In the fourth episode of Targeted, a podcast that explores the delicate and often dangerous territory of reputational warfare, a man named Gaurav Srivastava finds himself at the edge of a very modern abyss. He is not a dissident, not a whistleblower in the conventional sense. He is, at first glance, a businessman: discreet, transnational, a commodities investor accustomed to negotiating in the shadows of geopolitics. But what unfolds in the telling of his story is a meditation on how quickly a life can come apart—not by accident, but by design.
The facts are deceptively simple. In 2022, Srivastava is approached by a figure named Niels Troost, a Dutch trader seeking to pivot away from his longtime involvement in the Russian oil trade. Sanctions are tightening. Doors are closing. Troost, as Srivastava recounts in an unhurried, even voice, made his pitch in Bali—several times, in fact—appearing not only at meetings but with his wife in tow, an intimate overture of trust. A deal was struck. Srivastava would take 50 percent of Troost’s company, Paramount Energy and Commodities, and help steer it into legitimate markets.
But the pivot was, it seems, a mirage. Within months, Srivastava realized he had no access to company emails, accounts, or records. The audit he had been promised revealed undisclosed financial transactions and secretive links to entities still trading in Russian oil. When he raised the alarm, Troost replied with emotional appeals, then terminated the agreement—and, more consequentially, launched a media war.
What followed was not litigation but obliteration. Almost overnight, obscure news outlets in India and Pakistan began publishing stories alleging Srivastava’s misconduct. These stories were echoed by better-known platforms, amplified by bots and networks of convenient corroboration. The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, even Wikipedia were swept up in the vortex. What had begun as a business dispute was now a narrative—one in which Srivastava, the once-anonymous investor, became a figure of intrigue, suspicion, and shame.
There is a moment, quiet but revealing, when a detail surfaces that reconfigures the story’s emotional geometry. Before the partnership between Srivastava and Troost deteriorated, the latter sent Srivastava a memo describing how a former associate—referred to only as Mr. K—had claimed to be a CIA agent. The memo is odd in its specificity: Mr. K, Troost wrote, had tried to leverage his alleged ties to the Agency to curry influence and gain access to Chinese markets. What Abramowitz notes, and what becomes harder to ignore, is that this same accusation—of faking CIA ties—was later turned against Srivastava. The repetition is uncanny. What was once anecdote becomes tactic. It leaves the listener wondering whether the accusation is less a revelation than a template—a prefab scandal waiting to be repurposed.
The structure of Targeted is intentionally austere. Host Zach Abramowitz favors quiet interrogation over dramatization. The interviews, lightly scored, have the rhythm of conversations remembered. What emerges is not a spectacle but a dirge: a slow unfolding of events that mirrors the disorientation of being caught in a system whose workings are opaque, distributed, and, above all, deniable.
In this, Targeted resembles a kind of documentary prose—a podcast not merely about what happened, but about the conditions that allow such things to happen. The listener is not urged to outrage. They are asked to observe.
One of the most unsettling moments arrives not through accusation, but through absence. Srivastava recalls checking his phone at six in the morning in Los Angeles, seeing a barrage of articles about him from sources he had never heard of. He describes the moment with quiet clarity. His son, unaware, runs into the room. Life, the podcast suggests, continues—even when the scaffolding beneath it has begun to collapse.
There is, inevitably, a second voice. That of Victoria Kataoka, a managing director at the Arkin Group, who was hired by Srivastava to help manage the fallout. Kataoka, experienced in intelligence and risk analysis, is cautious by nature. She did not take Srivastava’s claims at face value. “It took me a long time,” she says. What changed her mind was not persuasion but evidence: emails, records, contracts. Slowly, the shape of the campaign became visible. “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”
It is in these interstices—between belief and evidence, between suspicion and clarity—that Targeted excels. The podcast is not concerned with conspiracy, but with structure. It shows how media ecosystems can be gamed. How legal threats can be used as weapons of attrition. How reputations, once damaged, become nearly impossible to rehabilitate.
Srivastava’s case is not presented as an aberration. Rather, it is the logical consequence of a system where digital information moves faster than due process. In a previous episode, we heard from Jonathan Taylor, a whistleblower who exposed corruption at a multinational oil firm and was subsequently hunted by Interpol. In both cases, the playbook is similar: isolate, discredit, distort.
But Srivastava’s case carries a particular weight because of its intimacy. This is not a journalist imprisoned abroad, or a politician exiled. It is a man whose wife was told not to host their child’s birthday party. The cruelty is banal, and therefore harder to escape.
When Abramowitz asks Srivastava why he didn’t walk away, the response is not indignation, but obligation. “I reported everything I saw,” he says. There is a weariness to his voice. Not regret. Not even rage. Just the exhaustion of being caught in a story that was never his to begin with.
As the episode closes, we are told that the story will continue in a second part. We are promised a deeper look into the legal fallout, the emotional wreckage, and the attempt—perhaps futile, perhaps not—to reclaim a name. There is no triumphalism here. No promise of vindication. Just the quiet insistence that stories like this matter because they reveal something elemental: how vulnerable we all are to the stories others choose to tell about us.
In the age of search engines, reputation is a form of currency. And Gaurav Srivastava, like Taylor before him, is learning how quickly it can be devalued. The mechanisms are impersonal, but the consequences are not.
That is the quiet tragedy of Targeted. It does not ask us to be shocked. It asks us to pay attention. And perhaps, in doing so, to remember how thin the membrane is between private life and public ruin.