Did a $100 million lawsuit filed by Gavin Newsom against Nick Shirley, Willie Nelson, and a dozen other celebrities collapse after whistleblower testimony? No, that's not true: The story that California's governor filed a defamation lawsuit against a long list of people who "publicly criticized state-level financial handling" was made up by a network of foreign-run Facebook pages and websites. The network, managed out of Vietnam, regularly publishes dozens of copies of the same made-up story but swapping in different celebrities as the main character.
Almost identical versions of the claim were made on Facebook about at least 14 people, including a post (archived here) published by the Whispered Praise page on March 26, 2026. The text opened:
Gavin Newsom's $100 million lawsuit against Phil Wickham completely collapsed in court after a whistleblower's testimony lasting just nine seconds, turning the entire legal landscape upside down. What began as a large-scale defamation lawsuit against Wickham--after he publicly criticized state-level financial handling--unexpectedly turned into a legal disaster. The lawsuit, seen as a strong move to protect Newsom's reputation, was dramatically altered in less than ten seconds by the unexpected appearance of a witness reportedly from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Fri Apr 3 04:38:32 2026 UTC)
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Whispered Praise page on Facebook)
A Google search (archived here) for the keywords "Gavin Newsom's $100 million lawsuit against" found no credible evidence such lawsuits were filed by Newsom.
A Facebook search (archived here) for the keywords "Gavin Newsom's $100 million lawsuit" and "completely collapsed" revealed nearly-identical Facebook posts naming these people as targets of the failed lawsuits:
- Anthony Hopkins
- Brandon Lake
- Bruno Mars
- Chris Stapleton
- Eminem
- Jasmine Crockett
- Katt Williams
- Kid Rock
- Marc Anthony
- Nick Shirley
- Phil Wickham
- Snoop Dogg
- Vince Gill
- Willie Nelson
(Image source: Lead Stories montage of Facebook screenshots)
The Facebook page hosting the Wickham post is managed from Vietnam, according to Meta's transparency data (archived here).
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of Meta transparency data for Whispered Praise page on Facebook)
The post links to an article (archived here) hosted at goldflow.daily24.world, which is based in Vietnam, according to its "terms of service" page (archived here).
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of goldflow.daily24.world)
The article offers no sourcing for the claim and has the hallmarks of AI-generation.
The Vietnam connection is significant, since fact checkers, including Lead Stories, have identified a major source of AI-generated false stories coming from a single operation based in that Southeast Asian country. You can see recent reporting and fact checks mentioning that country here.
Lead Stories has published a primer -- or a prebunk -- on how to identify these kinds of fake posts exported from Vietnam. It's titled "Prebunk: Beware Of Fake Fan Pages Spreading False Stories About Your Favorite Celebrities -- How To Spot 'Viet Spam.'"
