Do celebrities get paid to wreck expensive cars?

On a new E! Special called Secret Societies of Hollywood, Private Investigator John J. Nazarian alleges that some celebrity car accidents are actually well-designed product placement for the expensive cars! What the what?

The segment of the program dealing with this issue is very brief, but it’s something that isn’t often talked about and speculated about.

Narrator: “Rumors abound that some hollywood stars have purposely staged accidents as part of a highly secretive, but very lucrative practice called celebrity product placement.”

John J. Zazarian: “I don’t know what some of these people get paid to crash some of these expensive cars. The more accidents a celebrity can have in a Bentley, the better it is for that brand to say look ‘Look! Celebrity so-and-so wrecked one of our cars.’ They don’t care, as long as the name is out there. It’s all about the money, and it’s all about the attention you can bring to a subject, and that’s what a PR person does.”

Celebrity product placement is currently injected into every moment of public celebrity life (it’s almost never an accident when you can clearly see that a celebrity is carrying Smartwater while jogging, or a Red Bull can while doing errands,) but getting into fake car accidents seems a little extreme.

Still, you never can tell with Hollywood. Everything’s a facade.