The defamation trial between formerly married actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was the media’s defining event in the six week period between April 11 to June 1, 2022. The catalyst for the trial was an oblique reference to intimate partner violence in Heard’s 2018 Washington Post op-ed supporting the Violence Against Women Act: “two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” While the op-ed did not directly name Depp as Heard’s alleged abuser, Heard had previously filed for a temporary restraining order against him during their 2016 divorce, alleging physical assault. Throughout the course of the 2022 defamation trial, Heard’s counsel sought to prove that she was, in fact, a victim of intimate partner violence—including physical violence and sexual assault—from Depp and that her statements were protected by the First Amendment right to free speech. Conversely, Depp’s counsel sought to prove that he had never engaged in violence against Heard, proposing that her claims reflected a malicious and long-term effort to ruin his reputation and conceal her own abuse of him. In trying to convince the public of this long-term slander campaign from Heard, Depp’s team relied on well-established misogynistic tropes of female vindictiveness.
Almost immediately after the Depp v. Heard trial began, images from the courtroom flooded social media feeds across the country, inciting passionate fandom for Depp and vitriolic hatred towards Heard. The spectacle’s entertainment value attracted audiences and laid the groundwork for reactionary narratives, framing the victim as deserving of cruelty. Videos showed massive crowds of Depp supporters, mostly women, outside the courtroom eagerly cheering on Depp and his counsel while shouting obscenities at Heard and her counsel as they entered. For those who could not travel to Fairfax County, Virginia, channels such as the Law and Crime Network streamed every moment of the trial on YouTube and compiled videos of the most important moments, garnering upwards of 30 million views from the “highlights.” This trial, though, was more than an entertaining spectacle—it was co-opted by conservatives as an opportunity to reverse the spread of modern feminism and to offer women an appealing antifeminist alternative.
In addition to the channels providing news coverage and legal analysis of the trial, highly editorialized short-form content spread rapidly across social media. Commentators quickly spun conspiratorial or pseudoscientific interpretations (e.g. body language analysis, armchair psychology) of Heard’s actions that laid the foundation for intense cross-platform mockery. Viral TikTok trends of women cosplaying Heard emerged, mocking her testimony about the abuse she faced and reacting to readings of sexually violent language from Depp with erotic fervor.
The mainstream reach of the campaign of mockery against Heard even spread to corporate entities, including the makeup brand Milani Cosmetics and the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL). After Heard’s attorneys held up the Milani Cosmetics Conceal + Perfect All-in-One Correcting Kit while describing how she covered up bruises left on her by Depp, the brand quickly responded with a humorous TikTok—which included content taken directly from a Depp fan account—confirming that the product was created after Depp and Heard’s relationship. Later, a May 15 episode of SNL opened with a sketch parodying an infamous moment in the Depp v. Heard trial: Depp’s accusation that Heard defecated on their bed out of anger and malice, hoping he would unknowingly sleep on her feces. In the sketch, SNL Comedian Cecily Strong, acting as the judge, captures the sentiments of many Depp v. Heard trial viewers: playing surveillance video, she tells the fictional lawyers “[b]ecause it does sound fun, and this trial is for fun.” In the end, Strong’s character—an audience stand-in—believes Depp’s version of events.
Notably, the trial’s verdict—which favored Depp—was also championed by national political figures. In the mere minutes after the verdict was announced, the official Twitter of the House Judiciary Committee’s Republicans tweeted a GIF of Depp as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, celebrating his win. Donald Trump Jr. also joined in on the Twitter celebrations, writing that “perhaps a case that could end the effective rabid femminist [sic] notion that all men are guilty before being proven innocent” because Heard was “just that terrible!”
The repudiation and humiliation of Heard in mainstream culture was so crushing that it led to postmortems of the #MeToo movement in media outlets like The New York Times. The feminist #MeToo movement, which urged support for women coming forward with their stories about workplace sexual harassment, garnered widespread support after exposing serial sexual predators in Hollywood like Harvey Weinstein. Yet, its slogan “Believe Women,” predicated on the idea that women do not come forward about sexual violence as a means of self-advancement, was rejected in the social media frenzy of the Depp v. Heard trial. It grew socially acceptable, even in circles of liberal women, to suggest, as Depp’s counsel did, that Heard’s accusations of physical and sexual violence were a means of status seeking and vindictive warfare.
This did not happen merely by chance. In fact, many internet-savvy right-wing commentators recognized the value of amplifying the organic anti-Heard backlash and soon acted on it. Notably, Ben Shapiro’s conservative outlet The Daily Wire, the second most popular news publication on Facebook in March 2022, was estimated to have spent around $35,000–$47,000 to promote its coverage of the Depp v. Heard trial, which featured an unsubtle anti-Heard bias.
Given the success of right-wing commentators in linking anti-Heard and anti-#MeToo sentiments during the Depp v. Heard trial, it is no surprise that the right-wing media ecosystem was eager to capitalize on a similar movement. In 2025, we saw an attempt to re-enact the Depp v. Heard playbook through coverage of the legal showdown between actress Blake Lively and actor Justin Baldoni, the co-stars and co-producers in the movie It Ends With Us. Social media attention, which began with gossip and speculation about a supposed celebrity feud, was soon co-opted by right-wing influencers to promote antifeminist rhetoric.
During the press tour for It Ends With Us, many on social media speculated about possible conflict between Lively and Baldoni. In her press interviews, Lively often spoke lightheartedly about the movie despite its theme of intimate partner violence. In contrast, Baldoni sought to present himself as a male ally for feminism, centering intimate partner violence in his interviews. Furthermore, Baldoni often appeared in interviews separately from Lively and their other costars. The contrast between the two costars led to widespread fan backlash against Lively, with many dubbing her as the quintessential “mean girl” who bullied and excluded Baldoni for recognizing the gravity of intimate partner violence and as a display of power.
In late December 2024, following the growth of this rhetoric, Lively filed a legal complaint against Baldoni, alleging that he sexually harassed her during the production of It Ends With Us and, in an attempt to head off potential backlash, he hired a team to manufacture a PR campaign to destroy her reputation. In response, Baldoni sued Lively and The New York Times, which published Lively’s complaint, alleging that Lively fabricated claims of workplace sexual harassment as a result of a power struggle within the movie’s production team.
In their fight to sway public opinion in his favor, Baldoni’s defenders proposed the same thesis as Depp’s defenders: The allegations of sexual misconduct and sexual violence are a woman’s tools to ruin good the careers of good men. Going on the offense and publicly humiliating the accusers are the keys to their toolkit of pushing aside allegations.
The story of the two trials—both heavily featuring allegations of sexual misconduct—that incited popular backlash against the female accusers gives us insight into the appeal of antifeminism for women and the right-wing figures who capitalized. The rejection of contemporary feminist beliefs about sexual misconduct allegations, the grievance-based sense of justice, and the desire for domination and humiliation displayed in the harassment campaigns against the accusers Heard and Lively form the perfect basis for radicalization in reactionary right-wing politics, which many in the right-wing media sphere are capitalizing on.
Far-right political figures like Candace Owens quickly recognized the power of cultivating the burgeoning online harassment campaign against Lively, especially given the negative attention from women that she had garnered. From January-February 2025, Owens dedicated 16 nearly hour long videos to the Baldoni v. Lively case, establishing herself as the leading source of news and gossip about Lively’s supposed nefarious activities. The videos, full of conspiracy theories about Lively’s manipulation, have millions of views and mainstream appeal—a far cry from Owens’ other publicity stunts, such as her “White Lives Matter” t-shirt stunt done in conjunction with Nazi sympathizer Kanye West. Still, Owens’ politics and provocateur sensibilities are evident in her (so-called) reporting on the Baldoni v. Lively lawsuit. Her quips are almost always geared at normalizing homophobia or misogyny. In one video, for instance, she criticizes modern feminists for being too “perpetually offended” to think rationally and describes Lively’s husband as “pathetic and a little bit gay.”
Through her content, Owens promotes a version of antifeminism that is appealing to many. She is a charismatic speaker, one who has perfected the art of the soundbite; her one-liners, like the one calling Lively’s husband “pathetic and a little bit gay,” are perfectly engineered to gain virality—even if it is of an ironic nature. Owens’ videos on the Baldoni v. Lively lawsuit perfectly encapsulate the appeal of conservative parties for women. It promises them that if they reject liberal feminism and #MeToo, they no longer need to worry about the increasing hostility towards women in the US—seen everyday in the degradation of women’s rights, such as the right to an abortion. Instead of pleading for the recognition and prevention of women’s suffering like the liberal feminists do, right-wing women can write that pleading desperation off as hysteria. They can shamelessly, unselfconsciously enjoy mocking and degrading women with colorful, quotable insults—unleashing their worst instincts—while reassuring themselves that sexual violence and misogynistic harassment could never happen to them.
This is a promise that Andrea Dworkin illustrates in her book Right Wing Women, writing that “[t]he political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears.” In this case, it may be comforting for women to believe that Heard and Lively are uniquely deserving of the online harassment that they faced after coming forward with allegations of sexual misconduct and sexual violence. By insulting and degrading these women while highlighting all their perceived transgressions, women are able to distance themselves from the possibility of being faced with similar backlash after facing sexual trauma—a horrifying recognition of their gendered vulnerabilities in a deeply misogynistic world. Owens’ videos, and the harassment campaigns against Heard and Lively as a whole, promise women that only those who are truly deserving of vitriol and abuse will not be believed.
The possibility that Heard and Lively are not merely evil, lying, conniving women, but were still met with a concentrated stream of cruelty after sharing their stories, is infinitely more frightening. It is, however, also infinitely more likely. We have seen in our daily lives that women who come forward about sexual violence do so at a great personal cost, not for any personal gain. Women are overwhelmingly denied justice for their experiences and further traumatized by the systems that are intended to protect us. In the United States, only 5 percent of sexual assault reports lead to an arrest and many more are never even reported. Women recognize that when they make an accusation, they will be forced to undergo great levels of scrutiny. Even if they are believed, there is no guarantee that their abusers’ lives will be changed, much less that they will be brought to justice. We should remember that the current President of the United States was found liable for sexual abuse by a New York jury, yet this did not prevent his return to the White House.