I did not follow the defamation trial
between
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard — it followed me.
اضافة اعلان
A few weeks ago, images from the courtroom began to
saturate my social media feeds. Platforms that fed me soothing cake decoration
tutorials and “Sopranos”-themed therapy memes now served up regular dispatches
from the proceedings, all filtered through the glorification of Depp and
mockery of Heard. Heard blows her nose during her testimony, and a
TikTok appears accusing her of snorting cocaine on the stand. Depp adjusts a phone
cord near
Camille Vasquez, his attorney, and the gesture is replayed in slow
motion and exalted as a chivalrous deed. Heard’s attorneys introduce a series
of violent text messages between the couple, and a TikToker films herself
absorbing Depp’s words with panting, orgiastic reverence.
Depp is suing Heard, arguing that she defamed him in
a 2018 Washington Post op-ed where she called herself a “public figure
representing domestic violence”; she is countersuing, arguing that he defamed
her when his lawyer accused her of perpetrating an “abuse hoax.” Many of the trial’s
central incidents were previously aired in court in 2020, when Depp sued the
British tabloid
The Sun for calling him a “wife beater.” He lost that case,
with the judge ruling that Heard’s abuse claims were “substantially true.” But
I didn’t hear about any of that, because that trial was not broadcast live and
replicated obsessively across the internet.
In the 1990s, the O.J. Simpson murder trial ushered
in a new era of 24-hour tabloid news, in which celebrity worship and domestic
violence were fused into an unceasing national spectacle. Judge Lance Ito later
defended his decision to allow that trial to be televised. “If you take the
cameras out of the courtroom, then you hide, I think, a certain measure of
truth from the public,” Ito said. A journalist reporting on the trial, he
added, might unconsciously skew its events through “the filtering effect of
that person’s own biases.”
Nearly three decades later, as the
Depp-Heard trial
makes clear, a camera’s presence in a courtroom is an invitation for the
proceedings to be deliberately, even gleefully tailored to a viewer’s whim.
Platforms like TikTok and YouTube are practically built to manipulate raw
visual materials in the service of a personality cult, harassment campaign, or
branding opportunity.
You might expect a defamation trial pitting one
movie star against another to unleash a fire hose of debased memes in both
directions, but that’s not what’s happening here. The online commentary about
the trial quickly advanced from a he-said she-said drama script to an
internet-wide smear campaign against Heard. As one of
Hollywood’s most
legendary heartthrobs, Depp enjoys a large and besotted fan base. But his
campaign has since attracted the support of men’s rights activists, right-wing
media figures, #BoycottDisney campaigners eager to capitalize off Depp’s status
as a fallen Disney franchise star, sex abuse conspiracists, armchair true-crime
detectives, anyone wary of “the mainstream media” and plenty of opportunists
eager to draft off the trial traffic.
Seemingly harmless YouTube channels and TikTok
accounts dedicated to legal commentary or body-language analysis have pivoted
to pro-Depp content en masse. A husband-and-wife team of personal injury
lawyers now spends its days posting trial-themed dance breaks and humoring Depp
fans; a TikToker who previously ranted almost exclusively about anime has
racked up millions of views with videos of fake Heard text messages he splashes
over a looming
Disney logo. TikTok is a bandwagon platform that rewards users
for jumping unthinkingly on ascendant trends, so figures as innocuous as Lance
Bass and the Duolingo owl mascot have thought it wise to contribute their own
Heard mockery to the platform. If you’re following the trial on social media,
you’re unlikely to encounter Heard’s defense at all.
Anyone else who appears in court risks being lifted into an internet folk hero or smeared as a liar.
Importantly, there is not just one camera in the
Virginia courtroom. The pool camera system, which is operated by Court TV,
films the proceedings from multiple angles, which continually shift to provide
simultaneous shots — of the witness stand and the judge, or the defendants and
the gallery, which is packed with Depp supporters who have lined up overnight
to secure seats.
The sheer amount of material recorded each day
enables viewers to examine every inch of the courtroom with a conspiratorial
zeal, as empty gestures and meaningless asides are whipped into dubious case
clues, spliced into humiliating Heard reaction GIFs or leveraged to build a
charmingly unbothered bad-boy court presence for Depp. (He doodles in court! He
can’t remember the names of his own movies!) Exhibits supporting Heard’s claims
— like a video she recorded of Depp pouring himself a gigantic cup of wine and
violently smashing glasses in their kitchen one morning — are stripped of
evidentiary value and bandied about as memes. Each day of the trial begins with
Depp fans convening online and joking about downing their breakfast “megapints”
of wine.
Anyone else who appears in court risks being lifted
into an internet folk hero or smeared as a liar. Heard’s attorney Elaine
Charlson Bredehoft is branded a “Karen” (once a term for a racist white woman,
it has since been flattened into an all-purpose misogynistic slur) and
conspiratorially constructed as an undercover Depp fan, while Vasquez is cast
as a Depp love interest, hailed as an internet sensation for her “intimate”
interactions with her client. Seemingly every woman tangentially involved in
the case has been imbued with imagined Depp-lust.
Dr. Shannon Curry, an expert
witness called by Depp’s team, has been celebrated for “exchanging glances”
with Depp on the stand; even Curry’s husband, who she mentioned once delivered
muffins to her office, has been inflated into a treasured fan fiction character
referred to as “the muffin man.” Meanwhile, Depp supporters have harassed two
of Heard’s expert witnesses off the medical professional site WebMD, flooding
their profiles with one-star reviews.
Even if they cannot influence the trial itself,
viewers can shape public opinion in real time. Once a fan fiction scenario gains
enough momentum to achieve escape velocity, it is elevated into mainstream
tabloids, which are rife with reports of Depp’s courtroom flirtations and epic
witness-stand one-liners. Once gossip journalists had to craft celebrity story
lines themselves, but now the narratives are lifted straight from social media
and enshrined as Hollywood canon. Gossip sites are regurgitating banal
celebrity internet activity as heartwarming Depp content: Jennifer Aniston
followed Johnny Depp on Instagram as a “subtle sign of support,” the magazine
claimed, and Depp followed Aniston back as a “sweet gesture.”
But when
Julia Fox supported Heard on Instagram, she
soon became the focus of articles about how she was hypocritical and “downright
stupid.” When a celebrity does not provide such dubious material, it may simply
be invented: recently a YouTuber edited and dubbed trial footage to make it
seem as if Heard’s “Aquaman” co-star, Jason Momoa, has appeared on the stand to
fawn over Depp’s lawyer.
It’s tempting to ignore all of this — to refuse to feed the
machine with even more attention. But like Gamergate, which took an obscure
gaming-community controversy and inflated it into an internet-wide
anti-feminist harassment campaign and a broader right-wing movement, this
nihilistic circus is a potentially radicalizing event. When the trial ends this
week, the elaborate grassroots campaign to smear a woman will remain, now with
a plugged-in support base and a field-tested harassment playbook. All it needs
is a new target.
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