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Sung by Heard’s lawyers, Musso’s song mocks how often they raised objections to Depp’s comments at the helm.
“I used to respect. People took me at my word,” he begins to sing with pop music rhythms in the background. “Then I became an attorney representing Amber Heard. “
In fact, the week-long drama about the trial between two of Hollywood’s biggest stars ended up fitting into one of the most popular topics on the internet. Among the images of the ongoing Russian attack in Ukraine, the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, the National Abortion Debate that sparked protests in the United States, and rising inflation, are video clips from the same static, dark-paneled courtroom that went viral.
The case began as a reaction to a 2018 Heard op-ed in the Washington Post amid the motion #MeToo opposing sexual harassment, discrimination and assault. His article, which dealt with the domestic violence he had suffered, did not call Depp by call. he sued her in 2019, alleging that Heard defamed him and that she was the aggressor. The following year, Heard counterattacked Depp.
Then they were in court, with a camera live feed streaming free to the internet from their proceedings in Fairfax County, Virginia, and millions tuned in. Some people watched because it was entertaining. Others cheered on their preferred side. Before the trial’s concluding week, Saturday Night Live lampooned the case as a spectacle being put on “for fun.” In reaction, critics have said they’re disgusted by how callously audiences treated the case.
But that didn’t stop people sharing links, watching videos by the millions and tumbling further down the rabbit hole, remixing trial footage into their own brand of parody.
That included Musso, who didn’t initially plan to post his 87-second tune to the internet, until his girlfriend convinced him to put it on YouTube. And then on TikTok. Less than two weeks later, his song has racked up more than 15 million views.
Musso thought the trial “was ridiculous, and most people seem to agree,” he said. After all, to him it’s just one rich person suing another rich person while airing out their drama to the public.
Search for Depp or Heard on YouTube or TikTok, and most of what you’ll find are short clips from the trial with tabloid-worthy headlines like Johnny Depp Destroys Amber Heard’s Lawyer (13 million views) or one drawn from a now famous quote from Heard’s testimony, “I did not punch you, I was hitting you” (29 million views). The people who run these accounts say they uploaded the clips, which run to several minutes in length, to draw attention to a detail they believed was important that might otherwise get overlooked.
Critics, meanwhile, worry it’s turned from mocking celebrities to encouraging harassment of abuse victims. That particularly became clear after Saturday Night Live lampooned the trial in a May 14 skit, reducing Depp’s and Heard’s arguments over domestic abuse to, as SNL said, “a news story we can all collectively watch and say, ‘Glad it ain’t me?'”
“Domestic violence is not a joke,” sex and culture critic Ella Dawson tweeted in a viral thread hours after the comic strip aired. of us we are already disgusted. “
Despite the reviews, SNL’s video garnered more than four million views on the first day after its release, more than any other video posted through the screen in the past month. At noon on Monday, SNL posted the most modern video on YouTube. Other accounts on YouTube and TikTok have had similar success, accumulating prospects and torrents from new subscribers. And some have also taken out money.
The creators seem to tell the same story about the development of interest in judgment over time. Eventually, they released videos because they’ve been longtime Depp enthusiasts since their days as Jack Sparrow in the multimillion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean films, or perhaps his most recent career as villain Gellert Grindelwald in the Harry Potter prequel series, Fantastic Beasts (a role he lost amid controversy surrounding the couple’s separation).
Haider Ali said he saw himself in Depp and Heard’s explosive marriage, which began in 2015 and ended after just over a year. Heard filed for divorce and received a temporary restraining order. Ali, a 27-year-old virtual artist and internet developer, said he had been a victim of domestic violence and that the idea of sharing clips of the trial on YouTube could help others who have also been in this situation.
“I posted some videos and they didn’t look very good, and I sat down and wondered, ‘Why am I posting those videos?'”Then, his third video reached more than 2 million views. And a day later, it reached 2. 6 million views. Within a week, his channel had gone from his self-proclaimed roots as a singer-songwriter, which saw him play rock with his electric guitar, to multi-minute videos of the trial.
Johnny Depp in a Virginia court in his defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard.
One of the most popular to date, with over 2. 6 million views, shows Depp and Heard on screen, covered in laughing emojis, and the name Witness Dr. Dawn Hughes remembers nothing.
Ali said he uses emoji with dramatic titles like Johnny Depp’s lawyer Ben Chew Blasts Amber Heard, because that’s the culture of the internet sites he grew up with, like Twitter, Tumblr and MySpace. ” he said.
Alice Parkes went further. She created animations to broadcast in the audio of the actual trial, ridiculing everyone involved. His most popular video to date shows Heard doodling while Depp is in charge, until he accuses Heard or one of his friends of defecating in the couple’s bed, how he sweats a lot and is visibly uncomfortable.
“I thought, ‘The absurdity of total judgment would seem so lively funny,'” Parkes said. viral with more than 12. 7 million views. Three more successful videos later, he has around 108,000 fans and joined the TikTok Creator Fund that will pay him for video views.
“Maybe I do it and, you know, make money from it, which would be good,” he said.
Legal dramas have long been a mainstay of American pop culture. TV as Law
For more than 30 years, cable television and, eventually, internet broadcasting have given other people the opportunity to see every moment of a high-profile case. All the attention is also changing the way we look at those legal proceedings. Often, the maximums seen are called the “judgment of the century. “
“With big demands like this, you get the rare opportunities where virtually everyone has at least a little passing knowledge of what’s going on,” said Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
Millions of other people across the country were glued to their televisions watching soccer star O. J. Simpson’s murder trial in 1995, the indecent assault trial of pop star Michael Jackson in 2005 or the heartbreaking case surrounding the death of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony in 2011. And in each of the major cases cited as pop culture phenomena, the court drama has become as fascinating a subject as the cases in the case.
While Depp v. Heard has nothing like a thief trial, or the political significance of a presidential impeachment, it has a dramatic story full of lewd characters and details.
And it has social networks.
“With O. J. ‘s trial, you might just turn it off,” said Paul Booth, a media professor at DePaul University in Chicago. “You may just not see it. You may just not read the newspaper. “
But the computer systems that run our social networks on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and TikTok continue to force Depp v. We’ve heard about it because while we’re not interested, our friends are.
And rabbit burrows created through social media can also replace our perspective. Social feeds may start showing you only pro-Depp videos and posts, because that’s what apps think you’ll want. And, Booth added, TikTok’s short video format makes it even harder to find nuance beyond stories of smart or bad guys that other people have compatibility with.
“Where it gets bad or gets problematic,” he said, “is when you lose that kind of criticism and you start to think that the rabbit hole you’ve come to is the whole world, and you lose your attitude about everything else. “
The online denigration of political style between Depp enthusiasts and Heard advocates has not only made it difficult for a web passerby to temporarily perceive what is happening. It has also made the task more complicated for other people like rep and psychologist Amy Singer. called to consult on high-risk cases, adding the trial of thieves of Casey Anthony and the civil trial of Michael Jackson.
The singer is not a representative of Depp or Heard, but she was watching. Singer’s team has a set of social media listening teams that infer what jurors might think by following other people’s social media posts with similar backgrounds and demographics. What he discovered was not the typical political debate we hear in an emotional homicide case, or the cultural conversations we have about child abuse in sexual assault trials.
Instead, Singer detects discrepancies between the fandoms of the two movie stars.
“It’s more like a political debate,” he said, calling the trial a “pig for pig” case, where “who doesn’t care who wins?”
If you don’t get bombarded with Depp vs. Depp videos. Depp vs. Depp Videos The “adult population” that follows on Facebook and Twitter is more involved in the war and inflation in Ukraine. “They’re not talking about Amber Heard. ‘ Amber who?”
Some online videos hint at the little moments when Johnny Depp and Amber Heard appear in the courtroom.
Lahiru Darsha started posting videos about Depp vs. Heard when he felt that the trial did not pass in the direction of the Pirates of the Caribbean star. Soon, Darsha posted short videos, less than 2 minutes long, on her YouTube channel, Redux Dreams Lab. .
Before the trial, the 25-year-old’s channel had more common videos of his streaming game from the hit crime drama game Grand Theft Auto. a few months while I was in school to get a degree in cybersecurity.
But his Depp videos took off, gathering millions of perspectives a few days after their release. millions of perspectives. By the end of his first day offload, he had earned $3,700.
“I tried to draw attention to the urgent things missing from live broadcasts,” he said. And the excitement of finding an audience, most of which were positive for him, encouraged Darsha to upload even more videos.
He has earned more than $11,000 since the lawsuit began and plans to use the money to help build a space in Sri Lanka, where he lives, or to study abroad in Europe. He also intends to pay his circle of relatives who supported him. their studies.
Several days after May, Darsha discovered that her YouTube earnings had plummeted. He then heard rumors that YouTube moderators were penalizing accounts that posted clips of the trial, so he hid those videos. After this story was published, YouTube further reduced its profits by several thousand dollars. YouTube did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
Amid the courtroom clips drawn from the broadcast, YouTube and TikTok users also devoted their time to sober and serious analysis.
DC attorney Devin Stone, who runs the YouTube channel LegalEagle, posted a roughly 22-minute video describing the case and what prompted it. But he began his video by mocking the avalanche of videos encouraging Depp and denigrating Heard. mixing and countermixing is already becoming a circus,” he said in his video, which garnered more than 1. 7 million views. “Determining the veracity of domestic violence allegations is invariably a complicated prospect. As a result, the public reaction to those allegations has been incredibly polarizing. “
The excitement heightened the conflicting testimonies of Depp and Heard at the helm, whose evidence in the form of recordings of non-public interactions and text messages, which celebrities regularly review to protect themselves from the public, stood out.
The drama gave married attorneys Ashleigh Ruggles Stanley, 28, and Maclen Stanley, 31, a chance to bring a celebrity culture to their TikTok account, @the. law. says. what.
“When other people think about the law, it sounds very boring and not like an exciting TikTok you’d like to see,” Ashleigh said. “So there’s a connection to everything that other people are already interested in. . . other people are delighted to see. “
They also broke down in tears and reacted in the courtroom, attracting more than 12. 8 million perspectives for his 59-second video explaining why Depp’s lawyer once delivered a festive punch when Heard said something probably riskless at the bar.
“It’s a smart starting point to step in and say, ‘Hey, you may have noticed and even liked this viral video, but let’s talk about what’s going on,'” he added.
Musso, the Texas musician, will probably no longer record parody songs about the case. He thinks his moment of glory since the trial is worth 3 songs. That’s right.
Musso’s most recent offering, Johnny Depp’s Rap (The Final Trial Bop), attracted more than 195,000 views between TikTok and YouTube. One commentator stated: “It can’t be the last. We want a cross-examination and a verdict. “
But Musso made his decision. ” I don’t need other people to get too fed up. “