Meet Johnny Depp’s most loyal defenders – the ultra-woke Gen Z

A fanatical army of young Depp fans have seized control of the online discussion. Why?

Look at Gen Z’s favourite social-media site, TikTok, and you’ll currently see video after video of teenagers and twenty-somethings raging about Amber Heard. On Twitter, the hashtags #JusticeForJohnnyDepp and #AmberHeardIsALiar have been trending almost constantly since the defamation trial in America began last month.

For anyone who likes to stay out of complicated celebrity break-ups, Depp is suing Heard for $50 million on the basis that she implied that he had been abusive in a 2018 article published in The Washington Post. Heard then released footage of Depp behaving in an abusive fashion, leading to calls for him to be dropped from the Fantastic Beasts franchise (which he was) and as the face of Sauvage for Dior (which he has not been). Depp has counter-claimed that Heard herself was abusive to him.

There’s nothing surprising about a celebrity porce, or a second marriage between two celebrities with a massive age-gap falling apart. What is surprising is how so many Gen Z commentators online have publicly taken Depp’s side, defending him aggressively, labelling Heard a hysterical, malicious liar who is trying to ruin her ex-husband’s life.

There are thousands and thousands of TikTok videos pulling Heard’s behaviour apart. Instagram is saturated with posts doing the same to her testimony before the court, criticising her clothing, her demeanour, her legal team, calling her a gold-digger, claiming that much of what she is saying in court are lines from various films and TV shows. A petition for her removal from the upcoming film Aquaman II has been signed by nearly four million people – despite the fact it would mean remaking almost the entire film.

In these videos and posts, the usual Gen Z rules about kindness and understanding, about believing women no matter how illogical their stories, apparently no longer apply. So why are a group of people who perpetuate cancel culture as a hobby, who view words as a form of violence and see mental-health issues as sacrosanct, jumping to defend a man who is accused of actual, physical violence, and deriding his “mental” ex-wife?

The Depp vs Heard case has flooded Gen Z social site TikTok

One 19-year-old TikToker told me: “I know that Johnny is innocent. He was never accused of anything before he got involved with Amber Turd.” When pressed on how she knows that he’s innocent, she replied: “I just do. He’s gentle. He’s an outsider. He’s an artist. He’s not the kind of person who abuses his wife.”

Another TikToker, 22, told me that it was more about the culture surrounding abuse than Depp’s cult of personality. “I’m sick of seeing the assumption that men are guilty and that women are innocent,” she said. “Men are victims of domestic abuse too. My best friend was in a relationship with a woman who beat him, and no-one cared. When it’s a woman abusing a man, we just ignore it.”

The Depp fan community is an especially devoted one. When I wrote previously about the break-up, assuming in the wake of the MeToo movement that Depp was just another Bad Hollywood Man, his fans did not take kindly. I received some of the most intense trolling I’ve ever experienced, matched only by the time I said something rude about Harry Styles (which is why I have chosen to remain anonymous for this article).

Why does this man inspire such a vehement defence? I think the “outsider” point made by my TikTok informant is the key. Despite being rich, famous and enormously successful, there has always been something of the wounded animal about Depp. Abused as a child, blighted by drug and alcohol addiction, intermittently involved in legal troubles mostly stemming from physical altercations: there’s a sadness behind his eyes; it doesn’t make sense that a man who is the toast of Hollywood would still seem like an outsider and misfit, but he does.

Depp fans even temporarily rebranded Heard's IMDb pageCredit: Instagram

One user, a 23 year old man who runs a dedicated Depp account but didn’t wish to be named due to the same distrust of press shared by other fans, says: “The press believed Amber but Johnny is the victim of an abusive relationship and people are starting to see that. Amber’s lies are becoming more obvious and people are seeing through her. Johnny has already suffered so much while people didn’t believe him.”

Whenever a beloved celebrity is embroiled in a public scandal, you have an element of the Michael Jackson phenomenon, where we choose to ignore or deny questionable behaviour from the artist because we don’t want to disengage from their art. It seems that despite their disdain for “boomers”, Gen X and millennials, Gen Z aren’t exempt from this tendency. And who can blame them? Depp is a relic of their childhoods. He was Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter, a stalwart of the megabucks movies these now young adults grew up going to see in their school holidays.

I have no idea what the truth of Depp and Heard’s marriage was, but neither do those dedicating significant portions of their time to making TikTok videos and Instagram posts in his support. As is increasingly clear from the inconsistent treatment of celebrities who transgress, there is no overarching logic to who gets cancelled and who doesn’t.

And in cases such as these, it doesn’t matter who is right and wrong. Between the perception of Depp as a wounded outsider misunderstood by society, the brewing sense that men don’t get a fair shake during reciprocally abusive relationships, and the desire by a large group of tech-savvy people to believe Depp to be innocent, it’s no surprise that the #JusticeForJohnny movement is taking up so much internet space. It’s all about them: how much we liked the accused in the first place, and how unwilling we are to stop consuming their art.