Faith Jenkins Lattimore and Kenny Lattimore had just celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary when they began hearing the rumors: She had cheated. He was secretly gay. They were battling in court.

Normally, they ignore gossip: She is a television judge, he a Grammy-nominated R&B singer; they have small children and no time for hearsay. But these stories were coming from family, friends and strangers. The couple decided to investigate.

They uncovered YouTube videos full of lies and artificially generated content regarding their marriage, a trove that was also contaminating search results about them on Google.

Plenty of people have been anonymously slimed online. Most wait for the scandal to blow over, or maybe post a rebuttal.

The Lattimores chose to fight.

They subpoenaed Google, which owns YouTube, to unmask the video creators. They sued the ones they could identify — a rare step — and spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours on the effort, they said.

Still, their money, legal expertise and willpower could not get all the videos removed or the lies wiped from search engine suggestions. The attention economy, the Lattimores found, is structured to reward the most eye-catching claims, allowing sensationalist but baseless narratives to spread and perpetually resurrect with little resistance from social media platforms. Their grueling, 16-month lesson in modern disinformation underscored that fighting back is not only hard — it rarely undoes the damage.

“Everybody needs to know that this is a warning — this is going to snowball if it remains unchecked,” Ms. Lattimore said.

Through a Google spokesman, YouTube said it took action against content that broke its rules and offered legal avenues for people with complaints, but otherwise did not arbitrate factual disputes.

The Lattimores, along with disinformation experts who reviewed their case, believe that the YouTube creators wanted to exploit the family’s modest fame to maximize views — and ultimately boost their payouts from YouTube by drawing more traffic to advertisements or attracting the platform’s premium subscribers.

Mr. Lattimore, 56, has been described as having a voice as “smooth and glossy as silk sheets” and has recorded 11 studio albums. Ms. Lattimore, 48, a former Miss America runner-up and assistant district attorney in Manhattan, now hosts a true-crime show on Oxygen, “Killer Relationship With Faith Jenkins.” She has also appeared as a judge on courtroom shows like “Divorce Court” and “Judge Faith.”

Each has more than 360,000 followers on Instagram — making them not stratospherically famous, but well known enough to mark them as targets. When the couple posted an anniversary video in March last year recreating a dance from their wedding, it garnered 4.4 million Facebook views and 1.4 million Instagram views.

The lurid YouTube videos soon followed. With titles like “Judge Faith CONFESSES Everything” and “Kenny Lattimore SPEAKS!” they claimed to have inside details about the couple. They were sometimes narrated in women’s voices generated by artificial intelligence, illustrated with A.I.-generated images of the spouses and captioned with fake quotes like “I couldn’t stay silent.” Altogether, the couple found 35 different YouTube videos speculating about rot in their marriage — content that Google’s A.I.-generated search overview then quoted as evidence of divorce.

None of it was true, they said.

“It was nasty,” Mr. Lattimore said in an interview near their home in Southern California. “At that point, I think I felt just completely out of control.”

The video creators may have tried to piggyback off the attention the anniversary video attracted. They may have also targeted the Lattimores because they are Black — the YouTube accounts all focused on Black celebrity culture, despite being operated almost entirely from abroad, the Lattimores said.

Black audiences have long been targeted with digital disinformation about elections, health, social justice and celebrity, said Esosa Osa, the founder of Onyx Impact, a nonprofit organization working to protect Black communities from digital harms. Black adults are also more likely than their white counterparts to regularly use social media platforms and to use hashtags.

Clickbait mercenaries “profit off of race-based tension, and they profit off of race-based engagement,” Ms. Osa said. “They’re going to go where the attention is, and Black public figures carry enormous reach and credibility and emotional resonance, so that makes them a unique target.”

José Castañeda, a spokesman for Google, said YouTube had taken down six channels in the Lattimore case and blocked the account owners from holding or creating other channels. Ten of the videos did not violate the company’s guidelines, he said; the other videos were removed by their creators.

Asked about the inaccurate divorce claim from Google’s A.I. overview, Mr. Castañeda said that when vetted information was scarce, lower-quality content might surface. He added that the overviews are updated frequently.

The Lattimores said the YouTube videos were both a personal affront and a threat to their earning potential. Family is a cornerstone of the couple’s identity online: They post glossy portraits with their toddler daughter and 2-month-old son, plug Mr. Lattimore’s album of lullabies and refer to Ms. Lattimore’s book, “Sis, Don’t Settle: How to Stay Smart in Matters of the Heart.” When the spouses promoted a South African trip for couples last winter, angry fans called them hypocrites, citing the videos’ claims that their marriage was a sham.

“This is affecting how our family members see us, how the business community sees us, whether they trust our brand,” Mr. Lattimore said.

What the couple did next was unusual, said Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University who studies digital influence operations and advised the Lattimores.

“When these kinds of smears happen, so many people tend to assume that they just have to deal with it,” she said. “It’s very rare to see people actually take steps and assert themselves.”

Two months after first finding the videos, Ms. Lattimore sent a formal complaint to YouTube’s legal support team, describing a “coordinated campaign of harassment, synthetic misinformation and targeted abuse.”

The videos repeatedly homed in on and misrepresented the Lattimores through false claims and A.I.-generated portrayals, violating YouTube’s rules about cyberbullying and impersonation, she wrote. They did not constitute commentary, critique or fair use, she added.

The company responded that it was “not in a position to adjudicate the veracity of postings,” according to emails shared with The New York Times. Ms. Lattimore’s only route, YouTube said, was through the court system.

So the lawyer hired a lawyer: Felton T. Newell, who has handled various entertainment disputes. He filed what’s known as a John Doe lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against the unnamed uploaders as well as Google.

To unveil the account owners, Mr. Newell subpoenaed Google. Using the company’s records, the couple identified nine YouTube account owners by name. All were men.

Willie L. Laney Jr. was the only one in the United States, according to a lawsuit the Lattimores filed against him in Maryland. His YouTube channel still peddles dramatic narratives about Black celebrities like Solange Knowles and Denzel Washington. His video titled “Judge Faith Jenkins LOSES IT!” has more than 100,000 views.

This month, a judge denied Mr. Laney’s motion to dismiss the case. Reached by email, Mr. Laney wrote that the Lattimores were painting a “skewed one-sided narrative” but did not provide details.

The Lattimores eventually dropped Google from the lawsuit. The other account owners, operating from Pakistan, India and Russia, were largely out of the couple’s reach.

The U.S. court system offers little recourse against people posting from abroad, even if they claim to be American, the couple said. Mr. Castañeda said YouTube prevents video creators from misrepresenting their locations by requiring them to verify their identity and address and only then allowing them to monetize their content.

The Lattimores did manage to pin down one foreign account owner: Shams Imran, based in Pakistan, who they said ran six channels, several of which had hundreds of thousands of followers and purported to be based in the United States. He posted (and later removed) 11 videos about the Lattimores.

Mr. Imran fought to prevent Google from identifying him, but the Lattimores prevailed and reached a $5,000 settlement in August. Mr. Imran and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

More than a year after their ordeal began, the Lattimores have gotten further in their defensive campaign than most — which is still not very far. Several videos remain visible. Some of the YouTube operators changed their account names and kept posting. “Divorce” is still one of the first suggestions when users search for the couple on Google. Interest in the spouses spilled over onto platforms such as X, where the number of posts mentioning them has surged over the past year, according to Peakmetrics, an analytics company.

“I can’t advise people to go down the rabbit hole of litigation — it’s just not a sustainable response to dealing with this online defamation,” said Ms. Lattimore, who throughout the fight was also struggling with a difficult pregnancy. “That’s why YouTube has to do something — it’s really their responsibility at this point.”

The couple are now pushing the platform to make broader changes.

In February, they appeared with Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer, at a news conference announcing the complaints he had filed with the U.S. attorney general and the Federal Trade Commission about YouTube’s monetization policies. The couple will also lobby Congress this summer, joining a bipartisan group that has long sought to change Section 230, a federal law that shields internet companies from liability over the content they host.

“You think it’s going to stop with just us, as public figures?” Ms. Lattimore said. “It’s a very low bar to entry into this kind of business.”