Rebel Wilson’s Smear Campaign Over ‘The Deb’ Detailed in Leaked Audio

Behind closed doors, Rebel Wilson‘s crisis public relations team discussed plans to create anonymous websites that accused the producer of The Deb of sex trafficking as part of an alleged smear campaign solicited by the actress.

In a recording obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, digital fixer Jed Wallace instructed top entertainment publicist Melissa Nathan to assert without evidence that the producer, Amanda Ghost, is a “madame” whose work involves procuring young women for wealthy and powerful men. Listen:

“We can’t just do, like, oh, she’s a bitch, she sucks,” Wallace says in the recording. “It’s, like, it’s got to be really, really heavy and connected to something that heavy.”

At one point in the private conversation, Wallace references the involvement of Hollywood power lawyer Bryan Freedman, Wilson’s then-counsel, in the plan. The discovery of communications implicating Wallace, Nathan and Freedman can be traced back to the It Ends With Us legal saga, in which Freedman plays a central role, and a breach of contract lawsuit from ex-Baldoni publicist Stephanie Jones against Baldoni and his production company Wayfarer.

The recording bolsters the appearance that Nathan’s The Agency Group — a top PR shop in the entertainment industry whose clients have included Drake and Johnny Depp, and has frequently worked with Freedman — deployed websites featuring character-assassinating claims about Ghost. The conversation was originally recorded in order to relay instructions from Wallace to former TAG vice president Katie Case, who was not on the call. She was told to review a document detailing accusations the site ultimately alleged against the producer. 

Camp Sugar, Wilson’s production company, is named as an author of that document, according to court filings. 

“Rebel Wilson has repeatedly denied any involvement in the creation of the smear websites — not just on television but in her sworn legal testimony,” said Camille Vasquez, a lawyer for Ghost, in a statement. “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.”

Wilson, Freedman, Nathan and Wallace declined to comment. Freedman has previously said that neither he nor Nathan and Wallace were involved in the sites.

According to court filings, in an August 2024 exchange naming Freedman and Wallace, Nathan discusses plans with Case to implement a digital campaign targeting Ghost, who was then engaged in an escalating legal battle with Wilson over the actress’ directorial debut, The Deb. “So basically, Rebel wants one of those sites,” Nathan texts. “It can be really really harsh. And then link it to the [sic] Jed’s voice thing.” Later, she messages Case, “Jed and Bryan asking me for copy lol kill me.”

That copy, allegedly drafted by Camp Sugar, was revised to conform with Wallace’s instructions, Case said in a deposition. In the recording, the digital strategist tells Nathan to claim that Ghost provides billionaire Len Blavatnik, owner of Ghost’s production company AI Film, with sex workers. 

“So basically what we need to do is, we need to create a path where we expose Amanda Ghost,” Wallace says. “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.” (Ghost is best known as a music executive, including her brief, tumultuous tenure atop Epic Records.) 

He adds, “I think you, me, and Bryan and maybe Katie, since she’ll write this thing, what we have to do” is “connect Amanda Ghost with Blavatnik.” (The mogul declined to comment.)

The now-deleted site — titled Amanda Ghost is a Destroyer of Worlds — represents itself as being written by a whistleblower. It stated, in part, “Failing in music she turned full pimp, reinventing herself as a theatrical producer alongside her husband while really procuring young women for the pleasure of the extremely wealthy.” A comparison of the document Camp Sugar allegedly sent to TAG shows identical language, including a phrase that refers to Ghost as the “Indian Ghislaine Maxwell” and an allegation that she’s “notorious for withholding artist’s [sic] work from release.” 

In a deposition, Case said she made “cosmetic changes” to the copy allegedly drafted by Camp Sugar and “included the specific language that had been requested by Jed in the voice note and Melissa via text.” She wasn’t presented with evidence corroborating the claims and wasn’t aware of anyone at the firm who researched the accusations, according to the court document.

“I knew very little about her from cursory searches when we had first taken Rebel on,” Case said. “There was articles about her being a bit of an insidious figure in the music industry, but I didn’t know much past what I could find available online.”

At one point, Wilson demanded her public relations team to distribute adversarial coverage of Ghost, chairwoman of Blavatnik’s AI Film, as the feud worsened, according to a court filing citing a message from the actress. “You were supposed to get the negative information out about Ghost and have failed to do that,” she wrote. 

Case said in her deposition that she wasn’t taken aback by Wilson’s instruction, explaining that’s “the way these things work” and that it “can be somewhat of a tit-for-tat situation” depending on the client. She added that she never spoke with the actress and that she only received directions from Wallace on the website. 

The case has steadily been escalating since The Deb producers Ghost, Gregor Cameron and Vince Holden in 2024 sued Wilson for defamation after she accused them of sexual harassment and embezzlement. A countersuit from Wilson, multiple public statements from the lead actress of the movie denying claims that she was harassed and a lawsuit from the film’s production company alleging that the Pitch Perfect star blocked a distribution deal followed. An inflection point came last year when discovery in the It Ends With Us legal battle unearthed communications laying the groundwork for a new defamation claim against Wilson over the alleged smear sites.

TAG has been an ongoing business partner of Freedman and his law firm. In the past decade, he’s become one of the entertainment industry’s most visible litigators, a regular presence in the media as a self-styled “pit bull” advocate for clients ranging from Kevin Spacey and Chris Cuomo to Diplo and Megyn Kelly — herself a former lawyer who’s vouched for her counsel by explaining, “Once he’s on board for you, he’ll kill for you.” Freedman told THR in 2024, “If you fuck with my client, you get what you get.”

In February, THR revealed how the slanderous sites at the center of the Ghost-Wilson dispute appear to be part of a broader online smear machine which connects to many other recent headline-making sagas. They range from the sex trafficking case involving the socially prominent Alexander brothers who were convicted this month in Manhattan to the legal feud between K-pop entertainment giant Hybe and one of its former top executives.

Digital forensics filed last fall in court for Jones, another alleged victim, first linked Wallace to the wider pattern. Her attorneys contend it’s apparent that Nathan and Wallace have run “a clandestine cottage industry of creating false smear websites and social media accounts targeting their adversaries and those of their clients,” doing so “often in connection with litigation.” They termed this a “playbook.”

Freedman has previously objected to Jones’ technical data, terming it “speculation presented as fact.” He wasn’t identified in Jones’ digital forensics as a culprit, nor named in her suit as a defendant. Yet the subject of another smear site, the actress-turned-activist Alexa Nikolas, sued Freedman as well as Nathan for defamation on Feb. 5. She contended the attorney “was an integral part of a team working to control [unfavorable] narratives.” (As a defendant in Nikolas’ action, he’s so far remained silent on the matter.)

In THR’s February investigation, Ghost’s lawyer Vasquez explained that any litigator’s involvement in commissioning such smear sites would constitute “a profound abuse of power and a betrayal of the lawyer’s role in the justice system.” She added, “secretly engineering false or misleading narratives to intimidate, discredit or pressure an opponent crosses the line from zealous advocacy into misconduct. When a professionally orchestrated smear campaign is weaponized in litigation, it distorts the legal process itself by polluting the fact-finding mission, influencing witnesses and the public, and attempting to win through reputational harm rather than evidence and law.”

Until the It Ends With Us saga pointed a Klieg light at him, Wallace had been an under-the-radar Hollywood operator, with a scant online footprint of his own. The digital fixer, who lives outside Austin, has been compared to the shadowy entertainment industry problem-solver of Showtime’s Ray Donovan. Freedman, his longtime associate, has previously lauded his resourcefulness.

Lively’s legal team has described Wallace’s work in court as specializing in “high-profile and high-net-worth clients,” for whom he executes “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 and to perpetuate those perceptions by, among other things, creating social media accounts with inauthentic users.”

Wallace has denied this, and his own attorney instead characterizes his business as being a “crisis mitigation firm engaged by clients to help navigate real-life human crisis, threats, trauma and mental health concerns,” adding, “It helps primarily families and individuals when they find themselves unjustly attacked, extorted, doxed, swatted, scammed or need help navigating through the most frightening situations.”