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. (Depp has denied ever hitting or assaulting Heard; she is countersuing him for a hundred million dollars.)
As 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 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.
According to Wired, the hashtag #JusticeforJohnnyDepp has surpassed ten billion views on TikTok. Parody
videos of Heard’s emotional testimony are already a TikTok cliché. 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. (The Daily Wire has not commented on the story.) NBC News has
reported on the YouTube creators who pivoted to anti-Heard videos when they realized how much users and the algorithm liked them.
But that half-sentence in the
Post—that’s the whole case. That’s fifty million dollars. Depp lost a 2020 defamation
lawsuit against a British tabloid, the
Sun, which was far more brazen in its language—it called Depp a “wife beater”—and, despite the United Kingdom’s strict libel laws and a reversed burden of proof, the High Court in London found the vast majority of Heard’s claims to be “substantially true.” And yet, earlier this month, the presiding judge in the Virginia case, Penney Azcarate,
rejected Heard’s motion to dismiss. Azcarate cited “evidence that jurors could weigh that the statements were about the plaintiff, that the statements were published and that the statement was false, and that the defendant made the statement knowing it to be false or that the defendant made it so recklessly as to amount to willful disregard for the truth.”