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WEDNESDAY, MAY 25 , 2022. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ SU C

BY EMILY YAHR

K

ylie Putnam, 23, is not enjoying her time in

Fairfax County. She doesn’t want to be here. She

lives in Minneapolis but felt compelled to fly to

Northern Virginia when she saw videos on

Twitter that showed a crowd outside the Fairfax County

Courthouse booing and heckling Amber Heard as she

departed after another day in court against ex-husband

Johnny Depp. Putnam was taken aback that the actress

appeared to have no defenders.

“I think what really got me here is that no one was

doing anything. Someone has to do something,” said

Putnam, who arrived with a sign that read “I Believe Her”

written in purple, the color associated with raising

awareness about domestic violence. “Do I particularly

want to do this? No. But this isn’t supposed to be fun. ...

Everything about this is just weird and off-kilter and

bizarre and horrible.”

In 2016, Heard, 36, filed for divorce and a temporary

restraining order from Depp, alleging the actor had

physically abused her. Depp, 58, denied the allegations.

Two years later, when Heard wrote a Washington Post

op-ed referring to herself as a public figure representing

domestic abuse, he sued her for defamation. She

countersued him for $100 million for defamation after

one of his attorneys called her claims a hoax.

The trial, which started April 12 and is being held in

Fairfax County, where The Post’s printing press and

online server are based, is live-streamed every day and

has consumed wide swaths of the Internet. A flood of

updates and memes has been overwhelmingly one-sided,

as Depp’s fans dominate Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,

YouTube and TikTok — on the latter, the hashtag

#JusticeforJohnnyDepp has been viewed 15.4 billion

times, while #JusticeforAmberHeard has just 51.5 million

views, some of which are actually pro-Depp.

Outside the courtroom, reaction to testimony has been

centered on Depp’s extremely vocal fan base, but since the

actress took the stand this month, Heard advocates have

noticed a small tonal shift, with an increase in supporters

online. However, they also say the Internet has been a

“nightmare” for the past several years when they vocalize

support for the actress, and it has only gotten worse; Depp

fans will often swarm replies and lash out at anyone who

criticizes Depp or says they believe Heard, and rush to say

that the actor alleges Heard abused him.

Putnam tweets often about Heard, and she has grown

relatively numb to being bombarded with messages, she

said: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t really

care.” Some Heard supporters publicly post the vulgar

SEE HEARD ON C3

‘She’s a person’

Amber Heard, who’s embroiled in a defamation trial against ex-husband Johnny Depp, is

cast in the role of pariah online. Her fans face the same vitriol when they show support.

BY MICHAEL ANDOR BRODEUR

If I had but one word to sum up

composer and bass-baritone Damien

Geter, I’d have to go with “busy.” Or at

least, that is what I would have chosen

before Monday, when the Choral Arts

Society of Washington presented the

East Coast premiere of Geter’s “An

African-American Requiem.”

Now I think I’ll go with “major.”

First the busy part: Last week it was

announced that Virginia Opera and the

Richmond Symphony have commis-

sioned Geter and librettist Jessica Mur-

phy Moo to produce “Loving vs. Vir-

ginia,” an operatic telling of the U.S.

Supreme Court case concerning the

interracial marriage of Mildred and

Richard Loving. On June 12, the Wash-

ington Chorus will give his “Justice

Symphony” its D.C. premiere as part of

the chorus’s “Justice & Peace” program at

the Kennedy Center. And his one-act

opera “Holy Ground,” written with li-

brettist Lila Palmer, is set to premiere at

Glimmerglass this summer. He and

Palmer previously collaborated on

“American Apollo,” my favorite of the

pandemic-shorted and plexi-shielded

batch of short operas digitally presented

as part of Washington National Opera’s

American Opera Initiative in 2021.

(With all of this output as a composer,

it’s easy to forget that Geter also is a

celebrated bass-baritone, who just last

week sang Beethoven’s Ninth with the

Richmond Symphony.)

In a recent phone interview, Geter

said he’d always considered himself a

“closeted composer.” The election of

Donald Trump in 2016 changed that; he

felt called into action. In a rush of

SEE MUSIC REVIEW ON C5

MUSIC REVIEW

‘Requiem’ is

the Kumbaya

moment this

country needs

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BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES STEVE HELBER/ASSOCIATED PRESS MICHAEL REYNOLDS/POOL/REUTERS

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BY TRAVIS M. ANDREWS

The notoriety of the Johnny Depp-Am-

ber Heard defamation trial offered a

peculiar twist Tuesday afternoon, when

both sides were given the chance to

question and challenge a potential wit-

ness, whom Depp’s lawyers had planned

to call for rebuttal testimony, because he

had seen some of the trial.

Outside the presence of the jury,

Morgan Night said that he had seen a

clip of testimony from the trial about

Heard and Depp’s 2013 trip to Hicksville,

a luxury trailer park he owned in South-

ern California — and that the testimony

was incorrect. He had also previously

tweeted in Depp’s defense in response to

a tweet by a user named Umbrella Guy.

Witnesses are instructed not to follow

a trial in which they’re going to testify,

which also means they aren’t allowed in

the courtroom before giving testimony.

Night, however, did not become part of

the case until after it began and, as Judge

SEE DEPP ON C4

Depp-Heard trial filled with rebuttal

JIM WATSON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Johnny Depp talks to one of his lawyers during his defamation trial

against ex-wife Amber Heard at the Fairfax County C ourthouse.

BY ELAHE IZADI

Houston Chronicle city hall reporter
Robert Downen was on the night shift one
evening in 2018, just a few months into
the job, when something caught his atten-
tion.
Scrolling through an online federal
court docket, he spotted a lawsuit that
accused Paul Pressler, a prominent for-
mer judge and leader of the Southern
Baptist Convention, of sexual assault.
While the case had been previously re-
ported, newly filed documents painted an
even more damning picture, including
the revelation that Pressler had previous-
ly agreed to pay his accuser $450,000.
Downen, then 25, probed more deeply
and discovered other alleged survivors of
church abuse, who made it clear to him,
he recalled, that “if you think this problem
is confined to one leader, we have quite a
bit to show you.”
Downen’s ever-growing spreadsheet of
cases soon inspired a larger reporting
effort to quantify the scope of sex abuse
within the massive Protestant denomina-
tion. Journalists at the Chronicle and the
San Antonio Express-News teamed up to
create a database of cases involving nearly
300 church leaders and more than 700
victims for their landmark 2019 “Abuse of
Faith” series.
A wave of outrage in response to the
series rocked the Southern Baptist Con-
vention, prompting its Executive Com-
mittee to hire an outside firm to investi-
gate. The result was Sunday’s release of an
explosive, nearly 300-page report that
found church leaders had covered up
numerous sex abuse cases and belittled
survivors.
Among other key findings: SBC leaders
kept a secret list of ministers accused of
abuse — all the while insisting to the Texas
SEE ABUSE ON C3

How Texas

papers broke

the church

abuse scandal