The host
Mark Groubert
Host of Celebrity Crime & Rehab on Wassup With Lordbuckly?. He has spent years inside the rehab business, as a reporter and as an operator, and that is the file this paper follows.
The rehab file
In 2008, for the LA Weekly series Rehab City, Groubert checked into Impact Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center in Pasadena as a resident. Only the executive director, Jim Stilwell, knew he was a reporter. Staff and patients did not. In that story he wrote that he had never been a patient in a rehab. The same series took apart Passages Malibu, the luxury “cure” above Pacific Coast Highway, and mapped Los Angeles treatment centers.
His published author biography says that in 2004 he and associates opened the Malibu Coast Treatment Center, a licensed six-bed luxury rehab in the Santa Monica Mountains.
The book is Rehab Nation: Inside The Secret World of Celebrity Drug Rehabs. It is his account of the business: the operators, the celebrities cycling through, and what it is like to walk in as a phony patient. He was a regular guest on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s radio show, and he has explained the Malibu model on television.
He now hosts Celebrity Crime & Rehab each week on Wassup With Lordbuckly?. The desk copy on this site follows that show.
Before the beat
Groubert is a native New Yorker and lives in Los Feliz. He has edited National Lampoon and the Weekly World News, published MTV Magazine, produced documentaries for HBO, and written screenplays as a member of the Writers Guild. Since 2005 he has reviewed film and books for Crooks and Liars. He also hosts America’s Untold Stories. On X he is @lordbuckly.
Who writes the stories
The articles on this desk are written by the California Fried Journalist, the byline on every story. The Journalist transcribes Groubert’s shows with AI and turns those transcripts into the articles.
What Groubert says on the air is his commentary and opinion. The write-up is the Journalist’s. Allegations stay allegations until a court decides them.
Rehab record drawn from Groubert’s 2008 LA Weekly reporting, including “Going Undercover at Impact House,” and from the author biography published with Rehab Nation.