On Wednesday, a jury of five men and two women awarded Depp a victory in its defamation case against Heard, his ex-wife. Heard, for his part, prevailed in part in his counterclaim against Depp. Depp accused Heard of falsely and maliciously accusing him of domestic abuse, which cost him millions in damages for losing his job as an actor after the Washington Post published an opinion piece attributed to Heard. in 2018. Although the piece did not name Depp directly, Heard described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” The verdict quickly hit social media platforms, with some conservative experts such as Ann Coulter and Meghan McCain declaring #MeToo dead. (McCain’s tweet saying “#MeToo is dead. Helluva job @ACLU” has since been deleted; the ACLU wrote a draft of the opinion piece and helped post Heard is an ambassador for the organization.)
Tarana Burke, who started the “Me Too” movement years before it became a viral hashtag, said Thursday in a statement that the movement is “very much alive.”
Burke said people try to “kill” the label “every few months” as a sport, but that “it means something to millions and millions of people.”
“You can’t kill us. We’re beyond the hashtag. We’re a movement,” Burke said. “The ‘me too’ movement is not dead. The system is dead.” Days before, Burke’s organization, me too. International, issued a statement acknowledging the “mockery of aggression, shame and guilt” during the weeks of the trial, calling it a “toxic catastrophe and one of the movement’s biggest defamations.” Despite the seriousness of the witnesses throughout the trial, Heard’s allegations of abuse were widely dismissed. Because the test was broadcast live, it was possible to capture images and turn them into clips that generated views and new followers. Many content creators quickly learned that there was an audience for creating content in favor of Depp, while publications considered to be sympathetic to Heard were targeting others online.
How the trial unfolded on social media alarmed the experts.
“It’s not just that the extremely serious problem of domestic violence has become a creepy spectacle on social media, but also that the traditional media and public discourse have so thoroughly incorporated the misogynistic narrative that obscured the issues. underlying and direct legal issues, “said Mary. Anne Franks, of the University of Miami School of Law, told CNN Business Wednesday after the verdict.
Franks, in a 2019 article, pointed to the contradictions between those who support free speech and those who want to reduce what some are able to speak freely.
“It is women’s discourse that has been most feared and therefore widely regulated, criticized, and banned throughout American history,” she wrote in 2019, adding that “a massive movement of women that speaks of experiences and abuses that have long been suppressed, such as the #MeToo movement, to be praised as the quintessential exercise of freedom of expression. ”
Depp’s trial against Heard, he said on Wednesday, was essentially summed up in “a trial of witches in the digital age”, and noted that the intention was to “reverse the small progress made by the #MeToo movement”.
(Carrie Goldberg, an attorney whose law firm is known to represent both online and offline sex offenders, tweeted on Wednesday: “We’ve had a good% of potential clients in the last two weeks who need legal help against and they have expressed their terror at how they are afraid of being retaliated against like Depp. “
Pro-Depp fervor was especially evident at TikTok. Shortly before reading the verdict, the #JusticeForJohnnyDepp tag had reached 18.8 billion views, while #JusticeForAmberHeard had only accumulated 68.2 million.
“Right now it’s a massive TikTok celebration for Johnny Depp,” said Ashley Roberts, a TikTok user who previously found herself in the crosshairs of Depp supporters and human rights activists to express a point of view. different, on CNN Business Wednesday night.
“It wasn’t an absolute loss for her,” Roberts added, referring to Heard winning part of his rematch, a fact he said is not recognized in many celebratory publications.
After the verdict, the hostility towards Heard continued, with people using the hashtag #MeToo to reprimand her and feeling emboldened by the verdict to do so. Heard, for his part, has indicated that he plans to appeal.