The sensationally famous legal case between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard ended well over 3 months ago much to the delight of Depp’s fanbase. The Edward Scissorhands star got support from a majority of the internet/social media while his ex-wife was constantly vilified for being an abusive wife who “lied about a lot of things”.
The verdict mandated Heard to pay $10.3 million in damages to Depp, while Depp was also ordered to pay $2 million in damages to Heard. The verdict on its own is a whole other thing, but the popularity of the legal case was met with a barrage of negative opinions about Heard. The implications of Amber Heard’s mockery by a majority of the internet have reeked into other cases involving high-profile women.
Angelina Jolie’s Brad Pitt Abuse Allegations Questioned, Much Like Amber Heard
The cultural progress in the more modernized parts of the world to believe victims of cases regarding any kind of abuse has increased quite significantly as more people are being educated about why vilifying the victim in an abuse case is not the correct course of action.
But this trend has been changing over the past few months after millions of social media users around the world learned of Amber Heard‘s alleged abuse towards Johnny Depp, which as we all know ended up with a defamation case in which the jury ruled in favor of Depp.
What followed was an army of misogynistic social media accounts that were hellbent on burning Heard’s reputation to the ground with memes, jokes, analysis videos, and so on. This further fueled questions over the veracity of victims’ allegations in other high-profile cases.
Angelina Jolie’s most recent abuse allegations against her ex-husband Brad Pitt can be taken as an example of the new trend of dismissing the victim’s claims of abuse.
The Salt star was the subject of a civil suit filed by her ex-husband in February regarding the sale of her part of a French winery that they bought together back in 2008. The jury would rule in favor of Jolie, who then decided to file a countersuit in which she details allegations of abuse that Pitt inflicted on their children.
This new countersuit, much like Amber Heard’s abuse allegations against Johnny Depp, was met with not-so-constructive criticisms from large corners of the internet – many claimed that it was simply a ‘smear campaign’ against Pitt by Jolie, or that she was out for blood after winning the case.
This is a precursor to a very eerie trend that has been forming in the new decade ever since the sensationalization of the Heard v Depp case, and the following abuse that the former received after the verdict.
What’s With The Tons Of Content Creators Milking The Amber Heard Issue?
Much like many of the people who targeted Angelina Jolie following her countersuit against Brad Pitt, Amber Heard has also been the victim of such online campaigns.
Jolie became the latest high-profile actress to be subjected to online attacks, with some even comparing her case to Heard’s. But according to NBC, this is simply “a trend of misogynistic stereotypes aimed at high-profile woman accusers”.
Popular video platforms like YouTube and Instagram are bound to have accounts with a huge following, and a huge following means getting more views which alternately means more money paid to the owner of the account.
A domestic violence researcher and an instructor from NBC says that views pay pretty well on these platforms. That in turn is an incentive to earn millions of views by making hate videos against high-profile women accusers like Amber Heard simply because the most popular trend is to hate these celebrities and dismiss their claims.
While we completely understand that people do want to make quick bucks off a trend, there are bigger implications for future legal cases surrounding abuse of all forms if the continuing denigration of accusers is not put to a stop.
Source: NBC
