How Johnny Depp can be blamed for Trump's election victory: analyst

Actor Johnny Depp may not be a fan of President Donald Trump but, argued Amanda Marcotte for Salon on Monday, he was partly to blame for sparking the MAGA crusade of young men.

At the trial over his lawsuit against Amber Heard three years ago, the right-wing media made Depp the poster child for the woke emasculation of young me — and gave them "permission" to vote for Trump in the last election, Marcotte wrote.

This issue has long been a focus for Marcotte, who was warning as the trial unfolded that young men were being "radicalized" against equal treatment of women. Now, she considers her warning vindicated.

"The evidence in Depp v. Heard, in a sane world, should have favored Heard," wrote Marcotte. For one thing, the entire focus of his lawsuit was that Heard's allegations cost him his role in "Pirates of the Caribbean," but "A Disney executive denied this on the witness stand, and Depp's longtime talent agent testified that Depp's erratic behavior was what soured his reputation on set."

In 2022, Depp sued Heard for $50 million over a 2018 op-ed she wrote in which she described herself as a victim of domestic abuse — though she did not mention Depp by name. After a six-week trial, the jury found that Heard had defamed Depp and awarded him over $10 million in damages.

The case highlighted the complexities of intimate partner violence allegations.

According to the New Yorker, Heard had "a trove of text messages, witness statements, and photos of injuries — which, she says, corroborate her allegations of abuse." And Depp had already lost a prior defamation case against a British tabloid that called him a "wife-beater," even though defamation law in the United Kingdom is far more favorable to the plaintiff.

Yet the trial ended with Depp victorious, in part because — despite the instructions to the jury otherwise — they were almost certainly influenced by the negative PR blitz against Heard that was picked up and spiraled out of control by content creators online, Marcotte argued.

"As journalist Kat Tenbarge reported for NBC at the time, content creators for TikTok and YouTube found that spreading sexist rumors about Heard was like printing money," she said. "There was an immense amount of public hunger in 2022 to forget all the lessons of the #MeToo movement, and instead fall back into the comfortable belief that sexism is a myth, women just make up stories for attention, and it's accused men who are the real victims." Ultimately, she said, "They wanted Heard to shut up, not because they didn't believe her, but because they did."

And that backlash spurred a deeper cultural shift, Marcotte argued — one right-wing media took advantage of to push propaganda to a new generation of voters.

"The far-right website Daily Wire spent an astonishing amount of money promoting anti-Heard propaganda during the trial, which confused many people at the time. The Daily Wire is a political outfit, so why would they care about celebrity gossip that doesn't seem to have any partisan value to it?" wrote Marcotte. The answer is that "the entire circus was useful for convincing people that it's okay to choose disinformation over the truth, especially when the facts make you feel bad ... Defending Depp was boot camp for the real test: supporting the lie that Donald Trump would make a fine president."