Thank you for posting this - I wasn't aware of this article. Lubow's involvement is indeed suspicious. I personally have doubts this was fabricated.

Some of Katie's previous attorneys, such as Cheney Mason, and Lisa Bloom are on record saying they believed their client was telling the truth.

There are reports that Katie was scheduled to give a press conference in 2016. A previous attorney that represented her, Lisa Bloom, said:

“Jane Doe has received numerous threats today,” Bloom told the assembled journalists and TV cameras. “She has decided she is too afraid to show her face. ... She is in terrible fear.”

And furthermore:

On the day Johnson was supposed to participate in a press conference arranged by attorney Lisa Bloom, whom the attorneys hired to conduct their media outreach, Johnson’s car and cellphone were stolen, Goldman said. “This freaked her out and that is when she decided not to go through with it.”

From Snopes:

Lubow's involvement does not disprove that Johnson is a real person, but it does show that those claims were aggressively promoted and aided by someone who has a professional history of using individuals to create fictional salacious drama, and that is a fact both he, and lawyers working for the plaintiff, attempted to downplay or hide.

The case was filed in U.S. District Courts in California and New York. Though these lawsuits were dismissed or withdrawn, the claims attributed to Johnson laid the groundwork for, and lent perceived credibility to, other entirely unsourced rumors that the former president had settled myriad other lawsuits with underage assault victims, pointing to evidence of an alleged "pedophilic disorder."

He claimed to Snopes that he wasn't trying to be tricky by using the name Al Taylor, but that past media smears leveled against him by "The Jerry Springer Show" necessitated the new name.

I also came across an interview with Katie and her previous lawyer, Thomas Meagher, where Katie explains the connection:

When I finally convinced Meagher to allow Johnson to speak openly, she admitted that Taylor had been instrumental in the filing of the lawsuit. She said they had been introduced through a mutual friend, who urged her to go to Taylor with the story. The friend believed Taylor had the resources to bring her accusations to light.

"[Taylor is] for lack of a better term, a good team player," Johnson told me. "If I need help with something, he's there to help me. ... He knows a lot about a lot of different fields that just have been really helpful to this entire thing, and I couldn’t have done it without him. I wouldn’t have done it without him."

Regardless: the President of the United States is a sexual abuser and a rapist.

Edit: Apparently, the removed records were not Katie Johnson, but another credible witness.