Since the summer of 2024, Rebel Wilson has been in the midst of a legal battle with the producers of her directorial debut, The Deb. They’re accusing her of defamation, while she has accused her production team of embezzling, sexual misconduct, and blocking the film from premiering. One of those producers, Amanda Ghost, also alleges that Wilson was at the center of a smear campaign that presented her as a sex trafficker with ties to a “Russian mafia financier.” Now leaked audio appears to show that Wilson’s crisis-PR team did create a narrative that Ghost was a “madame” who was “getting hookers” for The Deb’s billionaire Russian financier.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the man’s voice in the audio recording is digital fixer Jed Wallace, who is instructing publicist Melissa Nathan to make the claims about Ghost, a musician and former record executive. Wilson’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, is also mentioned.
“We have to connect Amanda Ghost with Blavatnik,” a man’s voice who THR reported to be Wallace said, referencing billionaire Len Blavatnik, who owns Ghost’s production company, AI Film. “So basically what we need to do is we need to create a path where we expose Amanda Ghost as like the new Heidi Fleiss. The reason why she sucks so bad at music is ‘cause she’s actually getting hookers for Blavatnik, right? And that’s what she does, she’s an absolute madame and that’s why she’s so lethal, blah blah blah.” He added, “We can’t just do, like, oh, she’s a bitch, she sucks. It’s gotta be really, really heavy and connected to something that heavy.”
Eventually, websites with the domains amandaghost.com and amandaghostsucks.com did show up, both of which used the same language spoken about in the recording (although it’s not clear who created them). The sites referred to Ghost as “[t]he 2000’s Heidi Fleiss” and said she was “the madame for one of the world’s richest men.”
If the names involved here sound familiar, it’s because they’re all part of the other major smear-campaign-related lawsuit of the moment: Blake Lively v. Justin Baldoni. In fact, according to Ghost’s complaint from earlier this year, she received “further confirmation” that there was a smear campaign waged against her from documents filed in the Lively-Baldoni case. Lively’s lawsuit, you may recall, accused Nathan and Wallace of engineering the smear campaign against her as part of Baldoni’s crisis-PR team during the It Ends With Us press tour; Freedman, Wilson’s lawyer, also represents Baldoni in their ongoing case. In Lively’s complaint, the actress alleged that the team, with Nathan and Wallace in the lead, “created, planted, amplified, and boosted content designed to eviscerate Ms. Lively’s credibility.”
“Rebel Wilson has repeatedly denied any involvement in the creation of the smear websites — not just on television but in her sworn legal testimony,” Ghost’s attorney Camille Vasquez said in a statement to THR. “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.”
The Cut has reached out to Nathan, Wallace, Freedman, and a representative for Wilson. We will update this story if we hear back.