Abuse as Entertainment

For years, the online hate against Amber was unrelenting, but something shifted during the start of the Virginia trial. Even without the excluded evidence, what was allowed at trial showed to anyone who paid attention that he was a violent and vindictive person who isn't worthy of praise and adoration. It wasn't enough to make people hate her; they needed to try and make Depp likable.

During the Virginia trial, bots and opportunistic accounts started to crop up, continuing the push of negative Amber content as well as new pro-Depp content. Websites like Law and Crime, who streamed the trial and likely profited from it, created top 10 lists of Depp's "best comebacks and reactions" during testimony. They were framed as being funny and charming, except when viewed in a larger context, showed Depp's disrespect and contempt towards being questioned under oath. He couldn't keep himself from getting angry and making jabs at Amber's attorney. Behavior that would, in any other circumstance, be admonished was now celebrated.

Outside the courthouse, you had fans dressed as poop emojis and pirates. Hundreds of people lined the streets for blocks with posters professing their love for Depp or their hatred of Amber. People actually brought live alpacas to the courthouse as a nod to Depp saying he'd never return to the Pirates franchise even for 300 million dollars and a million alpacas. Depp's attorneys even took pictures and signed autographs like this was a major league sporting event and not a trial detailing severe abuse allegations.

Snippets of every witness's testimony were cut into out-of-context clips with sensationalized titles and clickbait thumbnails every single day in real-time to push the narrative that Depp and his team were crushing Amber and that every one of her witnesses was being caught in lie after lie.

Tiktoks about the trial exploded. Tiktok feeds their users' content based on their own unique algorithm, so what one person sees, another won't, yet during the trial, the same content was being pushed to everyone. Regardless of your typical feed and despite telling whatever platform you were on that you weren't interested, the content didn't stop. It was enough to make some people suspicious, but the general public ran with the "fun" and completely lost sight of the fact that even if you believed Depp was the victim, you were still laughing and making a joke of serious abuse.

You had people dressing themselves and their children as pirates. You had adults acting out Amber's testimony describing assaults she suffered at the hands of Depp. You had women making Tiktoks over the sound of Amber's sexual assault testimony, asking what Johnny Depp did wrong, or pretending to be turned on by the description of rape. Parents would enlist their children in acting out descriptions of the physical violence.

It wasn't just Youtube personalities and Twitch streamers trying to cash in. Restaurants, such as Starbucks, had employees putting out two different tip jars. One with Amber's picture and one with Depp's, to see who people thought was the "winner" and generate more tips. Etsy shops started producing pro-Depp or anti-Amber merchandise. One person made a picture of Depp dressed as his Alice In Wonderland character holding Amber's severed head. A sex toy company made a dildo in the shape of the alcohol bottle Depp is accused of raping her with. An app creator made an app called "Hurds Turds." He attempted to market it and when he received pushback denied that his blonde character that poops in beds wasn't aimed at Amber. New tattoos of Depp's likeness started cropping up. Some even got tattoos in honor of his attorney Camille Vasquez.

Tubi, a streaming platform, made a movie about the trial only months after it ended. Keeping with the pro-Depp narrative, they hired actors who were more similar in age to erase the fact that Depp was twice Amber's age. The male lead even looked younger than the character playing Amber.  SNL dedicated a skit to the trial, mocking Amber.  Domestic violence was turned into online entertainment.

People who had probably never given any thought to Johnny Depp before were suddenly entrenched in an online parasocial bond with him. They created cutesy, infantilized pictures of him as if he were a tiny, innocent baby who never admitted to wanting to drown, burn, and rape Amber's corpse. As if he didn't admit to wishing life would take the gift of breath from her. As if he didn't wish her corpse was rotting in the back of a Honda Civic. As if he didn't call her a dangling, overused flappy fish market. As if over a dozen witnesses, including several of his own, didn't testify to seeing injuries on Amber inflicted by his hands.