone was reminded of the initial announcement.

Layla didn’t stop there. She went a step further.

Beyond having the initial announcement go viral again, Layla had the advertising department get someone to release fake news on a massive scale.

The news implied that Caroline was the one backing Sonia and had done all this to go against Layla herself.

She also paid for people to flood the comments, swaying public opinion. Now, netizens all thought that Caroline had spent all the money on Sonia, not the quality of her clothing.

This caused everyone who had made an order to worry about the clothes‘ quality and try to get a refund.

At the start, there were only a few dozen refund requests. Later, this shot up to number in the thousands.

Evans Group’s marketing department head was sweating as he stood by Caroline’s side, watching the computer before him stall. “What do we do, Ms. Evans?”

Everyone was requesting a refund. He guessed that the offline shop owners would come knocking on their door next.

Caroline looked at the screen with narrowed eyes.

She hadn’t fought back against the smear campaign conducted against her online because Layla had been smart about it this time.

Layla hadn’t gone at her directly, but rather indirectly. All the posts Layla shared were about how much she had gone through to become the boss of Evanson Corporation.

As a daughter of the Evans family, didn’t it mean that someone was going against her that she had to go through so much adversity?

But Layla’s posts never said that outright. Instead, she paid for people to suggest as much in the comments.

Thus, Caroline couldn’t come out and refute these claims. Once she did, people might think she was feeling guilty.

Besides, Caroline didn’t like bringing up old grudges. Plus, doing so wouldn’t bring her any benefits. It wasn’t going to be so easy to get out of the current situation.

After much thought, Caroline decided not to clean up her image but rather go a more roundabout route.

Since Layla said that Caroline had given Sonia financial backing, she would give credence to it.

When Andrea found out about this, she was astonished. She said, “Caroline, I think you should chill out. If you back Sonia now, people will become even more displeased.”

Caroline kept looking at Sonia, who had her head lowered and hadn’t spoken all this time. “What do you think, Sonia?”

Sonia looked up at Caroline. Hesitatingly, she said, “Ms. Evans, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“From what Ms. Sorkin said, you insisted on signing me because you were sure I would become popular. Can you tell me why you thought that?”

Caroline gave a small smile and told Sonia briefly about what she had seen that day when she had gone to the set.

“I’m not a professional, so I can only see things from an audience member’s point of view.

Honestly, I’ve never seen an actress who can do such a beautiful fight scene so smoothly.

“Besides, I believe that hard work pays off, especially for someone like you.”

Sonia stared at Caroline, taken aback.

This was the first time since she had started in this industry that someone had given her such strong acknowledgment.