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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 that is the trial between two of Hollywood’s biggest stars has become 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 courtroom, with dark wood panels, that went viral.
Millions of other people go online to dissect each and every moment of the live broadcast of the trial from a courtroom in Fairfax County, Virginia. Some other people watch because it’s fun for them. Others inspire their favorite side. Some other people are disgusted by the harshness with which the public treats the case.
Meanwhile, others go further down the rabbit hole, remixing images into something new.
That includes Musso, who hadn’t planned to release his 87-second song online, until his friend convinced him to put it on YouTube. Less than two weeks later, his song has amassed more than 15 million views.
Musso thought the trial “was ridiculous, and most people seem to agree,” he said. After all, for him, he is just a wealthy user chasing another wealthy user while broadcasting his drama to the audience.
Search for Depp or Heard on YouTube or TikTok, and the most you’ll find are short clips of the trial with tabloid-worthy headlines like Johnny Depp destroys Amber Heard’s lawyer (13 million views) or a shot of a now-prominent quote from Heard’s Testimony, “I Didn’t Hit You, I Hit You” (29 million views). The other people who manage those accounts say they download the clips, which last several minutes, to draw attention to a detail they consider vital and might otherwise. be overlooked.
Meanwhile, critics worry that he has gone from mocking celebrities to encouraging harassment of victims of abuse. This has become clearer after Saturday Night Live mocked the trial in a May 14 sketch, cutting Depp and Heard’s arguments about domestic violence to, as SNL put it, “a report we can all look at together and say, ‘Am I glad it’s not 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 look 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.
Court dramas have long been a mainstay of American pop culture. TV screens like 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, such as representative 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 is 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’s 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’re not bombarded with Depp v. videosHeard, by the way, Singer’s social media listening team implies you’re probably older. As the court case explodes on YouTube and TikTok, where the audience tends to be younger, the “adult population” remains 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 began posting videos about Depp vs. Heard when she felt the trial didn’t go 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 excerpts from the trial, so he hid those videos. After the story was published, YouTube further reduced its profits. through several thousand dollars. YouTube has not responded to several requests for comment on this story.
Among the courtroom clips pulled from the live stream, there are other people on YouTube and TikTok who also devote 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 conflicting testimonies from 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 collapsed and reacted in the courtroom, attracting more than 12. 8 million perspectives for his 59-second video explaining why Depp’s lawyer once struck a festive blow when Heard said something probably risk-free 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 court proceedings. He thinks his moment of glory from the trial is worth 3 songs, and that’s it.
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, saying, “I don’t need other people to get too fed up. “