Johnny Depp wasn’t the only winner in the sensational defamation trial between the actor and his ex-wife Amber Heard. The case drew viewers to emerging legal networks Law&Crime and Court TV with the verdict providing an exclamation point. Dan Abrams’ Law&Crime network set its YouTube viewership record with more than 3.5 million live concurrent viewers during its coverage of the verdict Wednesday.
The verdicts bring an end to a televised trial that Depp had hoped would help restore his reputation, though it turned into a spectacle of a vicious marriage.
Television turned the celebrity trial into a 24-hour tabloid spectacle. Social media made it into a sport.
The Virginia Press Association asked Friday to intervene in a $50 million lawsuit Johnny Depp filed against Amber Heard, his ex-wife. Depp says he was defamed by an op-ed piece Heard wrote in The Washington Post in December 2018, in which she never identified Depp by name but referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”
