Johnny Depp and the Darkish Facet of Celeb Fandom

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A shadow field above Rebecca’s dining-room desk, hanging there since 2006, shows an autographed copy of the Pirates of the Caribbean script—signed by Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, and Johnny Depp. Although Rebecca, at age 36, is emphatically not a Depp fan, she says she retains the script on her wall as a dialog starter. If somebody asks about it, possibly she’ll go into the total story, relatively than pretending she by no means preferred Depp. “Additionally it’s not prefer it’s his smug little face,” she instructed me.

That face is in every single place proper now, on account of Depp’s ongoing and extremely public lawsuit towards his ex-wife Amber Heard. The case is difficult, and the testimony is rife with sordid, disturbing particulars. In brief, Depp has taken Heard to court docket for defamation over a 2018 essay she printed in The Washington Put up that recognized her as a sufferer of home abuse and sexual violence. Heard additionally made abuse allegations when she filed for divorce from Depp in early 2016, and was granted a restraining order towards him.

Rebecca felt betrayed by Depp when Heard got here ahead along with her story, and has since renounced her fandom. However she’s been positively horrified by the habits of Depp’s different followers, who’ve spent the previous a number of years attempting to discredit Heard as a “gold digger” and a “monster.” (I agreed to determine Rebecca by solely her first title as a result of she was involved about harassment from this group.) In April, when followers’ efforts picked up momentum, Rebecca began a Twitter account known as @LeaveHeardAlone, with a plan to doc and counter the ridiculous claims that #DeppfordWives, as she and others name them, have made about Heard. When these supporters circulated pictures of Heard having grotesque face make-up utilized, for instance, they claimed that the images confirmed a plot to border Depp. Rebecca debunked that. She additionally wrote to Snopes, the fact-checking web site, asking it to handle the grotesque conspiracy principle that Heard murdered her personal mom in 2020 to stop her from testifying in help of Depp within the U.Okay. trial. (Snopes has addressed a number of different rumors concerning the trial, however not that one.)

Rebecca’s new Twitter account has not many greater than 500 followers, which implies she is much, far outnumbered by the opposite aspect. The professional-Depp, anti-Heard stance is now a dominant development on social media. Throughout the online, Heard’s supposed lies have been became all method of memes, and even, by one cosmetics firm, a bit of selling materials. On TikTok, {couples} have been performing out violent moments as described in Heard’s testimony, to be able to spotlight their alleged absurdity. On Tumblr, Depp supporters proceed to flow into the debunked declare that Heard plagiarized a part of her opening assertion from Patricia Highsmith’s The Gifted Mr. Ripley. On Twitter, I used to be personally stunned to see that even most of the Harry Kinds followers I observe are, for no matter cause, adamantly anti-Heard. “Makes me sick listening to Amber Heard,” one wrote. “Actually amber heard is the plague,” wrote one other.

Rebecca sees a twisted logic on this hatred. For Millennials particularly, she instructed me, followers’ sense of their very own morality is deeply entwined with fandom. “We cling a lot of our personal id on this stuff that we love,” she stated. “So if these issues are threatened, you both must admit that you just’re form of a foul individual for liking these issues or you need to persuade your self that everybody else is flawed.”

One might blame “the Deppford Wives” for all these on-line smears, however that’s not precisely proper.  A number of the most energetic commenters aren’t a lot decided followers of Johnny Depp as anti-followers of Amber Heard.

Hilde Van den Bulck, a professor of communication at Drexel College, has studied the model of fandom that inverts its practices and creates a group of denigration. The place fandom tends to derive from a constructive emotion (I really like this actor; I really like that character), anti-fandom attracts from simply the other, and nurtures detrimental emotions towards a well-known individual or character. Followers and anti-fans each specific themselves via on-line sleuthing: They cling on the article of their fascination’s each phrase, and analyze each element of that individual’s wardrobe and hairstyling and self-presentation. “Anti-fans know as a lot about their object of anti-fandom as followers do about their object of fandom,” Van den Bulck stated. Their relationship with the movie star they despise is “usually very deep, very emotional.”

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Some anti-fans are disillusioned former followers (I used to like movie star X, however now … ). Others’ hatred could also be unprovoked (I simply can’t stand movie star X, and resent their place in public life). In lots of conditions, as Van den Bulck explains it, anti-fans and followers are overlapping teams: The anti-fan of movie star X hates movie star X as a result of movie star X harmed movie star Y, of whom the anti-fan is a fan.

I’ve come throughout this latter group earlier than. In 2020, I reported on fandom communities that had been fixated on theories that the male objects of their fandom had been being manipulated and tortured by less-famous, feminine romantic companions. A faction of Benedict Cumberbatch followers believed that his spouse, Sophie Hunter, was a part of a world crime ring and had faked all of her pregnancies. (This isn’t true.) A faction of One Path followers believed that the band member Louis Tomlinson was homosexual and forcibly closeted by the leisure trade, and that his ex-girlfriend and the mom of his little one, Briana Jungwirth, was central to the conspiracy. (This isn’t true.) The anti-fans I wrote about tried to show their claims by inspecting tons of of pictures and video clips—simply because the Depp followers and Heard anti-fans are doing now. In addition they hunted for proof that their beloved celebrities had been winking at them, providing tiny, secret rewards for seeing the reality. One Path followers claimed that Tomlinson was posting issues on sure dates or at sure occasions in order that the digits would make a coded message, only for them. Equally, Depp followers search for indicators that he’s grateful for his or her help, and that he’s attempting to entertain them from contained in the courtroom.

These followers, who’re additionally anti-fans, topic the ladies they hate to body-shaming and wild felony accusations, and skewer them utilizing sexist tropes. The targets of their anti-fandom are manipulative and bold, as a rule, but in addition silly. They’re glamorous and seductive, but in addition secretly disgusting. Once I interviewed a Cumberbatch fan who was a agency believer within the conspiracy theories about his spouse, she recognized herself as a feminist. It was Hunter, she stated, who was “setting ladies’s rights again [and] making everyone look dangerous.” Many Depp supporters now make the identical argument. They insist that they don’t seem to be a reactionary motion attempting to undo the work of the #MeToo motion, and that questioning Heard’s claims doesn’t make them misogynistic. If something, she is the one who’s making a joke out of #MeToo, and making issues more durable for “actual” victims of abuse. Woman Victoria Hervey, a small-time British mannequin and socialite with some 300,000 Instagram followers, has written that Heard “feels like she can be extra at house in a psych ward,” and referred in a current Instagram story to “ladies like these that always make issues up.” “So many are sick of those faux me too motion victims who’re ruining it for actual victims of home abuse,” she wrote to me in an electronic mail, declining to talk additional. (Hervey has additionally espoused “New World Order” conspiracy theories and described the pandemic as a “eugenics program.”)

On-line occasions as sprawling and weird as this one will be onerous to make sense of whereas they’re nonetheless unfolding. However the historical past of the social web presents precedents. Mary, a 34-year-old Tumblr person who has been concerned in fandom for the reason that late ’90s, and who requested to stay nameless out of concern about harassment, just lately printed a protracted publish about her experiences with misogyny in fandom. She described a sexist meltdown amongst followers of Marvel’s Loki TV present, when many grew to become outraged {that a} character performed by Sophia Di Martino had change into Loki’s love curiosity. Followers unconvincingly accused Di Martino of transphobia, “to be able to justify on-line abuse and harassment,” Mary wrote; she in contrast this to the way in which that followers had been turning on Heard and weaponizing no matter they may discover or make up about her. “It’s form of at all times precisely the identical and but has so many particular, annoying particulars to it,” she instructed me: The language of social justice is usually contorted to make a case for whomever the fandom has chosen to help. Within the Loki meltdown, objection to Di Martino’s continued presence on the present was framed as allyship with trans individuals. Now help for Depp is taken as an indication of allyship with male victims of abuse.

“The thought is that #MeToo got here alongside after which Amber Heard noticed it and was opportunistic about it, which is a story that utterly falls aside whenever you do not forget that she obtained divorced earlier than #MeToo even occurred,” Mary stated. However trendy movie star fandom encourages followers to search for the narrative they need to see. Little clues are in every single place, and new supply materials is endless. If fandom has change into extra conspiratorial—and I feel it has—that have to be due, partly, to the way in which that social media has created quick incentives for beginner sleuthing. It additionally displays a lack of religion, amongst some followers, within the practices and motives of mainstream media. Perhaps, the considering goes, common journalists simply aren’t wanting onerous sufficient for these extraordinarily compelling tales.

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On Instagram, for instance, pro-Depp and anti-Heard followers, together with Hervey, have gathered round Jessica Reed Kraus—a onetime way of life influencer who has constructed an enormous viewers by offering narratives about popular culture and true-crime tales which are extra attention-grabbing than those supplied by conventional media shops. She has described the present trial as “a film in itself” and “the good Shakespearian tragedy of our age.” Reside-blogging it on her Instagram Tales, she intersperses her opinions on publicly out there data with allusions to insider particulars, which come to her via mysterious “sources.” “I’m working around the clock,” she posted just lately. “Which means no sleep, poor hydration, continuous digging and a lil wine. It’s consuming and exhausting but it surely MATTERS.”

These are parts of a brand new paranoid type amongst fan communities that already has many observable hallmarks. Just lately, Kraus mocked Heard for seeming to pause whereas wiping her face with a tissue, supposedly in order that photographers would have ample time to get a tearful snap. This principle—that Heard’s Kleenex was a false flag—is remarkably much like one circulated amongst One Path followers for years, that Louis Tomlinson’s ex-girlfriend would stage occasions for paparazzi as a method of concocting proof in favor of her lies. Depp supporters have additionally advised that Heard’s daughter, Oonagh, who was born through surrogate final yr, is secretly the kid of Elon Musk, and that Musk has some bigger function to play in an immense conspiracy. Many fan theories incorporate a superpowerful individual within the movie star’s orbit, in addition to lies about paternity.

The individuals who get entangled in this type of hypothesis additionally are inclined to cite surprising fields of experience: special-effects make-up, for instance, that could possibly be used to create faux swelling beneath somebody’s eye. The Cumberbatch followers appealed to insider data of the storage of presidency paperwork, corresponding to beginning certificates. Once we spoke, Mary famous one other similarity between Sophie Hunter’s critics and Heard’s: The previous was accused of being photographed with cocaine throughout her garments (she wasn’t), and the latter was accused of sneaking a bump of cocaine whereas testifying in court docket (she … didn’t).

These are normally difficult theories, all the higher to be mentioned for months or years on finish, however they’re tied collectively by one thing easy: anger at a lady within the public eye. Rebecca instructed me that the Depp followers had appeared to lose curiosity, at a sure level, in defending Johnny Depp. They had been “simply utilizing him as a platform,” she stated. Now they’ve change into obsessive about another person, and so they’re not about to let her go.