Discovery in the legal battle over It Ends With Us has unearthed communications laying the groundwork for a defamation lawsuit against Rebel Wilson from the producer of her directorial debut, The Deb, who says the actress was behind a series of anonymous websites that accused her sex trafficking.
Last year, The Deb producers Amanda Ghost, Gregor Cameron and Vince Holden 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 film’s production company alleging that the Pitch Perfect star blocked a distribution deal followed.
And on Wednesday, Ghost filed another defamation claim against Wilson, this time for allegedly directing her public relations agency to spread “malevolent lies and smears” about her. She alleges Melissa Nathan, Justin Baldoni’s crisis publicist, sent a dossier of false information about her, with the intent of setting up the websites, according to the complaint.
Nathan wrote in a text to another publicist at her agency, per the lawsuit: “So basically Rebel wants a one of those sites… Should be a mixture of that document that I think Carolina pulled about Amanda or the intern pulled… It can be really really harsh… Russian oligarchs and making her a madam basically lol.”
Until last month, Wilson was represented in the case by Bryan Freedman, Baldoni’s lawyer who was allegedly involved in efforts by Nathan and her firm, TAG PR, to undermine Blake Lively’s reputation in retaliation for speaking up about sexual misconduct on the set of the film.
Ghost’s lawsuit says the websites, which are no longer active, “carry the unmistakably defamatory meaning” that the producer is “engaged in sex trafficking and pimping women.” They include statements that she’s the “Indian Ghislaine Maxwell,” became a “madame for one of the world’s richest men,” and that she reinvented herself as a producer “while really procuring young women for the pleasure of the extremely wealthy.”
Also at issue: “This strain of constantly procuring women could explain her company UNIGRAM’s financial loss of 4.7M pounds last year. And let’s only hope the hookers made up for losing her financier $25M by mounting The Great Gatsby stage musical to simply reward an actress for remaining silent about the abuse she suffered at Ghost’s hands.”
The lawsuit brings defamation claims against Wilson, Nathan, who declined to comment, and TAG.
Wilson has maintained that actress Charlotte MacInnes falsely claimed that she wasn’t sexually harassed by Ghost. In a post on The Deb‘s Instagram account, she wrote that the movie “will never get released because of her lies and support for the people blocking the film’s release.” She added, “So glad you got your record deal Charlotte at the expense of the 300 people who worked on The Deb and really wanna see it released.”
A lawsuit filed against Wilson in July accuses her of interfering with a distribution deal for the movie, with the intent of buying the rights to the musical herself.
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