Photo by Elvert Barnes.

D.C. homegrown boutique fitness chain Solidcore’s New York expansion is facing a rocky start.

Bianca Jade, a fitness, health, and wellness influencer and TV host, went to a press preview of the Solidcore workout last week in the Big Apple. She didn’t like it—it was too dark and the music was too loud, so she felt like it was unsafe—and left 40 minutes into the 50 minute class. “I’m training for a marathon and I don’t want to mess up my legs for my race in two weeks,” she says.

Jade shared her thoughts shortly thereafter in a story on Instagram, where she has 115,000 followers.

She says she wasn’t trying to attack Solidcore. “As fitness influencers always do, I shared my opinion online,” says Jade. “We’re trusted as people who are honest with their followers.”

That’s when the private messages began.

It started with a note from Solidcore’s founder and CEO, Anne Mahlum, about an hour after Jade posted. “Sorry you didn’t like the class, but there was really no need for you to be rude to my staff, or frankly to anyone … ever,” Mahlum’s message reads. “Best of luck to you.”

For her part, Jade says that she wasn’t rude to anyone and barely interacted with staff before leaving. While she was there, she says, she spoke to Solidcore’s publicist, Robin Diamond, and asked the instructor, who she later found out was Mahlum herself, to turn down the music.

Mahlum has spent the past five years building Solidcore into a multimillion dollar extreme pilates and bootcamp empire, which she began after founding Back On My Feet, a nonprofit that uses running to decrease homelessness. As Solidcore has continued to grow, she’s faced a pair of legal battles. But at least one employee sees the positive in the litigation, telling Washingtonian, “It’s almost like ‘Thank God for the lawsuit because if Anne were not slowed down a little bit, we’d all be running around even crazier and opening ten more studios.’”

Solidcore attendees have included Michelle Obama and Ivanka Trump, and the brand already has outposts in Florida, Minnesota, Texas, and more.

After the message from Mahlum, Jade received others from Solidcore employees. One, sent by a woman who identifies herself on Instagram as a Soldicore pro coach and recruiter in Philadelphia, wrote that Jade “didn’t have a great experience because you didn’t walk in with an open mind and you weren’t ready to step outside your ‘normal’ workouts. Thankfully one opinion is not every opinion!”

A tipster initially alerted DCist to the exchanges because Jade began posting some of the messages on her Instagram story. When contacted, she provided her side of the story and the screenshots she had taken of the messages, which she says are a small sampling of what she received.

In her Instagram story, she said that Solidcore employees “continue to ‘nicely’ harass me because I didn’t like their workout.”

The pro coach wrote back, “Not harassing you! I’m sticking up for the workout you bashed on a [sic] your social media page that has inspired and changed lives!”

Instagram screenshots courtesy of Bianca Jade.

From there, Jade tells DCist, “it progressively got worse and worse … my phone was off the hook buzzing and ringing with all the nasty messages.”

“Are you in amphetamines or ice?” one woman, who identifies herself on Instagram as a New England Patriots cheerleader and certified health and wellness coach, said in response to Jade’s story.

When Jade turned that message into the next part of her story, the woman wrote, “Wow you have no life. And who does your chemical peels because I’d avoid them. Your face is burnt off.”

Jade says this typifies the next wave of messages she received, which insulted her appearance and asked if she was on drugs.

Robin Diamond, Solidcore’s publicist, says over email that the fitness company is aware of the exchanges, and that the screenshots exonerate Solidcore.

“You can clearly see there is no harassment from anyone who actually works” there, Diamond says. “We can’t control what people do.”

Jade is skeptical. The messages “were all saying the same thing,” she says. “It’s not a coincidence that 50 people messaged me within 10 minutes calling me a meth head.”

Diamond denies that Solidcore played a part in that. “Of course not,” she says.

Jade says that, despite a long history of “blogging about fitness even before Instagram,” this series of interactions has been singular.

“I get the trolls, but usually they’re men who are anti-feminist, not women,” she says. “I don’t find these kind of women very often who want to say mean, cruel things and attack each other’s looks.”

The private messages subsided after a day, according to Jade. She adds: “You can’t call yourself fitness and then try to attack and insult and harass people. That’s not fitness. Fitness is good for your body.”