A recording obtained by The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Rebel Wilson’s crisis public relations team held a meeting in which they discussed creating anonymous websites falsely accusing the producer of Wilson’s directorial debut, The Deb, of running a sex trafficking operation for billionaires.
In the recording, digital fixer Jed Wallace instructs top entertainment publicist Melissa Nathan to claim, without any supporting evidence, that producer Amanda Ghost is what Wallace calls “the new Heidi Fleiss,” a reference to the Hollywood madam who ran a prostitution ring in the early 1990s.
Wallace’s specific instructions were that Ghost should be portrayed as secretly procuring young women for billionaire Len Blavatnik, the owner of Ghost’s production company AI Film.
“We can’t just do, like, oh, she’s a b****, she sucks,” Wallace says in the recording. “It’s, like, it’s got to be really, really heavy and connected to something that heavy.”
He continued:
“Amanda Ghost is like the new Heidi Fleiss. Like, she masquerades as — the reason why she sucks so bad at music is because she’s actually getting hookers for Blavatnik, right, and that’s what she does.”
Wilson, Freedman, Nathan, and Wallace all declined to comment on the recording. Blavatnik also declined to comment.
The Blake Lively Connection
The names in this story will be familiar to anyone following the It Ends With Us legal saga. Jed Wallace and Melissa Nathan are the same crisis PR operatives accused of running a smear campaign against Blake Lively on behalf of Justin Baldoni.
Bryan Freedman, referenced in the recording as being involved in the Wilson plan, is Baldoni’s current attorney in that case, and was Wilson’s lawyer at the time the smear operation was allegedly being organized.
According to court filings, the recording implicating all three figures in the Wilson operation was discovered as a direct result of the Lively-Baldoni legal battle unearthing communications involving Nathan’s firm, The Agency Group, or TAG.
The document trail connecting them emerged from a breach of contract lawsuit filed by former Baldoni publicist Stephanie Jones against Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer.
At one point in the recording, Wallace explicitly references Freedman’s involvement in the plan, saying the group, including Wallace, Nathan, Freedman, and TAG employee Katie Case, needed to “connect Amanda Ghost with Blavatnik.”
What The Websites Actually Said
The recording was used to instruct Case, then a vice president at TAG, to review a document containing the specific accusations the website would publish.
According to court filings, that document was authored by Camp Sugar, Wilson’s own production company.
Case said in a deposition that she made what she described as “cosmetic changes” to the copy drafted by Camp Sugar and incorporated the specific language requested by Wallace in the audio and by Nathan via text message.
The resulting website, titled “Amanda Ghost is a Destroyer of Worlds” and now deleted, presented itself as a whistleblower account.
It stated that Ghost had abandoned her failing music career by “reinventing herself as a theatrical producer alongside her husband while really procuring young women for the pleasure of the extremely wealthy.”
The site also called Ghost the “Indian Ghislaine Maxwell,” a comparison lawyers for Ghost later described as “malevolent” and “racist,” and alleged she was “notorious for withholding artist’s work from release.”
Case said she was not presented with any evidence corroborating the claims before publishing them and was not aware of anyone at TAG who had researched the accusations.
A separate text chain from August 2024, cited in court filings, shows Nathan telling Case, “So basically, Rebel wants one of those sites. It can be really really harsh. And then link it to the Jed’s voice thing.”
In another message Nathan wrote, “Jed and Bryan asking me for copy lol kill me.”
Wilson at one point also directly messaged her PR team to express frustration, “You were supposed to get the negative information out about Ghost and have failed to do that,” she wrote, according to a court filing.
Case said in her deposition that Wilson’s message did not surprise her — that’s “the way these things work” in the industry — though she noted she never spoke with Wilson directly and only received directions from Wallace regarding the website itself.
Freedman has previously maintained that neither he, Nathan, nor Wallace had any involvement in the smear sites.
Wilson has “unequivocally” denied any role in “conceiving, planning, registering, directing, creating, writing, or posting the content of the websites.”
The Broader Smear Machine
THR’s reporting places the Wilson operation within a pattern that extends well beyond The Deb dispute.
In February, the outlet published an investigation revealing that the network of slanderous anonymous websites connected to Wallace, Nathan, and Freedman appears across multiple high-profile Hollywood legal battles.
The pattern was identified through digital forensics filed in the Jones lawsuit and has since been described by Jones’ attorneys as “a clandestine cottage industry of creating false smear websites and social media accounts targeting their adversaries and those of their clients.”
Actress-turned-activist Alexa Nikolas filed a defamation lawsuit against Freedman and Nathan in February, contending that Freedman “was an integral part of a team working to control unfavorable narratives.” As a defendant in that action, Freedman has remained silent.
Lively’s legal team has described Wallace’s broader work in court as specializing in executing “confidential and ‘untraceable’ campaigns across various social media platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and X, to shape public perception of his clients and their adversaries.”
Wallace has denied this characterization. His attorney describes his business as a “crisis mitigation firm engaged by clients to help navigate real-life human crisis, threats, trauma and mental health concerns.”
Where The Case Stands
The legal battle between Wilson and Ghost has been running since July 2024, when Wilson posted a video on Instagram to her 11 million followers accusing Ghost, co-producer Gregor Cameron, and executive producer Vince Holden of “inappropriate behavior towards the lead actress of the film,” actress Charlotte MacInnes, and of “embezzling funds from the film’s budget.”
Ghost denied the accusations and sued Wilson for defamation. Wilson countersued, accusing the producers of breach of contract, fraud, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
MacInnes denied Wilson’s account and separately sued Wilson for defamation over the sexual harassment claims.
In January 2026, LA Superior Court Judge Thomas Long gutted the majority of Wilson’s claims, tossing six causes of action and declining to allow Wilson to amend her complaint.
He called many of the allegations “conclusory without specific facts” and “abusive,” including a claim that Ghost had stolen partial credit for the James Blunt song “You’re Beautiful.”
Long described the broadest allegations as “debris that just obscures the real issues in the case.”
The lawsuit as it now stands is focused on Wilson’s breach of contract and fair dealing claims against AI Film, the production company, along with a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Ghost’s original defamation lawsuit against Wilson remains active, and has been amended to include the smear website allegations. A jury trial is tentatively scheduled for October 2026.
Ghost’s lawyer Camille Vasquez, who is also Amber Heard’s attorney in the Johnny Depp defamation case, said in a statement:
“Rebel Wilson has repeatedly denied any involvement in the creation of the smear websites — not just on television but in her sworn legal testimony. We, however, had long suspected that she not only contributed to the malicious sites but that she was the driving force behind them. The evidence we have submitted to the court in California supports that conclusion.”
