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The Case Of The Man Who Got Deported For His Billie Eilish Joke Just Got More Complicated

Dmitri Bolt
Dmitri Bolt  |  February 17, 2026 3:15 PM

An Australian man, Drew Pavlou, claimed Monday that he was detained and deported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after publicly joking that he planned to fly to Los Angeles and move into Billie Eilish’s $6 million Malibu home, citing her Grammys remark that “nobody is illegal on stolen land.” 

The story grew more complicated, however, as it was revealed that Eilish not only reported him, but her legal team allegedly leveraged a 2022 incident, when Pavlou’s email was used by the Chinese embassy in Britain to send false bomb threats, to frame him as a terrorism risk.

Pavlou, in a lengthy post on X, wrote that he was interrogated about "whether I had tried to blow up Chinese government facilities," or whether he had "tried to assassinate Chinese government officials."

Pavlou wrote that the "insane allegation goes back to July 2022 when I was the victim of a SWATing attempt by the Chinese Embassy in London," after "they used ProtonMail to send a fake bomb threat in my name while I protested outside."

He wrote that he "was brutally arrested by London Metropolitan Police as a terror suspect before being totally and completely cleared by British authorities once it became clear that I had been SWATed by the Chinese Embassy. The Chinese Ambassador to Australia literally laughed about my arrest on Australian television and gloated about it at the time."

Later, adding that the incident was "part of a broader overall state harassment campaign," by the Chinese, as "the head of the Australian Federal Police [AFP] ultimately testified to the Australian Senate that the AFP carried out police raids in Australia to disrupt a pro-CCP foreign interference plot to find my address and violently harm me."

Pavlou later went on Australia's Sky News to detail the entire incident.