The conservative site the Daily Wire spent tens of thousands of dollars to promote mainly anti-Heard content on Facebook and Instagram about the trial, per a story in Vice World News. Parody videos of Heard’s emotional testimony are already a TikTok cliché. According to Wired, the hashtag #JusticeforJohnnyDepp has surpassed ten billion views on TikTok. The precise demographics of the pro-Depp coalition are diverse, if uncertain in their exact proportions: bots, shitposters, men’s-rights activists, women who were in middle school when “Edward Scissorhands” came out.
(Depp has denied ever hitting or assaulting Heard she is countersuing him for a hundred million dollars.)Īs for whether Heard has “felt the full force of our culture’s wrath,” a quick glance at Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms, where she is cast as the Medusa of Sunset Boulevard, may settle the question.
The careful legal vetting of her Post op-ed may be evident in the wording: Heard calls herself a “public figure representing” abuse, not a victim or survivor of it she does not name Depp, nor does she specify a type of abuse. She also has a trove of text messages, witness statements, and photos of injuries-which, she says, corroborate her allegations of abuse.
But so much of the online chatter about the trial is noise rather than signal it has obscured how simple the core matter is, and how that simplicity makes the case all the more bizarre and tragic.ĭepp’s fifty-million-dollar defamation claim against Heard rests on the first part of one sentence, which she published in an op-ed in the Washington Post in December, 2018: “Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” It is incontestable that, two years earlier, Heard did indeed appear on the cover of People magazine with apparent facial injuries and that, around the same time, she obtained a temporary restraining order alleging domestic violence against her husband she was photographed leaving the courthouse with what looked like a bruise on her cheek. They aren’t entirely wrong: Depp-Heard 2022, playing at least through the end of this week in Fairfax, Virginia, is the sludge pit of an outlandishly toxic relationship. In recent weeks, as the defamation trial brought by Johnny Depp against his ex-wife Amber Heard has continued to overshadow nearly all other news stories and dominate the main social-media platforms, I’ve noticed that the normal people in my life-the ones who have not had the Law&Crime Network live stream of the proceedings running on their laptops since it began, in April-are often under the impression that the case is impenetrably complex.