07/14/2026
Since I spoke up about her actions, Nicole Zimmerman Russo of Folk Medicine And Remedies (the "Antipasto Lady" of TikTok fame) has now removed the two pieces of content plagiarized from Rowan + Sage. Thank you Nicole. However, she has refused to comply with our demand that she remove now over 30 posts filled with attacks and abusive language towards myself, and has continued to lie about the nature of her theft in her posts, the timeline that it occurred, and her use of intimidation and harassment as a weapon to attempt to force me into silence.
If her harm is going to be public, so will my response.
As I stated previously, in January of 2026, Nicole Zimmerman Russo was caught having multiply infringed on our copyrighted works by posting them without permission multiple times on her Facebook account. She will continue to claim that she stole an “AI-generated image” that was not AI generated as we have a staunch anti-AI policy at our company, and will obfuscate the fact that she stole our writing and published it multiple times. She will say she stole the writing and image 2 years ago, but that is not true…she published it multiple times between April 2025 and January 2026. This is the crux of her theft, using our words to position herself as an expert, and using our content as well as the content she has made harassing us to make money.
Nicole herself has admitted to the theft and has admitted to using AI to generate all of her own content, which we do not. There is a recurring theme in her harassment and abuse: every accusation is an admission.
Nicole has continued to claim that we are capable of “releasing a copyright claim” on her personal Facebook account when we neither 1) reported her personal Facebook account, nor 2) are capable of “releasing” a claim for a case that has been closed by Facebook for 6 months. I will also not set the precedent that people may steal our copyrighted works. Nicole’s entire operation is based on the lie that I am responsible for the loss of her personal Facebook account, which we have already confirmed with Meta to be untrue (a conversation she has a copy of), and she believes that her illegal behavior is justified on that premise.
Since January of 2026, Nicole has claimed:
That my followers have harassed her; two of my followers called her out for stealing my work after she blocked me (which she also lies about) on the posts she stole. She responded in her typical fashion, with unintelligible remarks and verbal abuse, while also claiming that she originated the work and would be suing me for copyright infringement. She has since admitted that she stole the work.
That I owe her between $5,000-10,000 in punitive damages because she stole from me and got caught for it. She claims a lawyer sent me the demand letter, but no lawyer of hers has appeared. She sent the letter personally and I ignored it.
That I doxxed her. Doxxing is the act of publicly revealing someone's private or identifying information like their name or address, on the internet without their consent as a form of intimidation, harassment, and abuse. After she refused to take the content down in January, I made a post saying Nicole Russo’s name and page title, both of which are public on her own page and therefore not private information. When Meta removed the infringing content, I took my post down. I did not doxx her. However, in May of 2026, Nicole made a series of posts and allegations commanding her followers to hunt me down after I ignored her demand letter. Her followers published my private identifiable information including my addresses as a form of intimidation, harassment, and abuse.
That I am running an illegal scam business, engaging in deceptive business tactics, that I own over 30 LLCs and am committing some type of fraud and money laundering scheme. Nicole does not have a legally registered business in any state that she has lived in. If we press charges against her, her personal assets including her home and all associated income with her business, and future income, would be on the line. I don’t wish to do that to a mother of two. As for me, I own two LLCs: the one for this business and one that has lapsed from my previous design studio.
That I sell fake certifications. Rowan + Sage does not offer certifications in herbalism and we are vocally critical of certification culture.
That I went on a psychotic rant and called her a white nationalist. Nicole, you know I never called you a white nationalist. You interjected yourself into a conversation I was already having within my free class teachings and online community about racism in herbalism and said it was about you. Your obsession with me is, however, unrequited.
That I am racist because I talk about dismantling white supremacy culture in herbalism. It is not possible to be racist to white people, and correctly identifying a Sicilian-Sardinian-Ashkenazi American woman as benefiting from historic and contemporary whiteness is not racist. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what racism is. As a first generation adult child of immigrants, Persian-Bukharan biracial woman, and someone with strong integrity and ethics, dismantling the structures of white supremacy and racism within herbalism is in my words recently, “the most critical work of our time.” Nicole has however agreed with her followers who have made racist statements towards myself and others, and she falsely represents herself as an Indigenous American-owned minority business on her creator account, which is a federally protected title and might earn her a report with the Department of the Interior.
Nicole readily weaponizes abusive language and bullying tactics to garner sympathy and drum up engagement on all of her pages. She has called me dozens of names, despite in her own words saying in May of 2026 in her long tirade about things I never did that, “The racism, insults, and hateful language you resort to during a professional disagreement say far more about you than they ever will about me. A real professional doesn't weaponize harassment and personal attacks when accountability enters the room.”
We have already established that every claim in this sentence is an admission of her own wrongdoing. And, Nicole, we never had a professional disagreement. That would mean we had some sort of relationship prior to you stealing from my company, doxxing me, harassing me, bullying me, attempting to intimidate me, and force me to pay you.
So beyond the crimes of cyberstalking, doxxing, and harassment, you are now threatening to come to my state so you can “file reports.” You have now transcended the realm of social media complaining into a credible threat to my safety. We have filed a police report detailing all of your illegal behavior. The authorities and their contacts with Meta and TikTok can decide if your use of social media to commit illegal acts is justified.
Nicole’s most pervasive tactic has been DARVO, a psychological manipulation tactic used by abusers when held accountable for their behavior. Nicole *D*enied that she ever stole from me and consistently minimized what she did while *A*ttacking me outright by making threats, attempting to force me to pay her, and spreading lies about me and my business. She then *R*eversed the *V*ictim and *O*ffender, swapping our roles by claiming to be the real victim here and portraying me as the aggressor who won’t leave her alone. She has attempted to keep me silent and force me to speak to her without my lawyers, while also saying she wanted to take legal action and sue me. Nicole, you have had my lawyers contact for months yet you still continue to take to social media to get attention for your delusional behavior.
The record is clear. You stole, you got caught, and you have been acting out nonstop. You might think that you can harass people on social media and it doesn’t matter, but you cannot evade accountability for engaging in illegal harassment and using your nearly 1 million followers to protect you and harass others on your behalf (another allegation you have slung my way).
You know your next steps. Remove all 30+ posts about me and Rowan + Sage on your Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram accounts and refrain from engaging in any further harassment. Apologize. All facts relevant to this case have been preserved in our records and will be turned over to the authorities immediately, who will then decide with their partnership with Meta and TikTok if you get to continue to use your platforms to harass and abuse others. You can avoid this by just taking the content down and letting us all move on.
– Sarah Bobodzhanov-Corbett, Founder of Rowan + Sage
In January of this year, I came across an account (Folk Medicine And Remedies, run by Nicole Zimmerman Russo) that plagiarized a section of writing from our blog word-for-word. She also stole the imagery from that blog and was representing it as her own intellectual property. I called her a thief; she falsely claimed I stole the work from her; and I filed a copyright infringement report with Meta for all the posts she stole from us.
Meta deemed her posting a violation of intellectual property and copyright law and removed the content she stole from us. Those cases have been closed for months.
I washed my hands of it. A few months later, she sent me and another herb school, which also reported her content for intellectual property theft, a demand letter claiming that we were responsible for her personal FB account being disabled. We never reported her personal account, and Meta confirmed that we did not do anything to put her account in danger of deletion. She also demanded thousands of dollars from each of us.
After SHE stole our work.
She tried to email us again. We ignored it.
In May, she started a smear campaign about me on her profiles, asking people to track me down and publish my address. Her followers complied with her request to doxx me. They published my addresses.
She has since made 20+ posts and videos about me across her Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram accounts and in multiple Facebook groups, making false, defamatory claims about my business and my credibility. I have received constant harassment from her community for months. She keeps claiming that all she did was steal an AI-generated image from me, that the theft wasn't that big of a deal, and that I will not leave her alone.
For starters, the image was not AI-generated. I made it myself, using a vintage botanical illustration and our team's published work. Second, she stole an entire section of writing from our monograph on Mugwort and posted it multiple times. She also claimed that she originated our text and altered a 2020 post to make it appear as though she created what our team wrote. She still has two posts on her page with the content stolen from me:
https://www.facebook.com/WonderlostHomestead/posts/pfbid02hpgx85XFbCg1YDXJkQg4gQqEyzHEDASBJtiDd22TAcciMYy3546wrUGmQjVXP9Mvl
https://www.facebook.com/WonderlostHomestead/posts/pfbid0Hqa7zUy7cPhxkFnh4TpKKw8KyYU4QbUK1Uqnc2sciV3JTTmSfM4bg3TqDeRcruWyl
Our original work: rowanandsage.com/blog/mugwort
She could not have originated the content in 2020, because the bulk of the text she stole was cited from a source written in 2022. In the post she claims to have written but actually copied and pasted from me, she left "The late herbal historian Stephany Riley Hoffelt" in the text. Stephany passed away last year.
Second, she initiated this entire drama by emailing me and the marketing person from Wild Rose College, attempting to extort us for $5000 after she was caught stealing content from us. We ignored it, and she proceeded to single me out and smear me on social media for months.
Nicole also made up that I called her a white nationalist. I did not. I spoke up on my own profiles about white supremacy in herbal spaces and my experiences as a Persian-Bukharan, mixed woman, and she took that personally. She has consistently taken everything I've ever said personally, for some reason, and has made it her prerogative to insert herself into my life and my business to get likes and views on her monetized accounts.
She has absolutely fixated on the fact that I speak about dismantling white supremacy to deflect from her ongoing theft, defamation, and harassment, and is also attacking other creators and claiming we are all using the "race card." No one is harassing her. She stole from me. I followed the proper channels to get the content taken down. She threatened me with legal action, and my lawyers responded with a cease-and-desist letter.
She keeps claiming I said things that I never did and when we confirmed with Meta that we have no power to restore her personal FB account, she made more posts defaming me with more lies to deflect from her theft.
Ironically, she also claimed that I doxxed her, which I never did, but she posted a screenshot of the letter from my attorney to her with her home address on it. She doxxed herself. And she had her followers doxx me.
All we have asked her to do is take down the content that defames and harasses my company. Content that she is monetizing. She is making money off of harassing me. She stole from me, she threatened me, I responded, and she is still going.
We did nothing to her, and I do not deserve to be defamed because she was caught stealing. It didn't even have to be that big of a deal if she had taken the content down, but she didn't. She still has it posted, and she continues to lie about me to her followers for likes, views, money, and attention.
The path forward is clear, Nicole. Take the content down. Comply with the demands in the letter from my attorneys and move on. I will not lie down and continue to withstand abuse and delusions because you feel entitled to steal from me and other herbalists without consequence.
– Sarah, Founder of Rowan + Sage
