Introducing...Who Trolled Amber? 37:12

Hello, it's Basha Cummings here. I'm an editor at Tortoise, which is the home of Sweet Bobby, Hoaxed and many more award-winning investigative podcasts. I'm here to tell you about Tortoise Investigates, where we curate the best of our chart-topping investigations in one place. Everything from extraordinary tales of deception to a suspicious killing to one mother's decades-long fight with the police. Just search for Tortoise Investigates wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Alexi, the host of Sweet Bobby. I'm really excited for you to hear my brand new podcast, Who Trolled Amber? It's an investigation into the battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, looking at a central question. Was Amber the victim of an organised trolling campaign? And if so, who was responsible? Here's episode one. I hope you enjoy it.

Just a warning before we start, this series contains strong language and descriptions of violence. There was a moment where I got up one day and I got on social media, I got on Twitter, and I just noticed that my feed was just absolutely overrun with content. This story starts with a spy. Well, a former spy. And I didn't have a whole lot of interest in learning much more about it than what I'd seen in the headlines. Like, I'm not particularly interested in celebrity culture stuff.

Someone who spends a lot of time online. And so I started to try to excise that content from my timeline. And it became apparent fairly quickly, within a couple of days, because I could feel myself getting frustrated, that that was not working, which is unusual. I'm actively seeking to not see this stuff, and it is still filling up my feed. You know, being a career investigator, my brain kind of went, oh, there's something going on here.

Daniel Mackey used to work for the Canadian government. I can't really go into more detail than that, but he specializes in something called open source intelligence. That means he pieces together clues on the internet to track down bad guys. He's basically an online detective. Daniel's gone private now. He works for this big accounting group, but he still wants to use his powers for good.

So, a bit like a lawyer who takes on some cases free of charge, Daniel helps out a few lucky journalists like me. I think we've spoken like more than a dozen times and this is the first time that I've actually seen you in the flesh. Really? You've never seen my face? I don't think I've ever seen your face. By 2023, we'd worked together on several stories, mostly involving internet hoaxes or conspiracies.

When he's interested in a story, Daniel goes into overdrive. He'll text me in the middle of the night, or he'll leave me these long voicemails. Daniel is an expert at navigating the dark corners of the internet. He's seen it all.

That is, until the spring of 2022, when something happens which takes him by surprise. I spent a period of time investigating disinformation campaigns, so foreign influence operations, information warfare stuff. This was more akin to that, what I was witnessing. Information warfare. Daniel is interested enough that he talks to his contacts inside the intelligence community. I said, "Hey."

you know, you guys are also watchers of this type of stuff. Are you seeing this too? And all of them had the same reaction as me. They went, yeah, it's really weird. Your Sherlock Holmes signal kind of goes off and you're like, what the hell's going on here? A few months later, he calls me and he tells me what he's noticed about a certain story and how it played out online.

Hundreds of miles away from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, this high-profile case will be right here in Fairfax County. The trial of Johnny Depp versus Amber Heard is a global phenomenon. From real-life political drama to real-life Hollywood drama, Johnny Depp versus his ex-wife Amber Heard. Depp is suing Heard in a $50 million defamation suit based on a Washington Post op-ed written by Heard.

The biggest court case since OJ Simpson was accused of murdering his wife back in 1995, almost three decades ago. She is accused of defaming her one-time husband and lover. He is accused of being so in the grip of drinking drugs that he would

become like a monster consumed by rage and violence. For seven weeks over the spring of 2022, this thing is everywhere. This has moved away from like a news story or a lawsuit and it's transformed into a cultural moment. It just dominates everything. Both COVID and inflation are on the rise and there's a war in Ukraine. But Americans are much more interested in talking about the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial.

And I remember thinking, "Ehh, no thanks." I was working on another story at the time, so I didn't really know much about the case. But my general reaction to it was, "This is a celebrity story. Not that interesting." But for Daniel, something about the online coverage of the case intrigued him. Daniel is a liberal. He's the sort of person who'd naturally support someone like Amber Heard. A woman who claims she's a victim of abuse.

He also knows how social media algorithms work, how they identify what you're interested in and then serve you similar content which they think you'll like. If the internet's echo chamber was working properly, Daniel would expect to see at least some pro-Amber Heard content on his social media feeds.

But what he actually saw was the exact opposite. Almost everything was trashing Amber and promoting death, a stream of misogyny and hate directed towards her. Things that I think actively damaged some of the progress that the MeToo movement made, for example. Really quite uncomfortable stuff with respect to Heard in particular.

The Me Too movement changed global conversations about sexual assault and domestic violence. It gave women who were abused a voice and a platform to tell their stories for the first time.

But Amber didn't get sympathy. She got vitriol. The queen of domestic violence claiming that she's a victim of violence is the biggest joke ever. What other options does a violent, predatory narcissist have when they are desperate to control their victim? Your voice is gone, Amber Heard. Die, bitch.

The scale of the attacks was staggering. Between 2016 and 2022, more than 800,000 tweets were posted with the hashtag Amber Heard is an abuser. Only 15,000 tweets used the hashtag Johnny Depp is an abuser, even though she was the one accusing him of abuse. And

And that wasn't all. Tens of thousands of posts across social media called Amber a gold digger, a whore and much worse. I'm coming for you when you get out of court. A lot of that hate came from real people. Johnny Depp has some really devoted fans and they do not like Amber Heard. Who wants to join me in my expedition to brutally murder Amber Heard?

Daniel also noticed that many of the online attacks came from accounts that seemed less than human.

Accounts with odd names, which seemed to be acting in a coordinated way, as if someone was controlling their movements, like the conductor of a giant orchestra. We don't want pirates without Johnny Depp. Amber Heard is an abuser. Amber is a big, fat, white, nasty-smelling, fat bitch. Just to play devil's advocate, what kind of chance do you think that everything actually was organic in this case? I would say there's a 0.1% chance that was all organic.

0.1% chance that was all organic. There's absolutely, and I swear, there is no fucking way that that was all organic. There's no fucking way. I would bet you a million dollars. I would bet you a million dollars. Just to be clear, Daniel thinks that someone deliberately set out to trash Amber's reputation online, either by buying bots, which are automated accounts that in this case could have pumped out thousands of anti-Amber messages or hashtags,

or by employing real people, internet trolls, who could have pretended to be Johnny Depp fans online. For me, these possibilities were interesting. But to be honest, even after talking to Daniel, I still had a nagging feeling. Would it be that big a deal if a PR company had bought a bunch of bots to defend a famous actor? And don't we know already that rich people sometimes play dirty?

But then I started speaking to people about the Depp case, including some of my friends. And I was shocked by how many of them had a negative opinion of Amber Heard, without really being able to explain why. They all said something like, I didn't watch the trial, but isn't Amber a bit crazy? Or wasn't there violence on both sides? Or I reckon that Johnny was the real victim. And that really did trouble me.

Because if it's possible for sensible people to end up hating a person without really knowing why, if it's possible for someone with a vested interest to plant opinions in people's heads simply by serving them up enough content, then that type of manipulation isn't just a celebrity issue. It's much more serious than that.

If your opinions on Amber Heard can be artificially swayed, then why not your opinions about a politician, a business, or even a war? Is your perception of reality being altered without you even knowing it? There are many things we can say about this situation.

very toxic industry that is really a threat to democracy. What I would say are indications that there have been rented bot network or a for hire. It's 100% inauthentic. I have no doubt about that. I received DMs on Twitter that basically said, we know where you live, we know where you are and we're going to come find you and we're going to hurt you. I felt like I was leaving the Truman Show because I thought at any time my story and my work would be revealed.

I'm Alexi Mostras, and from Tortoise, this is Who Trolled Amber? Episode 1, Missing Evidence. I receive death and rape threats. I receive threats and comments saying, like Amber, I have a punchable face. All kinds of awful things. It's a cold, wet day in central London, and I'm with my producer, Xavier. We've gone to see someone who knows Amber Heard well.

My name's Jennifer Robinson. I'm a barrister at Dowdy Street Chambers, and I was counseled for Amber Heard in relation to the UK defamation proceedings. Jen is a kind of superstar media lawyer. She's the longtime barrister of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and she's represented the UN and other major organisations. Between 2018 and 2020, she worked very closely with Amber, collecting evidence about Johnny Depp's abusive behaviour.

But Jen didn't represent Amber in the US trial, the huge media event that took place in Virginia in 2022. She represented her in London in an earlier trial two years before. When I first spoke with Amber, it was in the context of the fact that Johnny Depp had sued for defamation here in the United Kingdom. If you're not familiar with the case, don't worry. The background is simple.

When Amber Heard and Johnny Depp get married in 2015, they seem like the ultimate Hollywood power couple. Despite well-known drug and alcohol issues, Depp is still one of Hollywood's most famous names. The star of Donnie Brasco, Edward Scissorhands and the Pirates of the Caribbean. There are many pirates in rock and roll, you know.

Amber is pretty hot property too. She's about to star in Aquaman, a huge blockbuster that will take more than a billion dollars at the box office. She's a superhero in her own right. She's super strong. But their marriage is a disaster. Away from the cameras, it disintegrates almost immediately. The couple divorce just 15 months after the wedding.

At the time of their divorce, Amber is granted a restraining order against Depp. She alleges that Depp has been violent against her. But the pair seem to want to move on. They settle their divorce and they release a joint statement saying, Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love.

Fast forward to April 2018, and The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, publishes an article about the new Fantastic Beasts movie, which is going to star Johnny Depp. The piece criticises J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author and Fantastic Beasts creator, for casting Depp in the movie. The paper says that there's overwhelming evidence that Depp has been violent towards Amber. It explicitly calls him a wife-beater.

Depp sues the newspaper almost immediately. And he brings the case in London, where The Sun is published and where libel rules are notoriously weighed in favour of claimants like him. Under English law, it's up to The Sun to prove, on the balance of probability, that Depp has been violent. It's a big ask. And Amber? Amber's not a defendant in the British case. It's Depp versus The Sun, not Depp versus Heard.

She doesn't have to give evidence and she doesn't want to either. She never wanted to relive what happened in her relationship. She had to go on the stand and talk about what she describes as the most traumatic incidents in her life.

Not just in front of a judge and in front of Mr Depp himself and his legal team, but in front of the world's media. But Jen knows that if Amber doesn't turn up and the son loses, then Depp can forever claim that he's not an abuser and that the trial proves it. So she flies to London.

The first day of trial, Amber was really nervous. You can only try to imagine what it would be like to be in her shoes, but this was the first time she was going to see Mr Depp in person since they were divorced. In advance of the trial, because of the intense online hate and attacks that she had faced, that I had faced as her lawyer...

The newspaper and the court had arranged for us to be able to enter through the judge's security entrance because we didn't know what was going to be outside court waiting for her when we arrived. If it was anything like what was happening online, we presumed it wouldn't be very pleasant. The trial starts on the 7th of July 2020. When we got to the court, there were a bunch of protesters outside, lots of Justice for Johnny signs, even people dressed up as Johnny Depp.

and they were all milling about waiting for us to arrive. When we got to the gate, I was sat with Amber in the back of the car. We had her security guard in the front of the car with the driver. The car was encircled with paparazzi banging on the window. They do that to get the person to look up so they can get their shot. But also some of the protesters sort of circled the car and started shouting at us, Amber lies, you're an abuser.

All kinds of insults about being a gold digger, being a whore. Despite representing some pretty famous people, Jen has never seen anything like this. For someone who's there to give evidence about domestic violence, to have these people shouting and screaming at you in a really aggressive way, I found it offensive.

The trial lasts three weeks. Amber is cross-examined over three gruelling days by Depp's lawyers. According to Jen, they use tactics reminiscent of the 1970s, bringing up some of the worst stereotypes about domestic violence. If it was true, why didn't she go to the police? If it was true, she would have more evidence of the injuries.

The fact is Amber had a lot of evidence of injuries. She had photographs which they claimed she had doctored. They even suggested with all this evidence she'd collected of images of bruises, you know, where's the video of him punching her or grabbing her by the hair? What domestic violence victim is able to take a selfie or film when they're being hit? Before and during the trial, Amber also faces thousands of attacks against her on social media. Attacks that seem coordinated.

I started to question the authenticity of the activity going on when we received, and I received, a whole raft of emails and tweets after Amber appeared with me at a Women's Day event associated with my chambers. It was quite early in the case. It was before the UK trial.

I was acting for Amber and working with her in preparing for that case, but the trial hadn't happened yet. And it was the first time I really started to see what appeared to be inauthentic coordinated activity. So the same tweets, the same emails, it looked orchestrated. And when I say orchestrated, it was just one tweet would happen and then hundreds or thousands of tweets would come saying the same thing with the same hashtags.

and calling her Amber the abuser, Amber the liar, justice for Johnny Depp, making awful comments about Amber and about us or about me as her lawyer. Attacks on my professionalism, the way I look, my personal life, but also threats of violence. Jen is so concerned that she emails Amber's lawyers in America, asking them to get to the bottom of what she calls a targeted online campaign to undermine her client. But they never do.

Finally, on the 28th of July, the trial is over. The judge retires to make his decision. Three months later, Jen hears her computer ping. It's the judgment. Over 129 pages, Mr Justice Nicol concludes that Depp has been violent against Amber on 12 separate occasions.

He finds that Depp has headbutted her, kicked her on an aeroplane, pushed her against a wall and grasped her by the throat. The judge finds that Heard has been the victim of, and I quote, "sustained and multiple assaults." The next day, the Sun newspaper front page, under a picture of a flustered-looking Johnny Depp, runs the headline, "He is a wife-beater." Amber Heard is vindicated.

Why are you here? I am here because my ex-husband is suing me.

Amber doesn't know it yet, but her troubles are only just beginning. Eighteen months after the London trial, she faces another hearing, in the US. And this time, she's the defendant.

Amber Turd and Johnny Depp. The defamation trial is set to commence. Amber, your time's up, love. Jen thinks her client will be OK. And I said to her at the time, by rights, you will win in the US because it is a more difficult standard of proof in the UK that the sun was able to win on a truth defence where they bore the burden of proof...

In the US, you should have an easier time of it because the burden is on Johnny Depp to prove not only that what you said was not true, that he didn't hit you, but that you said it with malice. It's a much higher standard. Here's what happens. Eight months after The Sun publishes its article, Amber writes a piece for The Washington Post. In it, she describes herself as a public figure representing abuse and calls for tougher laws against domestic abusers. She doesn't name Depp.

and she doesn't call herself a victim, but that doesn't matter. Depp sues her anyway, claiming that anyone who reads the piece will know that it refers to him. He says that Amber's libel has cost him $50 million, including a part in Pirates of the Caribbean 6. On the 11th of April 2022, the trial of Depp v. Heard finally begins. This is a case about the impact of Amber Heard's

Words on Johnny Depp. The US trial is looking broadly at the same questions as in London, but everything about it seems 10 times bigger. It's like if a low-budget indie movie is remade as a Hollywood blockbuster. Mr. Depp's team is going to try to turn this case into a soap opera. Why? I'm not really sure, because the evidence isn't pretty for Mr. Depp. It's not. You're going to see who the real Johnny Depp is. Behind the red carpets...

behind the fame, behind the money, behind the pirate costumes, you're going to see who that man really is. Outside the Virginia courthouse, Depp fans gather to cheer on their hero, heckling Amber and her witnesses.

Inside court, it's even worse. Against Amber's wishes, the judge allows the trial to be televised. Our cameras are in court and you can watch every twist and turn live. Over seven weeks, hundreds of hours of footage are generated. From the trending hashtag justice for Johnny Depp to the viral memes mocking Amber Heard, even re-enacting her claims of abuse for millions of likes. And he slapped me.

Every smirk, every grimace, every pause, it's all put online, shot from six different camera angles. And this helps the case go viral, really viral.

By May 2022, at the height of the trial, TikTok videos using the hashtag JusticeForJohnnyDepp have been viewed 15.7 billion times. Today we're going to talk about something I don't think we've ever even spoken to each other about. The Johnny Depp, Amber Heard defamation trial. Knee-jerk reaction, go. What do you think? Amber's crazy. We're going to find out whether or not Amber Heard shit in the bed next on the Joe Rogan Experience.

Online celebrities with large profiles talk about the case. But they're not the ones who keep Amber's name trending day after day. It's the tens of thousands of smaller social media accounts who do that. Some have only been created during the trial. Others are tweeting 24 hours a day.

Lots post about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and nothing else. Amber Heard is finished. Amber Heard. Amber Heard. Amber Heard. Amber Heard. Amber Heard. The accounts share clips from the trial, cutting them together to make Amber look bad, or they write long threads with their theories on the case.

Many of the posts are provably wrong. There are false claims that Amber Heard snorted cocaine on the stand, that she took bits of her testimony from a movie, The Talented Mr Ripley. Some of the content looks automated, but it's hard to tell. The hate all mixes together. And if you use the internet like most of us do, scrolling through your socials quickly, you don't have time to double-check this stuff.

The overall impression is that Amber Heard is definitely lying. Amber Heard deserves prison.

In the UK, Jen and Amber didn't have to worry too much about what was happening online. The case there was decided by a judge who was probably not going to pay TikTok or Twitter much attention. But in the US, the case is being decided by a jury.

The most important thing to know about the jury in the Depp Heard case is that they're not sequestered, meaning that they aren't put in isolation after leaving court for the day. Even though they're not technically supposed to check the internet, there's nothing to stop them either. It wasn't until the US trial happened and I observed what can only be described as an even more intense bout of online activity that

In a circumstance where you've got a jury that was not sequestered, that's where I think it does, and it can, and it did, have a very real impact. On the 1st of June 2022, the jury finds against Amber Heard and for Johnny Depp, awarding him $10 million in damages. It's a stunning reversal from the UK judgment, which found that Depp had been violent to Amber on no fewer than 12 occasions.

Amber Heard is interviewed a few days after the trial. Vast majority of this trial was played out on social media. I think that this trial is an example of that gone haywire, gone amok. And the jury is not immune to that. And you could say, well, she would say that, wouldn't she? After all, it's easier to blame the internet. But what if it's true?

What if a coordinated online campaign did ramp up the hate against Amber to the point where a jury simply couldn't avoid it? One of the things I find weird about the Depp case is that for all the money and attention thrown at it, no real effort has gone into trying to answer this question. There are rumours about bots, about trolls, about organised campaigns, but it's all conjecture. Lots of heat, but almost no light.

So, okay, if this is a movie, it's got my attention. I'm convinced by this point that it's a story worth digging into. A story that could be much bigger than the celebrities in the middle of it. I want to know who trolled Amber. But that's jumping the gun. First, I have to show that bots and trolls were used against her in the first place. That it wasn't just real-life Johnny Depp fans giving her shit.

And maybe if I work out what happened, I can find some clues about who might have been behind it. So I start at the beginning. I look through thousands of pages of court documents filed in both the UK and the US. I'm looking for any mention of bots. And they're not difficult to find.

There's a deposition given by Amber's agent. Just as I would go through, you know, daily, just looking at comments or accounts that just had, you know, no followers, no posts, nothing, or following just...

Amber and Johnny. They weren't consistent with what I know to be actual Instagram accounts. And this email sent by her publicist. Our company, with 3,000 followers, gets killed consistently on Instagram when we post about Amber. There has to be an algorithm that they follow. I've clicked on many of those making obscene comments and they all seem to be bots. Jen had also told me about a counterclaim filed by Amber against Johnny.

A counterclaim is a claim against someone who has already brought a legal action against you. Amber files her counterclaim as part of the US proceedings. She submits it in 2020, a few months after Depp sues her. Basically, from that moment, the couple are suing each other.

In her counterclaim, Amber alleges that Depp's team created, coordinated, controlled and or manipulated social media accounts specifically for the purpose of targeting Miss Heard. In other words, it accuses Depp of orchestrating a bot campaign against her. But this part of the counterclaim is problematic. As evidence of this supposed campaign, Amber's lawyers list out a whole bunch of Twitter accounts that they say are bots.

But when I look at some of these accounts online, I find that many seem to be real people. I feel pretty certain that the counterclaim gets a lot of stuff wrong. And it seems to have confused Depp's superfans, people obsessed enough with the actor to post 20 or 30 times a day, with bots. So I'm not surprised when I discover that a judge dismissed Amber's claim about bots for lack of evidence more than a year before the US trial.

And that decision turns out to be critical. Because from the moment that that part of the counterclaim is dismissed, the issue of bots is off the table. When the trial starts at Fairfax County Court in Virginia and Amber's witnesses eventually take the stand, they aren't even allowed to talk about bots or a bot campaign. Because by then, the issue has already been decided in Depp's favour. And that left me wondering,

Did any of Amber's witnesses suspect that a bot campaign had occurred, but just couldn't say? Does any evidence exist that wasn't presented at trial? Be seated. Your next witness. We call Ron Schnell. Okay.

S-C-H-N-E-L-L. Thank you, sir. I go through Amber's witness list and there's one name that stands out. Ron Schnell. Ron is a computer expert from Miami. His speciality is social media forensics. I do software projects and manage software projects and architect them. But I also do things like this where I'm consulting in litigation and sometimes testifying in litigation. BEEP

He tells the court that he's analysed huge numbers of tweets posted against Amber Heard, but he only testifies on a relatively narrow point about whether or not anti-Amber tweets went up whenever Depp's lawyer, a guy called Adam Waldman, accused her of faking her abuse claims.

By the time the case goes to trial, that narrow question, the thing about the lawyer, is the only part of Amber's counterclaim against Depp that hasn't been struck out. So I wonder, does Ron Schnell know more than he was letting on? Hello. Hello, how are you? I'm very well, thank you, Ron. How are you? Well, thank you. In March last year, I gave him a call.

Although the judge did throw out the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim, I had already done a lot of work relating to it. So this whole question of were there bots, was there an orchestrated campaign, was something I did look into, just never got to see the light of the trial. Ron explains that when he came onto the case, one of the first things he did was download a whole bunch of tweets which were critical of Amber Heard.

We're talking almost a million posts, gigabytes worth of data. I actually used something called Botometer. There's a web version where you can just give it a Twitter handle and it'll tell you whether it thinks it's a bot or not. I fed in hundreds of thousands of anti-Amber Heard tweets and got a lot of data from that.

But his work stopped when the judge threw out most of Amber Heard's counterclaim, meaning that the jury never heard anything about Ron's data. Ron won't go much further on the phone. He needs to check what he's allowed to tell us. If I were to ask Amber Heard's legal team for their permission to disclose your work in this area, would you be happy for me to look at it? That's very helpful. That's really helpful. Thank you.

I feel like I have my first lead. Ron still has his huge database of tweets, hundreds of thousands of anti-Amber messages, perfectly preserved. Within that data might be patterns, networks, links that reveal which accounts were working together. If I can pick up where Ron left off, I might be able to learn about what happened to Amber Heard, who might have been responsible, and the ways we're all being manipulated online.

Next time on Who Trolled Amber. We go to Miami to see Ron. It appears to be some sort of organized attack. We speak to a Hollywood insider. She couldn't get an audition and no one would hire her. And we learn about disinformation from an emu. Emmanuel, leave it alone. Emmanuel, don't do it. We contacted Johnny Depp while making this podcast, but he didn't respond.

Thank you for listening to Who Trolled Amber? Who Trolled Amber is written and reported by me, Alexi Mostras, and by Xavier Greenwood. The producer is Xavier Greenwood. Additional reporting by Katie Riley. Sound design is by Carla Patella. The narrative editor is Gary Marshall. The editor is David Taylor.

That was episode one of Tortoise's new series, Who Trolled Amber? Episode two is now available. Search for Who Trolled Amber wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the feed to make sure you don't miss an episode. You can binge the entire series by subscribing to Tortoise Plus or the Tortoise app. Tortoise.