12 St 14 März 2021 Jahr - THE SUNDAY TIMES Justice warriors or troll army? Meet the ‘Deppheads’ JohnnyDepp's diehard superfans

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FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES:

Justice warriors or troll army? Meet the ‘Deppheads’, Johnny Depp’s diehard superfans

Johnny Depp’s libel trial comes to the Court of Appeal this week — and so will his loyal cheerleaders. Poppy Wood braves a Twitter pile-on to see what makes 21st century fans tick

by Poppy Wood

Johnny Depp is at one end of a long wood-panelled corridor. His ex-wife, Amber Heard, is at the other. In between them, men and women in corkscrew wigs, masked journalists and three Depp fans scuttle through the dark labyrinth of the High Court in London.

It’s midsummer 2020 and we’re here for the first day of the libel trial between Depp and News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun. Depp is suing the paper and its executive editor, Dan Wootton, over a story from 2018 that referred to the Hollywood actor as a “wife beater”. It’s the first big case since this great gothic building reopened after months of closure and social-distancing measures are in place, leaving a throng of bodies inside flailing for a chance to watch Depp take the stand.

Over the coming weeks this becomes more of a problem as growing numbers of fans accumulate. Some arrive with briefcases stuffed full of timelines, others sport the actor’s trademark plaid shirts and purple-tinted glasses. Court ushers ask the jostling women to state their case each morning, and pick a handful of the most worthy to enter the public galleries.

As the court sits, hundreds of figures mill about the stone walls of the High Court — smoking rollies, glued to their phones or pressing their ears against shuttered rooms. At lunchtime the narrow hallway outside court 13 becomes a mass of outstretched arms when a small tattooed figure emerges and is chaperoned into a side room.

One afternoon I see a group of fans huddled by the gates waiting for Depp’s silver Mercedes to arrive. When I ask why they are here, they say they’ve come to fight for “justice for Johnny”, who they believe has been wrongly accused of assault and is himself a victim of domestic abuse. “We’re here to disseminate,” one woman says, spreading her fingers as though swimming through the hot summer air. To whom, I ask. Thousands of Deppheads online, she replies, maybe tens of thousands around the world.

Depp, 57, would go on to lose the case against The Sun, which is published by the owner of The Sunday Times, in November. The judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence to believe 12 out of 14 incidents of alleged assault against Heard, including claims that Depp kicked her, slapped her and “put her in fear of her life” after “sustained and multiple assaults”.

Depp quickly filed an appeal. He was dropped from the Fantastic Beasts film franchise four days after the ruling, but his fans stuck by him. On Thursday some of his most fervent supporters — Deppheads, as they are known — will return to the Royal Courts of Justice for the first time in almost eight months to hear whether he can proceed with his appeal against the judge’s ruling. Others will be keeping a close eye from afar.

One of those considering going in person is Caroline Hicks (not her real name), a 40-year-old TV producer from Wales. Hicks is one of hundreds who have taken to the high seas of Twitter in Depp’s defence. His supporters come from all over the world and across the political spectrum, she tells me:“Trump supporters, lefties, righties …”

Depp, a goth heartthrob, has long drawn a horde of superfans, charmed by his good looks and dark, enigmatic film roles. But what started as a blushing fanbase has now calcified into a global campaign for male victims of abuse and men falsely accused of domestic violence, according to Hicks. “It’s still about 90 per cent female. But it has become this movement of people who’ve all had some sort of relatable experience with abuse. Not just a bunch of silly girls who want to get in his pants.”

She feels she knows Depp. “I met him so many times in those three weeks [during the trial]. It got to the point where it was like going to the office. I bumped into him in the hallway one day — it was when Amber was on the stand and he couldn’t really say anything, so he just hugged me. I almost feel like I can call him Johnny, but then also that’s a bit like I think I know him too well.”

Today is “Depp day” for Hicks, the one day each week she dedicates to catching up on the latest Twitter threads about the actor. Yet she doesn’t consider herself a fan. She has never had Sleepy Hollow posters on her walls or the Black Pearl pirate ship as her screensaver. And she audibly shudders when I mention the word Depphead. “I didn’t really have any interest in him whatsoever. I mean, obviously I’ve seen his films. But I don’t really do celebrity gossip and people’s private lives.”

It all started for Hicks in 2017, when her brother had a nervous breakdown while splitting up from his wife. “She was very controlling, a bit narcissistic. Then, when it came to the splitting up, she made lots of false accusations about him being violent.”

On a flight a few months later she watched Murder on the Orient Express. Depp’s role as the slick-haired murder victim was short and sweet but it was enough to stick in Hicks’s mind and she found herself googling the actor when she got off the plane. Over the course of a long coach journey back home she became convinced there was something dubious about Depp’s high-profile break-up with Heard, 34. “So I deep-dived basically, which is how the Americans say it, don’t they? I went down the rabbit hole.”

Much of the time Hicks uses a pseudonym online. She tells me this is because some of Depp’s diehard crusaders have recently been “doxxed” — the practice of publicly and maliciously revealing the personal details of somebody online. But she says they haven’t had their particulars plastered round the internet by rival fans of Heard — they’ve been doxxed by other Deppheads.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Hicks says carefully. There’s a lot of infighting between the different Depphead factions, she explains, and the best way to steer clear of trouble is to keep your name out of it altogether. “There’s the Twitter core, who are very active. They’re like activists for him, they get all the documents.” She says they do their own research, sharing information that they dig up on the case. “So there’s this real forensic activity among them. And then there are the lurkers — thousands and thousands of them.”

Sometimes the different divisions of the Depp community can clash when their motives are called into question, she explains. “You get people pretending to be other people, you also get people pretending to be Johnny Depp. It’s bizarre. Sometimes I think they’re just lonely guys.”

Some Deppheads are brave enough to put their faces out there, others divulge their names. But only a handful offer both. Lost Beyond Pluto is a YouTube channel run by a 27-year-old female lawyer from the US who is based in Australia. She stopped using her real name online a couple of months ago when an “obsessed madman” started threatening her and her boyfriend. Known as Pluto in the Depp community, she started making videos about the Kentucky-born actor during Australia’s first lockdown in May last year and has since become one of the most prominent YouTube stars among the Deppheads. Her videos are polished and professional, with excerpts from court documents sashaying on and off screen as she talks to the camera. So far they’ve earned her more than 16,000 subscribers and two million views.

“Based on the feedback I receive, the ‘service’ I offer is a clear and simplified explanation of legal jargon, which can often be quite complex,” Pluto tells me. She’s not shy of admitting she has admired Depp as an actor since she was little, but says she believed Heard’s side of the story when the revelations about the couple emerged.

“Her allegations were shocking,” she says. But, like Hicks, it was a personal brush with a domestic abuse case that made her reconsider. “What made me want to take it seriously was an experience I had with a case in 2019. It involved a male victim of sexual abuse and the abuser was female. The justice system didn’t take the case as seriously as it should have.” She is convinced the High Court ruling in Depp’s libel case was unfair.

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