Reputation management rules haven't really all changed after all these years.
It's very simple.
If you see a negative story about your client or yourself after doing a search on a personal name or business name, look to ranking content on many different high-domain platforms to beat that ranking.
Instead of Joe Blow ranking #1 and people can see that he scammed a lot of people, write an article on LinkedIn, Medium, and other properties like Quora or Reddit.
The list is endless.
And then build backlinks to those or issue press releases that build up the links to those.
If you do this right, you will bury the negative story to page 2 or page 3.
Make no mistake.
You can hide the dead body on page 2 because most searchers don't check page 2.
As long as you can rank enough pages on higher-powered domains, you should do it.
That's the secret to online reputation management, which hasn't really changed all that much after 20 years.