ICYMI - it's been 10 years since the demise of "Robsten," and I recapped all the chaos (NuttyMadam included) for your reading pleasure.

Enjoy!

It's been 10 years since Katie Holmes made her great escape from Scientology. I recapped it, burner phones and all, on Twitter. Enjoy!

Letters for Amber

Some of you have asked me these past few days whether a project’s underway to support Amber. Myself and a few others who have a way of directly reaching her have decided to put one together. We’re accepting any letters of support you’d wish to send her, online or physically. Afterwards we’ll pass them over to her.

The letters will have to be reviewed before they’re forwarded to Amber to make sure they aren’t hateful or threatening, as I’m sure many of you know she attracts a great deal of vitriol, so be conscious of that if you’re sharing something you wouldn’t feel comfortable with someone else reading, as I’m sure many of Amber’s supporters can relate to her experiences.

If you'd like to email Amber a letter: letters4amber@gmail.com

If you want to mail one physically: PO Box 101525, Arlington, VA 22210

We’re also accepting any letters in support of Amber’s attorneys, Elaine and Ben, who’ve done a terrific job with the case in spite of the uphill battle they’ve had to fight, both in the court of law and public opinion. As they have separate offices, if you’re planning on writing to either of them, it must be individually - so no “Dear Elaine and Ben” letters (unless you’re watching The Graduate).

The email for the Ben and Elaine letters: benandelaineletters@gmail.com

And the P.O. Box is the same as the Amber one.

If you choose to mail a letter, make sure it’s not too big - so no packages, gifts, or anything large in size, as they’ll be going to a post office box.

The deadline for all letters is July 12.

Amber’s attorney Elaine said on the Today Show Thursday that Amber’s planning on appealing the verdict, though there’s no telling how long that process will take. In the meantime, here are some things you can do to support Amber:

If you have any questions, you can reach out to myself (@pcd2009 on Twitter; @popculturediedin2009​ on Instagram); @drugproblem on Twitter; @AtheistjLiz on Twitter; @heardverse on Twitter; and @shxnerusso on Twitter.

Thank you everyone who’s been speaking up for her. I know attention spans are lightning quick these days, so don’t let her story fizzle out. Keep fighting!

Same here. I was always a fan of hers and thought she was cool, and given how private she's always been, I was confident she wouldn't speak up during any of this - I assumed if any of his exes were to testify for him, it'd be Winona, since she seemed to be hung up on him for years after their breakup. But lo and behold, Kate's front and center while Winona went out of her way to hire an attorney to block her testimony from being used to defend him in the U.K. trial. Guess I'm Team Klepto! I'll be sure to pillage my local department store in her honor.

But there's been something bugging me about Kate's testimony, and I wonder if anyone's thought about this, but did anyone else think it made Amber seem more credible?

Hear me out. For those who didn't watch it, you can here. It's a whopping two minutes. Basically, she testified that Johnny never pushed her down a staircase; the truth was that she slipped and fell and he came to her rescue. This was supposed to refute what Amber testified a week earlier about how when she hit Johnny during a 2015 fight, she only did so because she'd heard a rumor that Johnny once pushed Kate down some stairs when they were dating. (For context, the fight in question was atop a staircase in Johnny's apartment and Amber was worried he'd push her sister, Whitney, who was next to her at the time.)

Of course, the Deppies touted Kate's testimony as a bombshell and the final blow to Amber's credibility - "Amber said Johnny pushed Kate, but Kate said that never happened! She's a liar!" - completely disregarding that Amber never said he pushed her as a fact, just that she'd heard a rumor he did.

And while I'd admittedly never heard that rumor before Amber first mentioned it, as soon as I heard Kate's testimony, I believed Amber was telling the truth. Here's why: Amber was 9 when Johnny and Kate were dating. How would she have even known there was a staircase incident unless it really were a rumor? Since, let's say it was this sweet moment like Kate described it as and Johnny really did come to her rescue, how would Amber have possibly known about it twenty years later? I know Johnny's in love with himself, but even I don't think he's casually recounting minor instances of his chivalry to people two decades after the fact. It seems bizarre Amber would have ever heard about it if that were the case.

The only way it makes sense for Amber to have known about it is if it really were a rumor that he'd pushed her, and either someone around him or in the industry mentioned it to her. If Kate testified that there'd never been a staircase incident altogether, that would've helped Johnny more, but the fact she did acknowledge something happened made my ears shoot up like Scooby-Doo. Again, how could Amber have known about something that happened twenty years before her and Johnny got together?

Something in the milk blow ain't clean.

I saw someone on Twitter say the rumor was first mentioned in a British tabloid back in the '90s, but they had no source, so I can't say if it's true. But I have some U.K. followers, though, so if any of you are up for it, I'd be interested in seeing if you guys could snoop around. There are online databases here in the U.S. that catalog old issues of tabloid papers like the New York Post and Daily News; I have to assume there’s a similar one (whether through a university or public library) in the U.K. that has their equivalents (i.e. The Sun, The Mirror, or the now-defunct News of the World). While there's no guarantee the rumor would appear in any of those (for all we know it could’ve been printed in a British gossip magazine, and those are even harder to find than American ones), it's worth a shot.

As for Kate saying Johnny never hurt her (at least as far as stairs were related), I mean, we clearly know otherwise. It's like what Kathy Griffin said in that clip I shared the other day, about when Charlie Sheen shot Kelly Preston - Kelly, Xenu bless her soul, insisted up to the day she died that it was an accident, but c'mon, it's Charlie. We know better. That same common sense should apply to Johnny. Chances are if a guy's drunk and high and throwing stuff around a hotel room, something has to hit his girlfriend, even accidentally. Even Woody Allen thought so when he parodied the Johnny-Kate hotel fight in his movie Celebrity (also starring Winona, funnily enough):

(Far from his best movie but there's a scene where Judy Davis learns to deep throat with a banana.)

Kathy Griffin gave Johnny (and his “stans”) one of her classic smackdowns on Brian Karem’s Just Ask the Question podcast yesterday.

She’s one of the few celebrities who’s stuck by Amber from the beginning, even hanging out with her right after those edited audio tapes were first leaked by Team Depp in 2020. And she’s continued to back her through the trial.

Always a real one!

Last night I made a Twitter thread elaborating on the O.J.-Johnny parallels I've been talking about on here the past few weeks.

Some people might think it's a crazy comparison, but Nicole's and Amber's struggles were tragically similar.

I know that this is primarily a kitschy nostalgia account and that most of you don’t follow me for any sort of social commentary, but regarding today’s verdict, I’d like anyone who’s been following this blog and the case to know my inbox is always open if you need to talk. As you know, I’ve been supporting and defending Amber on here since she first came forward with her allegations in 2016. I still believe her; two separate judges in the U.K. ruled her allegations were true and a U.S. jury decision doesn’t change that, especially when, as I’ve been pointing out these past weeks, a wealth of evidence was kept away due to the judge in this case.

Unfortunately, every generation gets the O.J. verdict it deserves, and while it might feel hopeless now (and I certainly don’t feel too great about it myself), I’d like anyone struggling out there to know you’re not alone.

It doesn't really mean anything. His fans like to bring up Amber's mom's and dad's texts to him after Amber filed for divorce saying they still 'loved' him as proof Amber made it all up, but that's BS. Human relationships are complicated, and beyond that Johnny was always incredibly generous with Amber's family. Nicole Brown Simpson's family was the same. O.J. lavished them with gifts, gave her parents and cousins jobs, and paid her sister's college tuition. He was so generous that when Nicole showed her dad her bruises, he encouraged her to stay with him and work it out, and even after they divorced O.J. continued to talk to Nicole's mom on the phone to ask her advice on how to 'handle' her daughter. Check out Sheila Weller's book Raging Heart - there's a reason the Browns weren't held up as the moral center of the trial like the Goldmans were. In Faye Resnick's book, she remembered Nicole telling her once that while her family loved her, they 'loved O.J. more.'

With men like Johnny and O.J., their generosity was often a way of establishing control.

Basically, in an eleventh hour attempt to muddy the waters and further distract people from the purpose of the trial, Johnny’s team latched onto a supposed relationship between Amber and TMZ during the divorce in 2016. Its relevance to the case or her allegations is little, but Depp cultists have made it their latest fixation as it would somehow prove all of her allegations were a “hoax” and that she made it all up for attention.

Needless to say, it’s a whole bunch of nothing, and it’s a pretty hilarious claim considering TMZ was practically running interference for Johnny’s legal team back then. His two lawyers during the divorce, Blair Berk and Laura Wasser, are close friends of Harvey Levin’s, the orange guy with the iced coffee who runs TMZ. I did a little tweeting about it last week. For those who don’t know how TMZ works or how celebrity lawyers influence its coverage, I wrote about it in-depth during the Bill Cosby trial in 2018 - in short, where most celebrity outlets are shaped by publicists, TMZ is shaped by lawyers, particularly ones friendly with Harvey. One of my favorite examples is when Paris Hilton went to jail in 2007. The media was clamoring for that final shot of Paris before she surrendered to the authorities, but TMZ was the one to get it. How? Consider this: just a month later, the daughter of Paris’ attorney Richard Hutton got a job at TMZ. That’s how Harvey operates.

In the case of Amber and Johnny, after Amber filed for divorce there was a spate of negative stories about her on the site that appeared to come straight from Johnny’s side. I covered a lot of them when I did my “Team Amber” mega-post that summer (it’s kind of funny, but mostly sad, going through that post now and seeing how little things have changed and how the same accusations keep coming up again and again). The most egregious example was probably when they ran a photo of her shopping at Tiffany’s, claiming it was from just a day after she filed for divorce, when it was really from a month earlier. When people found out, they scrubbed the story from their site.

They also were the first to break the story of Amber’s 2009 arrest, which presumably had been fed to them by Team Depp, as Johnny had told Amber’s dad he’d known about arrest in a text message just a week before the story broke. When Amber’s ex Tasya issued a statement saying Amber had never abused her and that, at the time, the arrest had felt “homophobic,” TMZ immediately countered by reporting one of the two arresting officers happens to be a lesbian (whether she was out at the time of the arrest, who knows). They were working overtime to kill her credibility. When the notorious text messages from Johnny’s assistant, Stephen Deuters, to Amber apologizing for Johnny’s assaulting her during a plane ride in 2014 were leaked by Entertainment Tonight, TMZ ran a statement from Deuters saying the messages were “doctored” and that the incident had never happened. However in a classic act of tabloid one-upmanship, People magazine then fired back by obtaining a statement from a forensics expert confirming the texts were real, and the messages would later become a crucial piece of evidence against Johnny during the U.K. trial in 2020. When Deuters testified during that trial, he insisted that he’d never even spoken to TMZ, despite them quoting him directly, and that the 2016 story was fake; of the texts, he said he’d only discussed them with Johnny’s divorce team - so either way the connection is obvious. In numerous taped conversations between Amber and Johnny after the divorce, Amber accuses Wasser (and one of Johnny’s other attorneys, Marty Singer, who I talk about in the Cosby post) of leaking stuff to the site and of TMZ being in Johnny’s “pocket.”

So with that said, accusing Amber of being the one in cahoots with them is almost mind-boggling in its projection, but that’s how Depp fans operate. Whatever he does, Amber’s guilty of ten times over. Their evidence of this supposed relationship includes:

Sigh. Let’s break it down.

On the first count, I think it’s pretty clear to anyone not swept up by DeppAnon that Amber didn’t suffer some sort of Freudian slip by name-dropping TMZ in her deposition. She said she knew they’d been “alerted” - OK, and? What does that prove? If she’d tipped them off, like the Deppies claim, then why did it take several days from the time she filed for the divorce on May 23rd for TMZ to finally break the story on May 25th? What she likely meant in the video was she’d been informed that TMZ had found out about the divorce filing - given Johnny’s lawyers are connected to the website, and also due to the fact TMZ has informants at the courthouse, which I’ll elaborate on in a moment - and they were going to run the story. It’s as simple as that. She didn’t accidentally reveal her evil master plan.

As for the text to iO, it’s obvious that by Amber referencing TMZ, it was as a generic name for the media as a whole. Like saying Kleenex instead of a tissue. TMZ was the foremost celebrity gossip outlet at that time, so by her saying that the divorce would appear on TMZ, it’s the same as her saying it would appear in the media. And, again, if she’d really cooperated with TMZ, then why did it take them days before they picked up the story?

Now regarding the crush of cameras outside the courthouse when she got her TRO, it’s important to note one thing: They arrived after she’d already gotten there. They didn’t show up before, waiting for her; they only gathered once she’d been inside the courthouse and was about to leave. This is a significant detail as it fits with TMZ’s MO: what always set the site apart from other gossip outlets was its legal slant. From the time it first launched in 2005, Levin would station multiple employees at the L.A. courthouse to sift through public legal filings. Because of this, many of the stories on TMZ in its earlier years were raw legal documents (lawsuits, restraining orders, divorce filings, police records, etc.); before TMZ, Levin had an outlet completely dedicated to this sort of stuff called Celebrity Justice, which I talked more about in the Cosby post I shared earlier.

Levin and TMZ also have a relationship with courthouse clerks, who tip the site off about new filings and celebrity comings and goings. So with that considered, it makes perfect sense that cameras were waiting for Amber as she left the courthouse. What likely happened was that she’d shown up, a clerk or stationed TMZ underling spotted her, and then paged the others. It’s really that simple. As for the presence of Amber’s publicist, Jodi Gottlieb, who was with her that day, it’s important to note that Jodi was as much Amber’s friend as she was her flack; Amber had confided in Jodi about the abuse and even called her the night of the May 21st to ask her advice on what to do. So Gottlieb’s presence at the courthouse isn’t at all suspicious if you’re aware of the nature of their relationship.

Finally, the video. I do believe someone on Amber’s team leaked it, but whether Amber was aware is a different story. I assume she was. For those who haven’t seen the video, you can watch it in its entirety here. The version that appeared on TMZ was clipped short.

I say it’s likely Amber’s side leaked it because TMZ appears to own the copyright over the video, which means the original copyright owner - Amber - most likely agreed to pass over the rights to it (though not necessarily, as copyright law is complicated and there’s certain circumstances under which Amber’s permission wouldn’t have been needed to post the video, but still, let’s play with the leak theory). It’s then important to note when this leak happened: August 2016. Nearly three months after the negative coverage of her began on the website. So let’s put that into perspective: Johnny Depp, his team, and his fans are steaming mad at Amber for doing to Johnny what he’d been doing to her for months at that point. Like I said before, these people are masters of projection. It’s like when MAGA-heads would accuse Fox News of becoming liberal for running one unfavorable story about Trump out of a thousand puff pieces. Only when it’s the coverage they like is it OK and not a conspiracy!

Johnny’s attorney, the dollar store Elle Woods, grilled Amber about the video on the stand repeatedly. Amber insisted she wasn’t involved in the leak - and maybe she wasn’t. Maybe her lawyers were. Who knows. And it doesn’t matter, since as I noted, the video was leaked three months after his side had begun the barrage of bad press against her - mislabeling paparazzi photos, dredging up her past arrest, casting doubt on the legitimate text messages proving her abuse, and quoting unnamed sources that insisted Amber was lying. Amber could’ve done a press conference in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard showing off her bruises and it wouldn’t have changed the fact that he threw the first stone, and kept throwing them for nearly three months straight. But, of course, on the stand Amber did testify to what I said earlier: Johnny’s side had the TMZ hookup; Johnny’s side had Laura Wasser. But that fell on deaf ears, naturally.

But to milk their latest conspiracy a little more, Team Depp wheeled out a guy named Morgan Tremaine last week to testify about Amber’s supposed link to the site. Tremaine worked for TMZ for several years as a field reporter and says that he’d emailed Johnny’s lawyers the week prior about wanting to testify after he’d heard TMZ was being discussed at the trial. When he got on the stand last week I asked a few of my ex-TMZ acquaintances for his story, and it was pretty much what you’d expect. He has more than a few things in common with Johnny, I’ll leave it at that. When Tremaine was first reported to be testifying, TMZ tried to stop him, pointing out that not only would he be violating his strict non-disclosure agreement with the website, but also noting that he’d had no personal involvement in some of the stories involving Amber, despite his testifying otherwise.

Maybe they only said that to minimize what he had to say. Or maybe it’s true. That's anyone’s guess. But there’s no clear proof beyond his word that he actually worked on any of the stories involving Amber, and his word is dodgy at best: in his testimony, he claimed TMZ had been specially tipped off to photograph Amber at the courthouse when she got the restraining order, insinuating that it was someone from Amber’s side who did it. He doesn’t say who, just that there was a tip, and made a point of saying the courthouse isn’t a “celebrity hotspot” crawling with cameras, thus suggesting someone from Amber’s side must’ve tipped them off - which, as I explained earlier, is a flat lie. TMZ has people there around the clock, and anyone who works there would know that, but he and Team Depp were likely counting on the average person to be clueless to that fact.

The next Amber-related assignment he said he worked on was dispatching paparazzi to get her arriving to a divorce deposition at a law office in August 2016, almost three months later (I guess we’re just supposed to ignore all the negative stories about Amber on TMZ in that three-month gap), but what he leaves out is whose office it was - Laura Wasser’s - and the tone of the story in question: it was negative.

So let’s sit with that for a minute: Team Depp essentially trotted this guy out to recount a time that Johnny’s side had probably tipped off TMZ, but omits the names and details so it sounds to the average person watching the trial that Amber was the one calling the paps. 

Honestly, Amber’s team should’ve just called me to the stand. Are “TMZ experts” a thing? Since I would’ve ripped this wannabe Kato a new one.

Afterwards he talked about the kitchen cabinet video - he said it was sent via a Dropbox link and that they posted it to the site 15 minutes later. Amber’s lawyers would try to counter this in their closing arguments by pointing out she’d been on a plane when the video was emailed and published, but that doesn’t mean much since someone else from her team could’ve leaked it. It didn’t need to be Amber herself. Tremaine also claimed he was instructed to dispatch cameras the next day to Wasser’s office again to catch Amber, and once again he omitted the key detail that it was Wasser’s office. Isn’t that funny? Here’s a link to that story. He also denied that Johnny’s team had ever sent him tips - emphasis on him, not the site. 

So that’s pretty much it. There’s no smoking gun. Nada. Just the delusions of a cult and the unreliable word of a blonde-haired Twitch-streaming twink fished out of a gutter in West Hollywood. Unfortunately the average person following the case doesn’t understand how celebrity gossip and the tabloids work, so they’ll take these conspiracies and half-truths as gospel. And Amber’s lawyer Elaine was right about Tremaine wanting his fifteen minutes of fame - he’s since taken to Twitter and TikTok to share memes of his testimony. I just hope the eventual legal bills are worth it. I’ll gladly look the other way this one time if Harvey wants to sue this guy into oblivion.

(I also have a pet theory that the gossip site The Blast put Tremaine up to testifying, but that's peeling back a whole other layer of gossip industry machinations that'll probably be boring to you guys.)

As a lifelong Lindsay Lohan fan, I'm well aware that a woman can be a lying, scheming, narcissistic, abusive cokehead who cries and denies her way out of responsibility for her actions.

So when I say Amber Heard is none of those things, I mean it.

I think she’s suffering from Lance Ito disease. I tried to cut her some slack during the first few weeks of the trial as I assumed she was compensating for being a woman on a case attracting intense misogyny, but the behavior she’s allowed Johnny and his team to get away with in the courtroom is just ridiculous. She’s allowed a complete circus, and the fact that Johnny’s fans, who’ve been tweeting death threats about Amber, were allowed to sit in the gallery as she was recounting her abuse is horrific. I don’t know much about her, but a couple of weeks ago I found a page of comments about her past judicial decisions and apparently she has a history of siding with abusive fathers in custody cases. I don’t know how accurate that is but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Her definition of hearsay is also frustratingly stringent and has let a lot of important evidence stay away from the jury - the text messages from Johnny’s assistant, Stephen Deuters, to Amber acknowledging Johnny’s abuse; and contemporaneous photos, therapist notes, and medical records confirming the abuse. While I think there’s objectively enough evidence to guarantee Johnny a loss, I can’t help but be disappointed with how much was left out, and I don’t blame Amber’s team since I know they’ve tried their best. Despite all the mockery they’ve gotten online, I do think Ben and Elaine have done a good job, especially compared to Johnny’s dollar store Elle Woods (how many attempts at a “Gotcha!” moment can one person have?) who’s probably angling for a Fox News gig after this. 

Couple that with the fact the jury hasn’t been sequestered, and I’m nervous for the verdict. I’ve followed a lot of celebrity trials but never with the personal investment that I've had in this one, as you guys know I’ve been following the case and supporting Amber on this blog since the divorce in 2016. After all she’s been through, her losing would be devastating. The only potential upside would be her having a strong case for an appeal, but I’d hate for her to have to go through this all over again.  

I’ve shared this article a few times over the past month on Twitter and my other blogs, but I think it’s a necessary, if totally gutting read - Dominick Dunne’s account of his daughter’s murder trial. Judges can make or break a case like this. And on a side note, it really makes me wish Dunne were still around to cover this trial. He always stood up for the victims and managed to cut through the bullshit. Even in the few defenses Amber’s gotten on social media, they’ve stopped short of defending her as a person and focused more on the wider misogyny and the politics of the smear campaign against her, which by no means is unimportant to acknowledge but it’s frustrating how so many people don’t want to stick up for her directly because she’s imperfect or “complicated.” I’ve said this so many times, but it feels like Nicole Brown all over again, except people aren’t satisfied Amber lived.

I am! I think it appeared in print too, but I tried three different places near me and couldn't find a copy. Long Island is proudly anti-intellectual. After the story went up yesterday I got a random call from Fairfax, Virginia. Adam Waldman versus PCD2009 might be next!

Where it stands, I think neither of them will win their respective lawsuits. With regards to Johnny’s - and I don’t want to jinx it - I can’t imagine he’ll be able to prove Amber defamed him by calling herself a victim of abuse in that op-ed when his own team has called multiple witnesses who attested to seeing her bruises, including his and Amber’s nurses, and their couple’s therapist, Laurel Anderson, who also quoted Johnny as telling her that Amber “gave as good as she got” in their fights. How can you argue with that? Again, I don’t want to jinx it, but Johnny’s fans seem to be under the delusion that proving Amber hit him somehow negates his violence, like one cancels out the other, and it doesn’t work like that.

Regarding Amber’s, I don’t think she’ll win her end of the suit either, which is over Johnny’s lawyer Adam Waldman’s comments that her abuse allegations were a “hoax.” While we know Waldman was lying, I don’t think she’ll be able to prove that he knew he was lying and didn’t just take Johnny at his word. It’s unfortunate, since I’d love for her to win, but it’d take nothing short of a miracle. She would’ve had a much better shot at suing Johnny over his own comments in that 2018 GQ interview he did a month before her op-ed was published, wherein he accused her directly of lying about the abuse, in spite of their NDA. (Yes, people seldom acknowledge that he had brought her up before she even made her nameless reference to him in her op-ed.) The original judge in the Virginia case, Bruce White, deemed his comments “potentially defamatory,” but by the time she’d filed her countersuit, the interview had fallen out of the statute of limitations, so she was stuck with Waldman.

If that’s the verdict, I can only imagine the response online. I think his fans will spin it to a vindication somehow - that because Amber lost her end of the suit, that must mean Johnny’s “innocent,” even though his own loss would contradict that completely. It’s similar in a way to how Michael Jackson fans (who operate in an eerily similar fashion to the Depp defenders) spin the dismissal of the lawsuits of his accusers Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck, who were both dismissed on legal technicalities. Fans tout them as vindications and “proof” Michael was innocent, although every article about the decision acknowledges that the veracity of Wade and Jimmy’s claims was never deliberated on, merely if the targets of their lawsuit, Michael’s production companies, were liable for any abuse they may have suffered. The judge ruled no. Nevertheless, #MJInnocent still trends, and I’m sure we’ll see #JusticeForJohnny continue to trend until the end of time.

Oh, and regarding the post I said I’d make about the case several weeks ago, I changed my mind. Rather than do recaps of the courtroom, I figured I’d do a sort of Q&A post that directly addresses all of the major lies, myths, and misconceptions about the case head-on. I was hoping to have it up sometime this week or next (before the verdict), but I’m pretty busy so I could see it coming either the end of next week or early the following. It's pretty in-depth and heavily-sourced, hence why it's taken so long.

Us Weekly November 1, 2004

I’m working on a post recapping the trial thus far, and to make sure it’s as thorough as possible I’m going back and watching the full days of court, given a lot happens that doesn’t make its way onto Twitter. By the time it’s up I think I’ll probably be a week or so behind, but I don’t think you guys are counting on me for immediacy as much as you are for research and analysis.

But I just want to say in regard to your comment that Amber isn’t the “perfect victim,” no one - no one - is ever the perfect victim. I encourage every person who has to introduce a caveat to their defense of Amber (“Amber’s messy, but...”) to pause and take a moment to consider how their own actions and behaviors would look if they were placed under the microscopic glare of social media. We’ve all said and done stupid, regrettable things. We’ve all lost our cool in the heat of the moment. That shouldn’t make us any less worthy of compassion and support, especially when stacked against the psychotic, blood-thirsty social media campaign against her. There’s nothing Amber’s done that’s made me think of her as anything less than human; flaws are part of that package, we’d be kidding ourselves if we thought otherwise.

And this isn’t to rag on you Anon, I know you meant well, but I’ve seen so many of those sort of comments this past week from the few people sticking up for Amber and it’s frustrating. Whether we’d like to admit or not, we’re all one public transgression away from landing on the social media ‘shit list.’ What counts is the severity of those actions and how we learn from them.

And on a side note, while I have your guys’ attention, if you can keep an eye out on Twitter, TikTok, and other platforms for some of the more egregious examples of bias towards Depp, I’d appreciate it. You can submit anything you find here or just drop me a message. A good example of what I’m talking about is the celebrity gossip Instagram DeuxMoi recently encouraging its followers to submit their encounters with Amber or Johnny, and when stories about Amber seeming standoffish at a party and drinking a lot of wine were submitted, they were published, but a story someone else submitted of Johnny being aggressive with staff at an event wasn’t. When the person who submitted the Johnny story confronted them about it, D.M. bizarrely responded that they would not share the story because Johnny’s ‘in the midst of a trial where he’s being accused of abuse’ - plus, they said, they doubted the story was ‘real’ (since D.M. apparently has a reputation for accurate, hard-hitting journalism - who knew!).

I’ve been following it. I haven’t been watching the courtroom streams but I’ve been keeping up with the day-to-day via reporters on Twitter. Needless to say it’s a trainwreck so far. This first week, bar jury selection on Monday, was Depp’s team presenting their case and calling witnesses, who despite being chosen to testify in Johnny’s defense somehow managed to make him look worse (if that’s possible). First his sister testified that she’d never been aware of his drug problem, despite sending him a text message in 2014 pleading with him to stop the “coke” and “pills” (her explanation? “I don’t recall”). Then on Wednesday Johnny’s longtime friend Isaac Baruch, whom he grew up with and who by his own admission lives rent-free in a penthouse apartment Johnny owns, went on a weepy spiel about how Amber ruined Johnny’s life before admitting that one of the only times he’d seen them argue it was Johnny who appeared to be the aggressor, screaming at Amber over the phone, and confirmed a text Johnny had sent him saying that he hoped Amber's “rotting corpse is decomposing in the fucking trunk of a Honda Civic” (reminiscent of Johnny’s texts with his pal Paul Bettany joking about raping Amber’s “burnt corpse”). And finally on Thursday a marriage counselor called by Johnny’s side stated plainly that when Amber struck Johnny, she was reacting to the abuse he started - “Always hitting him back was a point of pride [for Amber]” - and quoted Johnny as saying Amber “gave as good as she got.” And if that didn’t drive the point home, when asked if Johnny was violent with Amber, the counselor said yes. Yes. Straight from his own witness. 

Mind you, he’s suing Amber for defamation - this Virginia lawsuit is over an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2018 saying she was a victim of domestic abuse - yet only a week into the trial one of his own witnesses confirmed he abused her. I don’t know how much he’s paying his lawyers, but it’s too much. It’s hard to believe this is the same guy Hollywood tried to convince us was an intellectual artiste back in the 2000s because he spoke French and wore scarves. He’s a fucking moron. And to top it off, he’s spent some of this past week in court sleeping and giggling.

If people are interested, I could make an updates post for the rest of the trial. It’s supposed to last six weeks. I know it’s been a while since I’ve covered the case on here, and I’ve wanted to post about it again, I just haven’t gotten around to it. Early last year I worked with someone to draft an entire timeline of Johnny and Amber’s relationship and the abuse claims, hoping to post it on here when it was done. It ended up being a little under 200 pages, each and every allegation cross-referenced and cited with the appropriate witness statements, photos, videos, etc. I figured that was probably a bit too much for any one person to read, though, so if I ever get around to trimming it, I’ll share it here - but that probably won’t be for some time. However, if any journalists happen to be reading this and would like to peek through it for stories they’re putting together, feel free to e-mail me (popculturediedin2009@gmail.com) and I’ll share the link. It’s probably the rare occasion I don’t mind people lifting my work given there’s so much misinformation - or disinformation, rather - about the case.

Britney Spears (in a wig) shops with a friend in Santa Barbara, January 2005

I have mixed feelings. While I agree with the judge’s decision to end the conservatorship, I don’t think it’ll be good for Amanda in the long run, and I think all the celebration over the news on Twitter and elsewhere is delusional. A lot of people seem to be under the assumption that her situation is the same as or similar to Britney's, but it’s not - it’s much more complicated.  

For starters, the circumstances that led to Amanda’s conservatorship were a lot more serious. I’m not sure how well people remember what happened, given it’s been a decade now since it all started, so I’ll recap: Back in 2013, Amanda suffered a public breakdown that was years in the making. As early as 2010 she’d been exhibiting strange public behavior: that year she announced her retirement, and immediate un-retirement, from acting, and was fired from what would’ve been her final movie, the comedy Hall Pass, over what reports described at the time as being “paranoid” behavior on-set. Her Twitter account also attracted a lot of interest due to her strange, almost comical, tweets about her life and, most notably, her sexual preferences (long before she publicly asked Drake to ‘murder her vagina,’ she was tweeting about her love of “chocolate” men). From around 2010 to early 2013, there was a lot of confusion over what in Amanda’s life was real or fake, what was genuine unstable behavior versus staged antics for publicity. Even as she racked up arrests and driving infractions in 2012 and 2013, it all unfolded in such a bizarre and brazen fashion that a lot of people thought it was a Joaquin Phoenix-style prank and not a serious downward spiral.

That was until June 2013, when she was finally hospitalized after trying to start a fire in a stranger’s driveway and dousing her dog in gasoline (one of the early warning signs of Amanda’s troubled behavior had been her treatment of her dogs - in 2011, her four-month-old puppy died after she allegedly let it wander off a cliff, according to one of her friends; she bought a new one a week later). She was committed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, like Britney had been, and like Britney, Amanda’s parents sought a conservatorship over her. At the time there hadn’t been much concern over the idea, as the conservatorship was still widely believed to have saved Britney’s life, even by many of her fans. I shared that sentiment - and still do, to some degree, even if I don’t agree with how it was handled.

In Amanda’s case, it would similarly prove to be a positive influence in the beginning. For a little over a year, Amanda’s parents had a temporary conservatorship over her, and during that time she seemed - at least by appearances - to improve. She enrolled in fashion school and shifted focus from a Hollywood comeback to designing a clothing line (something she’d previously tried at the height of her acting career to little success). Things seemed to be going well. Then, in September 2014, the conservatorship came to an end, reportedly with no pushback from her parents, Rick and Lynn. Within days, Amanda moved out of her family home and a couple of weeks later was arrested for DUI and quickly spiraled into another public meltdown that culminated with a psychiatric hold and reinstatement of the conservatorship. This time, however, Amanda’s parents shrugged off most oversight of her to an attorney, Tamar Arminak, who held that position up until the judge’s termination of the conservatorship this past month.

Since 2014 the status of Amanda’s health has been a lot less certain, with fluctuating reports of stability being followed by drug and alcohol relapses. Back in the early years of this blog I used to have monthly “Amanda Roundups” of encounters people had with her and in those years immediately following the reinstatement of the conservatorship most of the stories I was told by people who met her out and about made it seem like her parents weren’t in the picture at all and that she was kind of just doing her own thing. She had her own set of friends, and Arminak was hardly seen with her - a far cry from the Britney situation where Britney’s dad, Jamie, and her conservatorship team were quite literally on top of her every second of the day and restricting her contact with the outside world. And unlike Britney, who was pushed back into the recording studio and preparing for a world tour within weeks of her hospitalization in 2008, Amanda was never really a valuable financial commodity. Most of the money she had from her acting days she blew through during her breakdown, and she hasn’t seemed to be under any pressure by her family or Arminak to return to work, or even get a job. For all intents and purposes, Amanda’s lived a relatively uncontrolled life since the start of her conservatorship. The only area where she’s faced restrictions is her finances, where for years she’s been kept under an allowance for her own sake, and that’s likely the reason she filed to terminate the conservatorship in the first place.

Make no mistake, I’m not saying I think Amanda should be under a conservatorship. I think if the Britney situation has taught us anything it’s that it’s much too binding of a legal structure for anyone to be under, whether the state of their health ‘warrants’ it or not (although in Amanda’s case I think something in-between would probably be advisable - oversight, but balanced with certain freedoms), but the idea that her situation is even remotely comparable to Britney’s is ridiculous and has mostly been propagated by delusional conspiracy theorists and bored Britney fans who after spending the last couple of years tweeting by-the-minute updates on Britney’s situation suddenly needed something else to channel their obsessive energy into now that she’s free, so Amanda became their new caged bird. Likewise a lot of disingenuous interest in Amanda’s situation has been driven by conspiracy bloggers and YouTubers who’ve speculated all sorts of disgusting things about her without proof and have latched onto bogus social media profiles, like the faux-Amanda Twitter impersonator @persianla27, as evidence of Amanda’s supposedly being abused and needing to be ‘freed.’ (For those unfamiliar, @persianla27 is a Twitter user who purports to be Amanda and regularly tweets as her - but believe me, it’s not. A friend of mine used to have the @persianla27 username before handing it over to the person that runs it now, and ever since then the person running the account has pretended to be Amanda, telling stories about being manipulated and abused by her family and conservators, despite repeatedly being caught tweeting at times when Amanda would’ve been physically unable to, like when she was in the hospital or jail, and then having to quickly go back and delete the tweets before people noticed). Unlike the Britney case, there’s never been any evidence to support the notion that Amanda’s conservatorship was ever abusive or harmful, or that the principals involved - her parents, Arminak, or the courts - had nefarious interests (nor would they have had much of a reason to given, as I pointed out, Amanda’s small bank account and limited earning potential). If damaging information about the conservatorship were to ever come out, I’d gladly eat these words, but like I said I was never opposed to it being dismantled, I just think the interest in it isn’t in good faith and has mostly been an outlet for predominantly grown people (I really wish it were dumb kids) to run wild with theories all for the sake of likes and views.

So hopefully you can see now why I’m hesitant to throw a party. Based on Amanda’s past and her tendency to spiral without formal supervision, I think it’s only a matter of time before she reverts back to her old behavior and squanders whatever money she still has left. I just hope for her sake she avoids the Dana Plato route and invests in something a little more comfortable than a Winnebago.

Now moving onto your other question, do I think Amanda could ever make a comeback? No, for a couple of reasons. The first of which is that she’s too much of a liability for any film or TV production to cast her, a point we need not dwell on. As I said earlier, she was fired from one of her last film projects before her de facto retirement because of her behavior, and that was before her breakdown, so you can only imagine the hesitation of a major producer to cast her now. She would need to prove herself stable and reliable if she wanted to work again, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon. It’s not impossible, of course - other female celebrities, like Margot Kidder, were able to come back, or at least resume working, after public breakdowns, but most of them were more famous than Amanda ever was.

And that’s the other reason: Despite the rosy nostalgia of a lot of those 2000s-themed accounts on Twitter and Instagram (you know, the ones that algorithmically share the same handful of old music video clips and pictures of Britney Spears), Amanda was never really that famous, even at the height of her career. In fact, I’d venture as far to say that most people, besides those who’d grown up with her on TV, had no idea who she was until her breakdown. After her success on Nickelodeon and the modest popularity of What I Like About You (which, while it did well for The WB, was never really a show I heard people talk about), Amanda had one decent hit with She’s the Man and then fizzled with Sydney White, which was a major bomb. Her last two major movie roles - in Hairspray and Easy A - were both supporting and didn’t do much to establish her as a star, either.

When Amanda was at her peak in the early-to-mid 2000s, she was still on the short end of the Hollywood totem pole, her name only ever invoked as a foil to the other, more famous girls of that period - the ‘bad’ girls. Unlike her peers, Amanda never really succeeded in escaping the tween sphere, and I think - and this is just speculation on my part - that was something that deeply bothered her, as for all the interviews she did proudly distancing herself from the Lindsays and Britneys of the world, I think she wanted more than anything just to be one of them. It’s interesting to point out that Amanda’s the same age as Lindsay in particular, and at the same time back then that Lindsay was working with Robert Altman and Jane Fonda, Amanda was still headlining tween comedies. When Lindsay was rubbing elbows with Karl Lagerfeld and modeling for Miu Miu, Amanda was designing a line for Steve & Barry’s and posing for Seventeen.

Compared to the girls she’d come up with, like Lindsay, the Olsens, or even Hilary Duff, Amanda was never really able to establish herself as more than a child star. And lest we forget, this was the era of the “It-Girl,” so not only was Amanda finding herself getting inferior work, but she was also stuck on the sidelines as her peers were showered with the headlines, paparazzi, and couture - and what young girl in Amanda’s position wouldn’t want those things? I remember some years back Amanda did an interview with a random celebrity website, one of the only ones she’s done since her breakdown, and the interviewer showed her some of her old red carpet looks and she singled out one as her favorite - this flowy bohemian number from the 2008 SAG Awards. Amanda remarked that at the time she’d been going for a “Sienna Miller look.” It was a small remark, but I think it says a lot about her mentality back then. She wanted to be one of the glamour girls, but unfortunately was stuck being the cute, goofy girl from Nickelodeon.

For anyone interested in reading more on this, there’s a really great Hollywood Reporter story from back in the day, maybe the one decent bit of coverage of Amanda’s situation over the years. It goes into a lot of what I’ve been talking about in regards to her career envy and how that may have led to her breakdown, and while it was published in 2012, before the mental health component in her situation had become evident, it still raises a lot of great points and the ending's always stuck with me in particular. Forget the podcasts and crappy YouTube videos, just read that story.

At risk of sounding crazy, I think Amanda’s situation has always reminded me a bit of one of my favorite actors, Robert Blake. Like Amanda, Blake was a child star who struggled to find a place in the industry as an adult. Not for a lack of talent, just luck of the draw. He’d come up with a generation of stars that included Liz Taylor and Natalie Wood (whom he’d grown up with on the studio lots), but when he was older found himself stuck in supporting roles or headlining under-the-radar B-movies. With each project, he was promised by those higher powers in the industry that it’d be the one to finally make him a star, but it never happened (in fact, when he was cast in the film In Cold Blood he was chosen for the reason the director Richard Brooks wanted “unknowns” - this despite Blake having been in the industry for nearly 30 years at that point). And like Amanda, Blake carved out something of a reputation for himself as a Hollywood outsider; much in the same way Amanda appeared on talk shows and interviews laughing off comparisons to Lohan, Blake was a staple of Johnny Carson’s couch where he’d go on bitter diatribes about the industry, the “suits” whom he blamed for failing his career, and those bigger, more glamorous stars he’d always wanted to be one of.

And both would eventually find the fame and attention they’d always sought in career-ending scandal: Blake in his wife’s murder trial and Amanda in her downward spiral, her now being remembered as part of that very pantheon of Hollywood “It-Girls” she’d silently envied from afar. On those nostalgic Instagram and Twitter pages I mentioned earlier, pictures of her in crazy wigs and leaving courtrooms are shared alongside those of Lindsay, Paris, and Britney.

It's a sad irony. She’s finally one of them, and all it took was the total destruction of her life; for people to finally care about her, to find her interesting and worthy of being talked about. But that’s Hollywood for you.