00:00:20.800It is Sarah Marshall's series about the forgotten, the little known, or the misapprehended artifacts of American culture.
00:00:27.500And one of their best series, I think, is something that Sarah has called the malign women of the 90s. So they did stories on the likes of like Monica Lewinsky and Tonya Harding and other women who were subjected to media attention in ways where these kind of broader cultural anxieties and resentments about gender got projected onto them.
00:00:49.600So in the media and in sort of the popular imagination, these women's lives got factually distorted. Their behavior was misunderstood and misrepresented. They were lied about or they were judged by these unreasonable and sometimes just kind of bizarre standards.
00:01:05.480because what was being metabolized through their stories in the media and in the public
00:01:10.740consciousness was not really about them at all, but about making them into symbols of a greater
00:01:17.080gendered conflict. So these were women who could be collectively reviled and punished and discarded1.00
00:01:24.040in a way that women as a whole or gender relations more broadly couldn't be, right? So like we0.52
00:01:30.760couldn't throw away the ambition and woundedness of working class women, even though it kind of1.00
00:01:36.760shamed us to look at it. So we just threw away Tanya Harding instead. And we couldn't throw away1.00
00:01:42.960the discomfort and hypocrisy generated by the post-sexual revolution behavior of like boomer0.91
00:01:48.960straight men. So we threw away Monica Lewinsky instead. And Sarah talks about this as a feature0.93
00:01:54.740of the 90s, but I think it's very much still something we do now. And it's something we did
00:02:21.220I feel like the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp
00:02:24.100defamation trial was both a flashback.
00:02:28.540It really felt like it was a 90s repeat, but it also showed how far we'd come and not in a good way, not in the sense that somehow society was more enlightened or less likely to jump on a woman in order to sort of work out all the sort of internal contradictions of its gendered imaginaries, but rather in the sense that we've developed a whole bunch of new media to do it in.
00:02:49.420So we've moved on from the tabloid press to YouTube, and it turns out we've replaced one toilet with another.
00:02:56.920Oh, we've added a second toilet, I guess is the way you put it, right?
00:03:01.000And I think the case that we're going to be talking about today, which is when actor Johnny Depp sued his ex-wife Amber Heard for defamation after she published an op-ed in the Washington Post that, well, how do I even put this?
00:03:15.540that sort of implied that he had abused her, right?
00:05:35.700So the Depp Heard trial in 2022 was the culmination of years and years of a legal battle and a public back and forth that had incurred this massive movement around Johnny Depp.
00:05:51.000But before we get into that, just to take it back to how these two people met each other and what this relationship was like, in 2009, Amber Heard was 23 years old and barely anyone knew who she was.
00:06:03.820she was like a d-list actress johnny depp was 46 years old and he was one of the most famous
00:06:11.560popular and globally acclaimed actors of all time this was post pirates of the caribbean franchise
00:06:18.700he was multiple sequels in at this point and before that he obviously had a long and very
00:06:25.260well-renowned and extremely iconic career playing all of these different uh sort of figures that
00:06:31.640created fandoms around them like Johnny Depp was had this massive fan base and I think it really
00:06:38.240drew sort of a diverse group of people to him including a lot of women he had a really women
00:06:44.400dominated fan base uh playing characters like Edward Scissorhands and being in these Disney
00:06:50.060movies and so at the time that they met in 2009 Johnny Depp was working on a passion project
00:06:57.440called The Rum Diary, which was about Hunter S. Thompson, who was a real personal friend of
00:07:04.780Depp toward the end of Hunter S. Thompson's life, and someone who Johnny Depp really admired.
00:07:10.080And so he's searching for a female lead to compliment him in this film, and a lot of more
00:07:16.220well-established actresses don't want to do it, in part because the role requires so much nudity.
00:07:22.880So Amber Heard, she's young, she's hungry, she agrees to do it, and Johnny Depp casts her.
00:07:28.900At the time, Johnny Depp is married, and Amber Heard is in a relationship with a woman,
00:07:34.280so they're both in separate relationships, and over the course of the movie,
00:07:38.500and then when they reunite for the promotional cycle,
00:07:42.460they leave their relationships and they begin dating each other.
00:07:46.600So they're in a relationship, there's a huge sort of not only age gap,
00:07:51.000but also massive power imbalance in terms of Johnny Depp's wealth, his fame, his power within
00:07:57.280this industry. And in 2015, they get married. So shortly after they get married, this is when
00:08:05.000things start to become public about the nature of their relationship. In May 2016, about a year
00:08:11.600later, there's a very public moment where not only does Amber Heard seek to divorce Johnny Depp,
00:08:18.100she files for divorce, but she also files for a temporary restraining order. And she alleges that
00:08:24.080Depp had assaulted her by throwing his phone at her face and leaving a bruise. When Amber files
00:08:31.540for this temporary restraining order, there's immediately this massive storm of media. And0.93
00:08:37.860it begins, it's the inception of sort of this public campaign that a lot of people sort of
00:08:44.180rewrite history and say that from the very beginning, like people were pro Amber Heard,
00:08:49.160they were on her side, they were anti Johnny Depp, they believed her. But that wasn't always
00:08:53.660the case. And in fact, I've done some of like digital historian work trying to piece together
00:09:00.120when did the tide turn. And what I found is that people actually didn't believe her from the
00:09:04.600beginning. She definitely had some supporters. But from the very moment she stepped out of that
00:09:09.780courthouse, there were people on the sidewalk screaming at her that she was a liar.
00:09:14.180So from immediately as soon as she made these allegations public against Johnny Depp, there were a lot of people seeking to undermine those allegations and to protect Johnny Depp's reputation and to throw Amber Heard under the bus.
00:09:27.200Now, as they're finalizing their divorce a year later after the temporary restraining order, Amber agrees as part of that settlement that she is not going to maintain any sort of domestic violence protection order against Johnny Depp.
00:09:41.080but the two parties release a joint statement saying that neither of them have made any false
00:09:46.160allegations for monetary gain. And that's very important because later that would become the
00:09:51.560facts of the case that most of us were unfortunately privy to. But in the years following their
00:09:56.980divorce, Johnny Depp is, you know, his reputation does take a hit from the allegations that Amber
00:10:04.560Heard had made. Most importantly, he was supposed to play character in the Fantastic Beasts
00:10:11.000Harry Potter spinoff movie series. And The Sun in the UK runs an article calling him a wife-beater
00:10:21.020and saying, how can J.K. Rowling be happy to cast Johnny Depp in the Grindelwald movies?
00:10:27.480And that is the first sort of thing that incurs what becomes this massive legal battle.
00:10:32.720Because Johnny Depp sues The Sun for libel in the UK, claiming that it was libelous,
00:10:38.620it was defamatory that they had accused him of being a wife beater. In the UK case, which happens
00:10:44.960before the US trial, it ends in 2020. It's determined by a judge who looks at a list of 14
00:10:52.480alleged assaults that Amber Heard alleges Johnny Depp had assaulted her on these 14 different times.
00:10:57.980And the judge agrees that 12 out of those 14 times she has evidence for. So the judge rules
00:11:04.680that Johnny Depp had abused Amber Heard on a number of occasions and therefore it was not
00:11:09.700libelous for the son to call him a wife beater. But what Johnny Depp does next is he venue shops
00:11:16.140and he takes this matter to the US where over that innocuous op-ed that doesn't even name
00:11:23.020him, he's now suing Amber Heard for defamation in Virginia. And that is the moment where this
00:11:30.420case goes from something that I would say most people were not really following too closely.
00:11:35.300I was certainly not following this closely. But in the summer and in the early sort of late spring
00:11:41.900of 2022, what I think really changed this case is that it became an inescapable internet phenomenon.
00:11:49.800You could not get on any social media platform during the six weeks of that trial without being
00:11:55.040bombarded with a stream of content that was so biased, it was so inflammatory, and it was so
00:12:02.340violently misogynistic toward Amber Heard. Yeah, maybe you should clarify also, not just why the
00:12:08.980U.S., but why Virginia? Why did they venue shop for Virginia when it was the Washington Post? I
00:12:14.820mean, I hear they have courts in D.C. Yes. So the reason why this case took place, the trial was
00:12:21.980held in Virginia. Even though Johnny Depp and Amber Heard had never lived there, the Washington
00:12:27.020Post does not run out of Virginia, and the facts of the case have nothing to do with Virginia,
00:12:32.580they were able to get that jurisdiction because of, I believe, like process servers or some sort
00:12:38.840of printing facility that the Washington Post owns that runs out of Virginia. So it was like
00:12:45.240of extremely loose technicality. But the reason why is because had they done this case in New
00:12:52.540York, had they done it in LA, had they done it in Washington, DC itself, there would have been
00:12:57.580stronger protections around this question of whether Johnny Depp was defamed in this article.
00:13:05.440So Virginia had sort of weaker protections and they saw an opportunity there. And in addition
00:13:11.560to that, they were able to get a judge who really sort of played this trial up for the cameras. She
00:13:18.900allowed cameras in the courtroom. The jury was not sequestered. And it was able to become a circus,
00:13:25.600which fed into the exact legal strategy and media strategy that Johnny Depp's team had been hoping
00:13:33.020would swing this trial in their favor. And that's exactly what happened. And that's what we saw
00:13:37.800online. Because for me, I did not go into this trial even necessarily really knowing that it
00:13:44.760was happening or that it would become such an important feat for me. What clued me in that
00:13:50.120there was a really big, important thing happening here was that as a social media reporter who
00:13:57.320reported on online culture and discourse, and I had also covered a number of cases involving
00:14:02.700sexual assault allegations and gender violence allegations, I was really shocked by sort of the
00:14:09.680unanimous public opinion that Johnny Depp was a victim and that Amber Heard was a perpetrator,
00:14:16.600and therefore there needed to be justice. And before I knew the facts of the case or about
00:14:21.320the UK trial or really anything that was going on here, it just struck me as so odd that people
00:14:27.060would be in such unanimous support of any victim. And it also struck me as very odd that Johnny
00:14:32.820Depp would be able to be victimized by someone who was so much less powerful than he was.
00:14:38.600But as soon as I was sort of trying to sink my teeth into this and figure out what was going on,
00:14:43.040the first thing I read was the judge's decision in the UK trial. And the minute I finished reading
00:14:49.200that piece of paper, I was like, the entire world is gaslighting me right now. I've never seen
00:14:55.900anything like this in my life. And I haven't seen anything like it since. Yeah, it's one of the
00:15:00.540weird things about the trial is that it made very manifest the way that perceptions and moral
00:15:07.460judgment around gender violence in particular can be very easily and very completely divorced
00:15:14.100from the facts, right? The facts of the Johnny Depp case. And I think we can lay our cards on
00:15:21.400the table here like this is a quite straightforward case of domestic violence by a man against a less
00:15:27.700powerful woman uh he was in a romantic relationship with that really like checks a lot of the boxes
00:15:33.760that make this very typical right it's incredibly recognizable dynamic to those who are familiar
00:15:39.280with gender violence as a phenomenon the public perception of the trial and of this relationship
00:15:45.040and of the culpability and, like, relative moral standing of the parties
00:16:13.820And one of the things I want to do before we really dig in to how this backlash formed, like almost like these like clouds gathering and then it rained, is like try and put the trial and this moment when it happened in a little bit of historical context.
00:16:29.960Right. Because like 2022 was not that long ago, but in some ways it was a very long time ago.
00:16:37.500You know what I mean? Yes. It's a very different set of social and cultural factors at play that I think were influencing the way people were approaching this specific case of like a domestic violence or gender violence claim.
00:16:50.400so okay the trial happened it was six weeks it's kind of long for the quality of the claim right
00:16:56.800defamation claims very rarely make it to trial and they very rarely have trials that are so long
00:17:02.740and that's partly because depth's lawyers dumped in just copious amounts of material about herd
00:17:09.640um much of it was like kind of non-sequiturs right it's like how did you get your role in
00:17:14.380aquaman like that was like hours of her deposition on cross uh but in 2022 this is mid-biden
00:17:22.180administration right so you have some of the like resistance era liberal urgency and sense of like
00:17:29.220civic responsibility that was sort of um a heady mix of the first trump administration that's all
00:17:37.400gone right now we are five years out like a little less than five years out from the heyday of me too
00:17:45.360in late 2017 right so that sense of righteous feminist consciousness raising taking place in
00:17:52.520the media that has also receded oh and we might quickly add of course that the 2018 op-ed november
00:17:59.4002018 comes out of exactly that heyday right so like we're now you're right we're in a different
00:18:03.280place, but we're litigating something that happened during that period that the media
00:18:18.560This moment when it felt morally urgent and like kind of politically safe for survivors
00:18:26.780to speak about sexual and gender violence, you know, at least in such oblique terms as this very
00:18:33.940imprecisely phrased op-ed that Amber Heard's byline was attached to on The Washington Post
00:18:39.200has moved on, right? The social conditions that created that op-ed are no longer in effect,
00:18:45.120but the civil legal system can still respond to them. So like sort of reach back into the past
00:18:49.880and drag this up forward into the new social conditions of the present. And we're in this
00:18:56.020moment where like backlash is sort of accumulating right i think there's a tendency to historicize
00:19:02.000the dep heard trial is like and that's when we knew me too was dead and like as somebody who was
00:19:06.520there sorry it was dead before the backlash to me too began contemporaneous with me too the first
00:19:15.040mainstream press articles asking if the movement had gone too far were published in october 2017
00:19:21.440right yeah just a week or so or a couple weeks after the two harvey weinstein stories particularly
00:19:28.200the new yorker one which came second i believe it's october 10th that one was published uh these
00:19:32.940were immediately there right so there was already opposition to me too both on the political right
00:19:37.760and the political center there were a lot of skeptics of me too on the political left
00:19:41.040and you see a sort of broader cultural realignment against feminism and against the cause of like
00:19:49.320sort of politicizing women's rights this is you know the trial wraps just a couple weeks before
00:19:55.840Dobbs the Dobbs decision is released right so this is a moment when sexual misconduct stories
00:20:03.420of the type that were really really prominent and visible at the end of 2017 at the beginning of
00:20:10.0202018 they have ceased to be able to remove men from power or to stop them from attaining the
00:20:17.700heights of power. That's, I think, something you can date to at the latest, like Brett Kavanaugh's
00:20:22.320confirmation trial, which is the fall of 2018, right? Yeah. And maybe we, because you mentioned
00:20:27.780that there had been claims that Me Too had, quote, gone too far, I thought I might briefly mention,
00:20:32.660because you won't, that's the title of your book. Yeah. Gone Too Far, Me Too, Backlash and the Future
00:20:37.920of Feminist Politics. Moira, you got to plug this stuff. I know, I got to plug it up. But then this0.99
00:20:43.800This is also a moment where like a few of these accused men who have suffered career setbacks at the height of Me Too have begun already launching their comebacks.
00:20:53.380Right. They're like sort of back at the edges of public visibility.
00:20:57.080They're sort of sliding back in to something like their former careers. Right.
00:21:01.120I think what happened with that be heard marks a change in the character of the anti me to backlash when it went from being, you know, backlash as a matter of moral indifference towards women's claims of abuse to backlash as a kind of like punitive and angry response towards women's claims of abuse.
00:21:20.800It wasn't just like we're kind of done with this. We're bored of it. It was no, no, no. Now you have to shut the fuck up.
00:21:26.500Yeah, it was a punishment. And I think it's very clear when you look at some of the different0.99
00:21:32.720demographics that contributed online to sort of the reigning discourse during this trial,
00:21:38.000because you had a couple of corners of the internet that are very familiar and very well
00:21:42.600trodden territory to people who study anti-feminism online and movements like Gamergate and movements
00:21:48.780like Comicsgate and sort of these reactionary, very YouTube-driven spaces where misogyny
00:21:55.680had thrived. And what was interesting about Dev Be Heard is that you have this almost insular
00:22:01.580community with very specific people. These are commentary channels. For those who aren't
00:22:06.380familiar, what these YouTube channels function as are almost like independent journalists,
00:22:12.260except the only topics that they cover are like Star Wars. And the only stories that they cover
00:22:17.740are like, we hate women in Star Wars. But what they do, that's almost like news gathering. And0.85
00:22:24.360it's not news at all. It's just commentary. But every single day, they find these little
00:22:30.260incremental storylines that they can harp on over and over and over again. So a few years before
00:22:36.760Depard in 2022, these same people who made this content were talking about Disney's Star Wars
00:22:43.000being too woke. And they were targeting women like Kathleen Kennedy, who was a female executive0.89
00:22:48.740within the Disney corporation who had attempted to make Star Wars a little bit more diverse.
00:22:55.120And day in and day out, they would hammer away at these specific women. These women were targets,0.99
00:22:59.940they were characters in this broader narrative of victimization. And it crossed territory
00:23:05.920frequently with men's rights activism, which had this very specific narrative around Me Too.
00:23:12.200And even before Me Too, it was this narrative that had been existing for a very long time
00:23:16.400around women's allegations of violence against their husbands and against their male partners.
00:23:21.840And it was that these women are lying and it's actually the men who are the victim.
00:23:28.140You see this a lot of times in like family court settings when a mother says that the father of
00:23:33.960the children cannot be trusted around the children because he's violent. The narrative often becomes
00:23:39.180that the mother is lying and getting the children to lie to try to attack the father. And so you
00:23:44.300see this narrative that is kind of held within, to some degree, these specific environments and
00:23:50.960these specific political movements, what happened during Depp Be Heard is that it all of a sudden
00:23:55.400became the narrative that all kinds of people were relying on. And there was actually a meme
00:24:01.600during the trial that I come back to because the meme was intended to be spread among supporters
00:24:07.540of Johnny Depp as like a victory cry or like a rallying cry. And it was like a bunch of knights
00:24:12.320at a round table and each of their swords represented a different sliver of the population
00:24:17.000and it was like look at all the people we have believing johnny depp and supporting johnny depp
00:24:22.180and hating amber heard and it was like man of sphere gamer gate liberals feminists like you
00:24:29.980had all of these different spheres and it was true because you saw tons of women who considered
00:24:35.080themselves liberal who voted for joe biden who considered themselves supporters of the me too
00:24:40.120movement, grabbing onto this narrative and perpetuating it and believing in it wholeheartedly
00:24:45.540that some women were victims. And we don't know who those women are. We're not naming any specific
00:24:51.640women who we believe to be victims. But we know that this woman, Amber Heard, is not a victim.
00:24:57.160She's a liar. She used Me Too to curry favor and to get movie roles and to make money.0.97
00:25:04.300And Johnny Depp is actually the victim. And so we need to rally behind Johnny Depp as a victim.
00:25:09.180And so this was kind of like a twisted, inverse, hellish version of Me Too, where the very clear abuser was treated with the support that a very clear victim ideally would have received.
00:25:21.040Yeah, it's almost like that. It's the gendered version of the race hustler charge, right? Like the person who dares speak out about an injustice is actually profiting from that. And it's like, well, currently she's getting the pants toot off. So like, probably not, you know, but I know it's this weird kind of economy of like attention and exposure where it's like, well, but I have heard of her.
00:25:42.520It's like, well, I'm not sure if Amber Heard's ambition was limited to, you know, having gotten the attention of cretins on YouTube, basically.0.99
00:25:53.960I'm really interested in this point you made, Kat, about like how the false allegation sort of story around Johnny Depp and this painting him as a victim became like a photo negative of me to itself.
00:26:08.720Right. Adrian, you talked a little bit about this discursive mirroring in some of your work on Depth v.
00:26:16.440Sure. So I should say that I'm drawing here on a research project that I'm undertaking with a couple of researchers at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
00:26:26.660Our research director, Bethany Nichols, our executive director, Alison Dahl-Crosley, and with two students, Joshua Lee Kim and Olivia Pham.
00:27:11.920What we did in the project was to basically transcribe a bunch of videos about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, about the trial, about Johnny Depp's lawyer, who the manosphere was super smitten with.
00:27:24.160And then we downloaded 1.3 million comments that were under these videos and sort of tried to understand how people argued about this trial.
00:27:32.560And of course, the video content on YouTube was overwhelmingly anti-Amber Heard.
00:27:38.340There are pro-HERD videos, of course, but like it's pretty grim and the click numbers are really pretty lopsided.
00:27:47.580But it turns out in the comments, that's not necessarily the case.
00:27:50.380There's a little bit more of a debate, quote unquote, going on.
00:27:52.880Like not everyone's just going crazy, falling all over themselves, like how much they hate Amber Heard.
00:27:57.760But what's interesting is that they're not ultimately having the same argument, right?
00:28:03.140Partly, as far as I can tell, I'm sorry, there I'm sort of like taking off my researcher hat and putting back on my pundit hat.
00:28:09.340Part of it is that they never had a theory of the case.0.99
00:28:12.900They didn't say like affirmatively, here's what probably happened.1.00
00:28:16.300That sort of left to Amber Heard's few supporters to do.
00:28:20.760What they sort of would say is like, well, you can tell she's lying because, right?
00:28:25.440And a couple of things are really, really noticeable that we find.
00:28:29.160One is, it's very clear that Heard is being scrutinized in this very particular way, where it's basically abstracted from what she's actually saying.
00:28:40.460It's like, you can tell by the way she speaks that she is lying.
00:28:44.780Whereas with Johnny Depp, it's all about action, right?
00:28:48.160It's all about how he's charming, what he says, what he does, about his reactions.0.98
00:28:53.560And Amber Heard sort of gets frozen as this image of the cheating, lying woman.
00:28:57.480The other thing that we found, this is not totally substantiated yet. We have to run another couple of tests to make sure with 1.3 million comments, you are at the mercy of the algorithm. But it's very noticeable that a lot of people don't refer to her by name at all, but say that woman or the woman. And so it doesn't take a huge leap to think that a lot of them are not necessarily just talking about Amber Heard, but about their own, I don't know, their own ex-wife or something like that.0.99
00:29:23.480It's an expansive form of argumentation.
00:29:25.580They're teaching each other how to doubt women as a group.
00:29:29.900One thing we did was in comments that appear to be pro-Depp or pro-HERD, how likely are people to use different words?
00:29:36.400And one of the things that we find is that with HERD, a lot of it is about belief, about lying, about psychopathology, right?
00:30:18.240and what is clearly some kind of stan culture right yeah there's a kind of overinvestment
00:30:23.460into the quote-unquote canceled person there's a kind of overinvestment in their charmingness and
00:30:29.680and frankly also just like a fear of loss of like the next pirate of the caribbean movie that
00:30:35.000apparently like these people would badly like to see and you're like okay that's just you guys
00:30:40.140honestly like let these things die anyway that's a different story but there is this kind of
00:30:45.380merging of anti-feminism with the kind of fandom where the appeal is no longer hey don't you
00:30:51.360believe this man mostly they're not saying i believe him they just say i like him well i mean
00:30:57.960part of that merger of fandom and sort of belief or like sympathy right is encouraged by the
00:31:08.220structure of the legal claim right because in order to claim damages johnny depp had to assert
00:31:14.960not only that her statements were false, which he he did assert, I think, technically legally in court.
00:31:22.020Right. His theory of the case presented by his lawyers was that she had elaborately conspired to create all these witnesses to his abuse and all this.
00:31:30.040She started documenting his abuse in 2013 in text and phone calls and diary entries and emails and photographs and audio recordings.
00:31:39.740And I think at least one video recording and his theory of the case with that, that was all false. Right.
00:31:45.300Yeah. I mean, we should make that very clear for people who are like, well, they're being very, very glib about Depp's side of the case.
00:31:51.140The theory of the case, again, was that over a course of five years during a large part of which she stayed with Johnny Depp, Amber Heard covertly and and carefully constructed a fake case for a future trial that would take place 10 years later.
00:32:25.080And this is a recurring thing you see in a lot of these like anti-MeToo claims.
00:32:31.740And frankly, in a lot of like these defamation suits about Me Too, which sort of popped up a lot.
00:32:37.020You know, his was not the first, but it has spawned many others, is this idea that careers were ruined by the abuse claims, which, in fact, were kind of doing badly before, right?
00:32:49.000So this notion that, like, Johnny Depp got kicked out of the Pirates of the Caribbean reboot because Amber Heard had said that he abused her was contradicted on the stand by a Disney executive who said, no, actually, we are kind of trying to get rid of him before because he's old.
00:33:06.020he's aging and this is a children's film and we wanted somebody younger and we're trying to get
00:33:12.080margot robbie etc and so this like notion that all of the career and like life disappointments
00:33:19.180of the man are also sort of laid at the feet i think this speaks to your point to adrian about
00:33:24.420like clinical terminology and like attempts to diagnose right yeah johnny depp supposedly had
00:33:29.920i don't know anything about johnny depp's childhood supposedly had a bad childhood that
00:33:33.160was one of the claims of his fans right that is something that entitles him in their thinking to
00:33:41.160like deference and compassion and like indulgence for all of his subsequent conduct right like a
00:33:47.620trauma diagnosis which is very different than the much less sympathetic diagnoses that they were
00:33:52.480applying to amber heard which were like sociopathy or like borderline personality disorder right there
00:33:57.020was a difference in the use of uh clinical language as well between like the clinical
00:34:02.560language that evokes sympathy and care and the clinical language that evokes disgust, which is
00:34:08.020also about an epistemic claim, right? It's like, do we interpret this person not just as honest,
00:34:15.020but do we interpret them as potentially malicious? Yes. And so much of the extremely
00:34:21.700popular online discussion around this trial, narratives that were incredibly viral and
00:34:28.380carried a lot of weight in how the public viewed the trial. It's hard to overemphasize how little
00:34:34.380these narratives were rooted in reality. So like, for example, one of the things that was really
00:34:40.760popular to do during Depp Heard, while the trial was ongoing, you had all these different types of
00:34:46.460viral content coming out of it. So you had different genres. You had people who were
00:34:51.380getting millions of views on YouTube, just live streaming the trial and providing commentary over
00:34:57.260it. There were people whose careers were made doing this, who still have very profitable careers
00:35:03.120today because they were doing this. You also had people clipping moments from the trial to have
00:35:08.400them go viral. And this was done with a really specific pro-Johnny Depp, anti-Amber Heard slant.
00:35:14.180So it would be like compilations that went viral on TikTok that were like,
00:35:17.900Johnny Depp owns the core or like Amber Heard like fucks up in court. Like,
00:35:22.640oh she's so hideous and ugly 20 minutes of amber heard being caught lying yeah i mean god i can't0.95
00:35:29.260tell you how many of these i've watched it's horrible always the lying and the other thing0.97
00:35:33.080that i found really disturbing that has also persisted and been applied to numerous other
00:35:38.200cases since then is the body language discourse that came out of this this was a huge thing and
00:35:45.260body language is pseudoscientific particularly in this context because even to the degree that
00:35:52.420body language is real. It's, it's legitimate. It's researched. It was not in the way that it
00:35:57.440was being performed on YouTube in front of millions of people. This was just like random
00:36:02.720YouTube accounts who build themselves as body language analysts and experts taking clips of
00:36:08.580Amber Heard and being like her eyebrow twitched so you can prove she's lying. And it's so
00:36:14.560frustrating because the idea from this and from a lot of the anti-MeToo reactionary discourse
00:36:20.680is like, oh, well, you can't prove that someone is abusive. You can't prove, because we weren't
00:36:26.360there, that Johnny Depp abused Amber Heard, even though you actually can prove that.
00:36:32.040But instead, it was like, but we can prove that she's lying, which is, I would say,
00:36:37.580you can't really necessarily prove that someone is lying, specifically in this context and in
00:36:43.240this way that they're saying they can. So it's like the burden of proof completely distorted
00:36:48.420and shifts. And then the other thing around like the fandom of it all and the lying of it all
00:36:54.360is they would draw these really fantastical comparisons to popular media. So one that I
00:37:00.980like to bring up a lot is that there was a real theory that Amber Heard was taking moments from
00:37:07.620the script of the incredibly talented Mr. Ripley or whatever that movie is called, where it's like
00:37:13.700a man who like is a master liar and they were claiming that amber heard was quoting him on the
00:37:19.840stand so this was like a really popular conspiracy theory and it's ludicrous but it goes along with0.52
00:37:26.160some of the other really viral and popular conspiracy theories which were like amber
00:37:29.960heard is doing cocaine on the stand or amber heard lied about using a specific makeup product on the
00:37:36.120stand because the makeup product didn't come out until years later like people were pulling from0.55
00:37:41.580pop culture and sort of imbuing a lot of how they talked about the case with references to pop
00:37:48.840culture and fandom. Whereas on the other hand, it was really hard, almost impossible to just like
00:37:55.120even by Googling or seeking it out to find neutral language about the facts of the case. It was so
00:38:01.760hard. The only resources around the actual facts of the case were often compiled by this tiny
00:38:08.520movement of amber heard supporters i wanted to flag two things kat is talking about like rejection
00:38:15.900of sublimation right and then like discursive over production on the pro johnny depp side
00:38:22.500and adrian i wanted you to talk about both of those basically from your excellent paper
00:38:26.420that's what i wanted that's just what i'm asking you to do yeah just right to give you a sense of
00:38:31.320what this looks like because i mean i think kat you're interested in social media creators and
00:38:34.580like what one could say like well okay so the social media creation that's what we watch and
00:38:38.200then that's what we do with it but the comments suggest that this is exactly what they were putting
00:38:42.420out people were picking up on in a major way right so um one thing we did was we kind of pulled from
00:38:47.840these comments terms that have to do with appearance right so that'd be ugly photo face
00:38:52.880camera nose facial smile hair and of all of these obviously like they all become applied to amber
00:38:58.720except for one which is far more likely to be applied to johnny depp which is smile right the
00:39:04.100one thing that you can do with your face, the one thing that's active is applied to him and all the
00:39:09.800stuff that's about contemplating. And I think, I mean, I love the way you're bringing that up,
00:39:13.300this evidentiary status, like the idea that you can diagnose from someone's face, whether they're
00:39:17.740lying, whether they're criminal, whether they have a mental disorder. This is a really, really old
00:39:22.760idea. This is from like criminal anthropology in the 19th century, someone like Cesare Lombroso
00:39:27.940So in Italy, Sir Francis Galton in the United Kingdom.
00:39:32.460Or like phrenology, you know, she has the skull of a manipulator.0.84
00:42:02.740but it was more confined to, like, Black audiences
00:42:06.720and black social media discourses, whereas these two white people belonged to the, you know,
00:42:13.960white man belonged to the category of man that we mistake for all men and a white woman who
00:42:18.120belongs to the category of women that we mistake for all women. And then I think they had other
00:42:22.080aspects too, other features of themselves too, that made them particularly like potent screens
00:42:27.480for all these projections. Yes. I think that their personal histories and who they are
00:42:33.780really played into the way that this trial became this narrative that could be applied to so many
00:42:40.400other people. Because I even did a piece after the trial had wrapped about how it had become a
00:42:46.080big thing on social media to refer to women as an Amber Heard, which I think is really interesting.
00:42:53.020And you saw that happen with women like Angelina Jolie, because her allegations against Brad Pitt
00:42:58.420had become publicized to a greater degree in the months after Depp Heard. So you saw Angelina Jolie
00:43:04.280being referred to as Amber Heard 2.0, and you saw women who testified against Donald Trump
00:43:09.720be referred to as Amber Heard 2.0. And this idea of Amber Heard 2.0, this idea of who Amber Heard,
00:43:16.540what her name represents, who she evokes, I think was partially possible because Amber Heard was
00:43:23.580a figure in popular culture who was just not that popular so she became a blank slate and I think
00:43:30.660you know I've before this trial I had really never seen an Amber Heard movie except for maybe Aquaman
00:43:37.140which I thought was the worst movie I had ever seen in my life like so I was not paying attention
00:43:41.920to it and Amber Heard she is a fine actress I think she has a decent reel but she was never
00:43:49.300popular enough to have any sort of characterization that a lot of other famous actresses have
00:43:55.640associated with them. She had no baggage because she wasn't very known in the public perception.0.70
00:44:00.840Someone like Angelina Jolie has been so known for so many years. There are so many stories about her.
00:44:06.620She almost takes on a mythological quality in the way that a lot of celebrities do.
00:44:11.420But Amber Heard didn't have any of that. She presented as more of a blank slate.1.00
00:44:14.820And she was incredibly beautiful. And I think that played into sort of the response to her as well, because you have this woman who's kind of at like the height of privilege. She doesn't have any controversies in her past. So there's nothing to complicate her. The only thing that we really know about her is her life with Johnny Depp and her allegations against Johnny Depp.0.73
00:44:35.200But she's incredibly beautiful. She is wealthy. She is privileged. She was in, at the time, I think Aquaman was like the highest grossing movie of all time. So she is a really interesting celebrity figure, the type who doesn't come around that often. Someone who's achieved these heights, but we don't know that much about her.
00:44:54.140And so it's easy for her to become a stand in for every woman, whereas Johnny Depp is like the opposite. There's a folklore around him. He has such a strong history. Everyone knows who he is. And people have impressed upon him these ideas sort of in the same way that Donald Trump supporters will like project whatever they want onto Trump and he just becomes that person.
00:45:19.100So Johnny Depp, people just projected everything onto him.
00:45:24.460They saw him as a representation of themselves.
00:45:27.260And you saw this a lot with men in particular who defended Johnny Depp really vociferously.
00:45:32.220Like Andy Signore, the YouTuber who had his own Me Too reckoning moment, who came back into the public spotlight by defending Johnny Depp.
00:45:40.760He literally has a video on his channel where he's like, I'm Johnny Depp and the woman who accused me of sexual misconduct is Amber Heard. And so that was the formula that all of these different people were using. And I think for a lot of women, because the movement against Amber Heard was in a lot of ways very female driven, you have the photos outside the courthouse of all the people standing there who were Johnny Depp supporters.
00:46:05.100And it was overwhelmingly women. You had a ton of content creators who were overwhelmingly women and commentators who were overwhelmingly women. And I think there was such a desire to not be seen as Amber Heard. Like you had to distinguish and differentiate yourself from Amber Heard and not be her, whereas men just wanted to be Johnny Depp.
00:46:27.540Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about the kind of proliferation of content on YouTube you mentioned had already kind of a counter Heard, right, in Camille Vasquez, right, Deb's lawyer.
00:46:39.020The same people would make these like reels of Amber Heard lying or being the worst for 22 minutes straight or whatever would make these videos about Camille Vasquez and like clearly kind of had the hots for her.
00:47:16.980But she also had this other counter in, like, the good woman, the woman who was on the man's side and was, in fact, using the credibility of her gender to, like, stand up for and stop the sexual violence accusation.
00:47:44.000um technically that judge was employed by santa clara county that's right yeah um but you know0.93
00:47:50.800there's something about cat's point that a lot of the depth fandom around the trial was female
00:47:59.460driven right like there's kind of cleavage in like the manosphere treatment of johnny depp where0.99
00:48:05.720feminism is full of these crazy deranged bitches who have gone too far it was much more about like1.00
00:48:11.240demonizing a movement as a whole and much more explicit about making the case a referendum on1.00
00:48:16.820me too but then there was this other like sort of female oriented world of content in which johnny
00:48:23.220depp was the heartthrob from the early 90s right and there was a ton of appropriation of images of0.94
00:48:30.120johnny depp and i'm gonna be like really honest with you here he does not fucking look like that
00:48:34.000anymore you know um he had this like feline quality when he was very young there's something0.74
00:48:40.960about that kind of male star where they are supposed to look very young uh they're supposed
00:48:47.340to look like almost kind of girlish and there was something about that legacy he had when there were
00:48:53.740a ton of pictures of him you know with Winona Ryder in 1991 and we actually know if you look
00:48:59.380into Johnny Depp's history he was already drinking and using drugs to excess he was already being
00:49:03.720accused of violence and like outbursts of rage and paranoia but he looks like a statue you know
00:49:10.620and there was this weird displacement where he was sort of out of time and out of age and he was
00:49:17.520like suspended like over history whereas amber heard she didn't get like the afterglow of me too
00:49:24.180she got dragged very much into the moment of the backlash yeah i mean i think that goes to kat's
00:49:28.760point right like the trump connection as well so much of the meme game around trump is about
00:49:33.980kind of contradicting the obvious physical decay of this man and i have to say that i didn't follow
00:49:40.540the trial as carefully as i should have when it first happened but what i did metabolize like oh
00:49:45.180shit johnny depp got old because i was around for those movies where i was like man that is a good0.84
00:49:50.800looking man and i was like no wow like i guess time stops for no one well he's also been living0.91
00:49:55.920very hard in the interim you know he's not somebody who's like eating vegan and jogging a lot one of
00:50:01.480the exhibits that herd's team submitted was a picture of johnny depp's lunch which was a water
00:50:06.460glass full of whiskey and three lines of cocaine you know it's uh he's living hard yeah right but
00:50:12.100this kind of over investment and as you say this kind of transhistoric idea of this guy0.98
00:50:16.600was so striking to me that because i i just saw like oh shit like this guy that i thought was0.95
00:50:21.780kind of interesting and charming in the early 90s, like, is just as washed up as they all end up0.98
00:50:27.340being, right? And it was very evident to me, like, looking through our data for this project,
00:50:32.100I was like, that's not what people saw in a way that really reminds me of the way people can look
00:50:36.540at Donald Trump. Like, I have to recognize that you see a vastly different thing than I see.
00:50:41.740I guess we just kind of just sit with that difference because, like, I cannot do something
00:50:45.940to my eyes or to my brain to, like, see what you're seeing right now. Because every cue gives
00:50:51.000me evidence of the opposite of what you appear to be seeing right now yes and i think you see this
00:50:55.460so clearly in fan art around these people and fan art traditionally like refers to artistic
00:51:02.760creations within fandom which was absolutely what we saw happening with devon heard and it's also
00:51:08.020what you see happening with trump because trump supporters love to make fan art of him too and
00:51:13.100today a lot of times you see that with generative ai where they're literally creating fake images of
00:51:18.320trump where you can only see the resemblance in like his face and his hair but they've drawn him
00:51:23.320as like a muscular superhero man exactly with johnny depp it's really interesting and i saw
00:51:28.580this a lot and i still see this women in particular will do something with johnny depp that's referred
00:51:34.420to with a lot of different terms colloquially like he's a soft boy is a big term that you see
00:51:40.040within like internet culture that's around women he's a soft boy and then he's also chibi-fied
00:51:46.060And what that refers to is a very particular style of drawing that's derived from, I think, a lot of Southeast Asian style of illustration, like Japanese anime styles.
00:51:58.320So they would oftentimes draw Johnny Depp as a little cartoon character where he was drawn as looking much younger, but he was mainly just drawn as much softer.
00:52:08.200So decades-old photos of him were often trotted out as a real-time representation of him.
00:52:13.380But when they couldn't do that, they would literally, like, draw on, like, pink cheeks and little emojis to, like, signify that he's, like, a girlish, heartthrob-esque character, and they would make him smaller, and they would make him into, like, this just cute little guy, and that was how the female-driven portrait of Johnny Depp was created and drawn up during this trial.
00:52:37.140And in comparison to that, the images of Amber Heard were most strikingly, because one of the big narratives around this trial and something that Johnny Depp alleged that Amber Heard contested and the evidence really contests this narrative, but something that took on a huge cultural hold and that really, I think, defined Amber Heard's image.
00:53:00.080Like I said earlier, she's a very beautiful woman. So how do you turn a really beautiful woman into something really ugly and really detestable? And what they did was Johnny Depp accused Amber Heard of shitting in his bed. And Amber Heard contested this, and there's a lot of evidence that suggests it was actually their dog.
00:53:20.020But this image of Amber Heard surrounded by human fecal matter became a really defining aesthetic imprint.
00:53:29.160And so the way that Amber Heard was often drawn in fan art, which was incredibly vulgar and crude and abusive, was she was drawn as literally like the embodiment of the poop emoji.
00:53:39.320and that's how they kind of pictured her versus him they turn him into this like he's a teenager
00:53:45.620again or he's just like this non-human soft cuddly creature again talking about like the inversion
00:53:53.120of facts and perception like the inversion of just like the way that they look because the truth is
00:54:01.120this is a very young woman who is almost comically beautiful you know just like a perfect face and
00:54:09.100And then this guy who looks like a leather glove that used to be in much better shape, you know?
00:54:14.680Yeah, I mean, if you showed me them and said, like, you can know nothing more about these people, but one of them pooped a bit, it's a guy.
00:54:35.540Yeah, something I don't really know, because we've been doing sort of very, very sort of high level analysis on this stuff, and we don't know much about our commenters. One thing that's really interesting to me is that like, my guess is that the average YouTube commenter, unlike the average YouTube uploader or YouTube viewer, is fairly young. So it's also that like, these people are kind of drawing on a past they didn't even really experience, right? They're drawing on 21 Jump Street, which is like, probably pretty hard to find now. I mean, like, it's got to be the recesses of like Paramount Plus or something.
00:55:04.480like what do we make of that the fact that like for them it's also kind of a history lesson
00:55:09.620yes and i think that you saw a certain subset of johnny depp fans and i have obviously encountered
00:55:16.560so many of these people because for years and still even to this day um although it has died
00:55:22.320down significantly but for years johnny depp supporters were you know haranguing me online
00:55:28.380for defending amber heard me too like every now and then i'll still get an ad that's like
00:55:33.600you defended they all call her amber turd yes and they'll be like you're evil because you
00:55:38.100defended amber turd you supported the abuser and i was like like first of all no that secondly
00:55:42.600like that was literally three years ago yeah yeah you're like i've done horrible things after
00:55:48.200you don't even think about any of the guys i've killed anyway sorry go on
00:55:53.380no no it's so true and i think for a lot of these johnny depp supporters it really is a lifetime
00:55:59.640commitment and i think that these people are going to be on this train until they die
00:56:03.220but i noticed that there were certain demographics who would come after me one demographic was an
00:56:10.020older woman so literally i would have grandmothers and i knew they were grandmothers because they
00:56:15.420would in their social media profiles have pictures of their grandchildren and they are clearly drawing
00:56:20.300on their lived experience of witnessing johnny depp at his peak of course for the younger people
00:56:25.380I think it was so overwhelmingly driven by Jack Sparrow, by Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean.
00:56:32.880And I encountered this so frequently. We've talked about this a little bit.
00:56:36.840Johnny Depp and his role as Jack Sparrow is so pervasive, even to this day.
00:56:42.460And it's interesting because I have been to Disney parks around the world.
00:56:46.600I'm a big fan, a little bit of a Disney adult, which is embarrassing to admit.
00:56:49.820But I have gone to Disney parks multiple times since this trial.
00:56:54.000and it's always like a jump scare because even to this day even though this franchise is not
00:57:00.120that popular anymore the box office numbers for the last sequel that they released were quite low
00:57:05.200but he as a character is still very very popular so they have their Johnny Depp character running
00:57:11.480around all the parks he's in the ride is still very popular he's in all the firework shows it's
00:57:16.560like the figure of Captain Jack Sparrow as a character is so enduring and so I do think that
00:57:22.120a lot of Gen Z, millennials feel like an extremely strong parasocial attachment to this guy through
00:57:30.020the character of Jack Sparrow, which is still extremely profitable to this day. And you saw
00:57:35.000that a lot too in the fan cams, the TikToks. I remember I interviewed this one young woman who
00:57:40.720was 19 years old, who was making these viral Johnny Depp in the courtroom TikToks. And she
00:57:46.260was a really big fan of disney's the avengers like she was a big marvel fan and i was like okay
00:57:52.140this does make sense to me because if you're a big fan of anything disney then you're just
00:57:56.300constantly reminded of captain jack sparrow's existence no there's something here just about
00:58:02.240like the the persistence of fantasy man like yeah there is a a way in which these fantasies
00:58:09.420these pre-existing commitments these emotional investments these desires to not know or
00:58:15.220countenance, things that might disturb those fantasies can drive people to, like, crazy
00:58:20.160delusions. I might, like, ask you guys to weigh in just as we wrap up on, like, three years on,
00:58:27.080what is the legacy of this? But I think, like, one of the big ones is now I see the way fantasy
00:58:32.120can invert reality in people's perceptions. Yes. Maybe particularly around gender, but I don't
00:58:37.220think exclusively in some, like, really clear ways. Yeah. I think for me, the biggest sort of
00:58:44.320aftershock that you keep seeing over and over again, post-Deep Hurd in 2022, is that that trial
00:58:51.640created a very persistent narrative script for any time you have a male and female celebrity
00:58:59.080warring in any way. So you brought up Megan Thee Stallion. That was a great example of this.
00:59:05.020There have been other celebrity disputes. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt was a big one. You saw
00:59:09.520the usage of the word Amber 2.0, but I think even more importantly, you just saw the exact same
00:59:15.580argument framing. It goes back to that manosphere idea that women who accuse men of any sort of
00:59:23.020sexual misconduct or any sort of violence toward them, harassment, workplace harassment, anything,
00:59:28.840they're lying. They're doing it for some sort of perceived gain. And this is a crisis that is
00:59:34.820facing men. And that framing has really, really stuck. And right now, I think one of the biggest
00:59:41.020ways that we're seeing this happen again in the world of celebrity media is the Blake Lively,
00:59:46.780Justin Baldoni case, which is even more shocking to me than Johnny Depp, because in this case,
00:59:53.440you have a woman who is much, much more famous than the man. Justin Baldoni, no one had even
00:59:58.840heard of him unless you watched a random CW show in which he was not even the main character.
01:00:03.920and regardless of that he's still the Johnny Depp in this scenario and that really showed me
01:00:10.220while I do believe that Johnny Depp's fame played a big factor in this case it all comes down to
01:00:16.720gender because the only thing Justin Baldoni has going for him is that he's a man and that Blake
01:00:22.060Lively is a woman and so he can rely on this rhetoric that it was an offense for Blake Lively
01:00:28.460to do anything to have any sort of leadership or authority on the movie set that they were on
01:00:34.720together. And that has been a very persistent framing that is really unfortunate. Yeah. I mean,
01:00:40.820may I just add to that? I think my read on this case three years on, and maybe that's part of,
01:00:46.340because for two years of those three years, I've been doing a podcast with Moira. I think I've
01:00:50.300become fully Moirified on this. Because there's a way you can tell the story of like, well,
01:00:54.400Depp's team very cleverly realized a lot of people still really like Jack Sparrow and they used that
01:00:59.900to sort of get people to move away from how they actually feel about gender relations etc and that
01:01:05.260in some way the fact that like they still had to use the language of abuse just imputed to him
01:01:10.520was a sign that like maybe Me Too had changed something I've started to really doubt that
01:01:15.760version I think it is much more that there was an offer and more I already mentioned this
01:01:21.020made by the backlash against Me Too sometime in October or November of 2017 to say,
01:01:28.120hey, aren't you all fans of people who might get canceled for having, you know, committed sexual
01:01:33.460assault? Wouldn't it suck to not have another thing from these people? Think of all the art
01:01:39.680you're going to be losing. And basically enough people responded with like, oh yeah, no, I care
01:01:43.720for justice a whole lot less than I do for... And then like the fact that these things are such
01:01:48.640garbage right like obviously like no art justifies turning a blind eye to something like this but
01:01:54.540but pirates of the caribbean i'm sorry like i mean i remember someone asking me like during the
01:02:01.240height of me too like well what about another woody allen movie like who watches another woody
01:02:05.000allen movie it's the same movie it's the same for the last 30 years let's presume you like it which
01:02:10.980is fine like you have 30 to choose from like you don't know the world does not need another woody
01:02:17.440movie, your investment in this movie is, and this is, I guess, my point, is a proxy for something
01:02:22.920else, right? It's a language for these ladies need to shut the fuck up, right? You're becoming a fan1.00
01:02:29.780in order to tell women to shut the fuck up, right? Like, no one's gonna watch that shit. They're1.00
01:02:34.360doing it because they don't want to believe Dylan Farrow. I also think kind of along with that
01:02:39.900mindset, which is very pervasive, there's also this really compelling phenomenon that you see
01:02:46.560coming from a lot of women who support johnny depp which is like we can solve like we can the
01:02:52.080me too movement can continue and women can get justice as long as we root out and identify the
01:02:58.260bad women who are taking advantage of our movement personal gain like it's this desire to find and
01:03:04.280punish specific women who are ruining it for the rest of us and that has been a really strong sort
01:03:11.360of rhetorical and cultural strain of discourse that has persisted this hurts real victims is
01:03:17.760what they always say yeah like the the ability to isolate the abused woman from the phenomenon of
01:03:25.520abuse and just transform her right yes the other thing about amber heard is she does not exist in
01:03:30.300context like again as we said earlier if you know anything about the way gender violence happens if
01:03:35.340you know anything about you know what alcoholics look like and do and how they think when they're
01:03:39.660in the middle of active addiction, none of this is surprising, right? None of the way she behaved
01:03:44.060is surprising. None of what he did was surprising. None of how their relationship escalated and ended
01:03:49.040is atypical. It's aggressively typical, but we're not allowed to see her in context. We're not
01:03:55.780allowed to see him as part of a pattern, right? The man is always a unique snowflake whose past
01:04:03.220history and suffering needs to be taken into account, whose talents need to be prioritized.0.99
01:04:07.120And the woman has always collapsed into an archetype of evil. You know, we can analyze this at a very high abstract level. Right. But at the center of the story is a woman who was abused so horribly for many years in her marriage and then whose abuse was furthered both by the justice system and by the media and by social media in this like ongoing retaliatory abuse, what people call litigation abuse, but also sort of just like public harassment.
01:04:34.660in a way that has to have been so horrific, right?
01:04:38.480Like she didn't choose to be in this lawsuit.