Hear that nervous click-click? It’s the sound of celebrities quietly removing their likes from the victorious Instagram statement Johnny Depp posted after winning his libel case against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, earlier this year.
Approximately a gazillion words have been written about the case, so I’m sure I don’t need to recap it. In brief, though, Depp sued Heard for a 2018 op-ed piece in which she said she was a victim of domestic violence but didn’t explicitly name him as the culprit. The televised trial was a sickeningly sordid spectacle – one lawyer described it as the “litigation equivalent of Squid Game”. Heard endured merciless mocking and walked away with her reputation in tatters, while Hollywood largely rallied around Depp.
Now, however, it seems that attitudes toward Depp might be souring. Twitter detectives have noticed that more than a dozen celebrities appear to have “unliked” the actor’s Instagram post over the past two months. That list includes Bella Hadid, Halle Bailey, Amanda Knox(!) and a bunch of other people I’ve never heard of but are apparently very famous.
What could be behind this Great Unliking? Probably the fact that more than 6,000 pages of court documents were recently unsealed, providing a lot of unpleasant new information about Depp. Funnily enough, Depp fans were the ones responsible for thrusting this information into the public eye – they crowdfunded the fees required to get hold of the unsealed documents, which contain allegations that lawyers for Depp and Heard managed to keep out of the trial itself. The idea was to dig up dirt on Heard, but their efforts seem to have backfired: the documents are packed with nasty nuggets of information about Depp and illuminate the extent to which his legal team weaponised misogyny throughout the trial.
