WEDNESDAY, MAY 25 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU C3
missives they receive. Among
several viewed for this story, one
of the least explicit tells a Heard
fan “Ur a liar. You are scum. You
will burn in hell.”
“It has just gone absolutely
stratospheric,” said Hannah, a
London resident who has been
outspoken on Twitter in defense
of Heard; like multiple people
interviewed for this article, she
spoke on the condition that her
last name be withheld because of
threats. She estimates that she’s
blocked more than 10,000 ac-
counts. “You get abusive Twitter
DMs telling you to kill yourself.
... A lot of these accounts get
banned for being abusive, saying
slurs and making violent threats.
But then they just create new
accounts to harass you.”
A representative for Depp did
not respond to a request for
comment about the online vitriol
from the actor’s fans, and
Heard’s publicist declined to
comment on the record.
Belia Garcia of Mexico City
said she never had much engage-
ment with her tweets until she
started posting about Heard.
Now when she posts, she said,
some replies are “legitimate”
questions regarding the case,
while many more include name-
calling, pictures of clowns, the
hashtag #JusticeForJohnnyDepp
or Depp fans referring to the
actress as “#AmberTurd.”
“I’ve had to mute them all,”
Garcia said. “They don’t bother
me, but at the end of the day, I
was just insulted 60 times in
three hours.”
Kali, who also did not feel
comfortable using her last name,
has been following the story
since Depp’s libel trial in the
United Kingdom, when the actor
sued the British tabloid the Sun
for calling him a “wife beater.” He
lost, which some say fueled Depp
fans into social media conspira-
cies about why the judge ruled
against him, and Kali has sensed
a similar tone here even before
the verdict.
“The level of disinformation
just watching the trial going on is
one of the scariest things I’ve
seen online in a long time,” she
said, pointing to people liking
tweets and TikTok posts that
claimed Heard did a bump of
cocaine on the stand when she
was blowing her nose into a
tissue.
At one point, Kali said, she
would have attempted a dialogue
with Depp supporters who bom-
bard her mentions with defen-
sive tweets, but those days are
HEARD FROM C1
gone. “You get conspiracy theo-
ries instead of legitimate side
discussions,” she said.
“The experience of all of this is
like an optical illusion: You and
another person are looking at the
same thing and seeing some-
thing entirely different. Going
online during all of this is likestepping into an alternate reality
when you start to doubt your
own eyes and ears and question
your sanity,” said Matt James,
who runs a popular Twitter ac-
count, Pop Culture Died in 2009.
James predicts that this trial will
be similar to O.J. Simpson’s and
spawn a generation of legal ana-
lysts. Only now, it’s Twitter com-
mentators and YouTubers whohave become dependent on con-
tent from the case.
Heard’s defenders say that the
trial being televised on Court TV
and live-streamed has made it
far easier for people to transform
clips into viral memes, which
they do every day, mostly to
celebrate Depp and mock Heard.
Viewers edit snippets to make
the actress’s accusations seem
unfounded or create jokes out of
her audio. 'N Sync member
Lance Bass jumped on a recent
TikTok trend that ridiculed
Heard testimony about the first
time she alleged Depp struck her.
(Though Bass was applauded by
many, he ultimately deleted the
video after backlash.)
The actress’s supporters say
they are not shocked by reaction,
given the animosity directed at
her since she first made the
allegations in 2016. But they have
been taken aback by the level of
mockery directed at someone
describing abuse.
Charlotte Proudman, a barris-
ter from the United Kingdom
who specializes in male violence
against women and girls, said
that is one of her main concerns— which is shared by other
domestic abuse experts — when
she logs on to the YouTube live
stream and sees people jokingabout settling in with a cup of
coffee like they’re watching a
reality show, or posting things
like, “Oh, this is hilarious.”“They’re vilifying her to the
point where victims and survi-
vors watching that are thinking,
‘My God, if they’re behaving like
that toward Amber Heard, who
does have power and is wealthy
and famous, how on earth are
they going to treat me as an
ordinary woman?’” Proudman
said. “There are lots of women
looking at this and thinking,
‘Maybe I’m a joke. Maybe nobody
will believe me.’”
To James, this is why the trial
is more than just celebrity dra-
ma. “For every hundred nasty
messages and death threats I get
for saying anything that’s even
construed as slightly negative
against Johnny, there’s one per-
son who says, ‘Thank you for
speaking up about this, I really
appreciate it.’ That really does
make it worth it. All it takes is
one person, especially since a lot
of people are afraid to speak up
and say something.”
A common theme among sup-
porters is that they weren’t even
“fans” of Heard; they’re just
horrified watching global reac-
tion: “To me, this isn’t just about
Amber Heard. It could be my
sister, it could be my mother, it
could be my wife,” said J. Davis of
Atlanta. “Who’s going to defend
these people if this happens to
them?”
But Giorgia, a woman in Italy
who also spoke on the condition
that her last name not be used
because of threats, has helped
run the Amber Heard Italia Fans
website since 2009. She and her
friends loved Heard as an actress
— they were thrilled to meet her
in Paris around 2013 while she
was filming “3 Days to Kill.” They
were also drawn to Heard’s sup-
port of social causes.
Giorgia was not expecting
Heard’s journey to go in this
direction. She’s most discour-
aged by people who she thinks
aren’t following the trial but see
public opinion overwhelmingly
in Depp’s favor and are joining in
only to be part of the conversa-
tion. The online discourse, she
said, is similar to what happened
in the U.K. trial “but 10 times
worse,” especially the urge for
people to turn Heard’s testimony
into TikTok comedy. “It’s totally
disheartening, and sometimes it
makes me lose faith in humani-
ty,” she said.
Then there are those like Put-
nam, the rare supporter to show
up at the courthouse to defend
Heard one step further than the
screen of her phone or laptop.
“I’m not here because she’s a
celebrity,” Putnam said. “I’m here
because she’s a person.”Online discourse is ‘an alternate reality,’ Heard fan says
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Christina Taft, left, of Los Angeles, voices her support for actress Amber Heard outside the Fairfax County Courthouse. The actress’s
supporters have been far outnumbered by fans of Johnny Depp, whose defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife is being tried in Virginia.JIM WATSON/POOL/REUTERS
Heard arrives in court earlier this month.“You get abusiveTwitter DMs telling youto kill yourself.”
Hannah, a London resident who has
been outspoken on Twitter in defense
of Amber Heardreporters who first inquired about
the scope of the problem back in
2019 that such records would be
impossible to compile, according
to Chronicle investigative report-
er John Tedesco. (On Tuesday, the
leadership said it was planning to
release names of the accused on
Thursday.)
“It is beyond frustrating as a
journalist and as someone who
knows many of these survivors,”
said Downen. “How many years of
survivors pleading for this and the
tears they cried, and how much
work and how many hours of jour-
nalism we could have put else-
where, in this story or any other,
was wasted because they just
didn’t want to say they were doing
this.”
Downen worked with Tedesco
— who moved from the Express-
News to the Chronicle during the
investigation — and Lise Olsen,
then an investigative editor and
reporter for the Chronicle. They
spent several months hunting
down and combing through court
records, traversing the state, in-
terviewing local district attorneys
and sending letters seeking com-
ment to every alleged abuser per-
son they had learned about. Data
journalists Matt Dempsey and
Jordan Rubio helped create the
database and verify the case de-
tails, as did a team of lawyers for
Hearst, the parent company for
both newspapers.
They discovered 380 people in
ABUSE FROM C1
the church, including deacons,
youth pastors and Sunday school
teachers, who had been credibly
accused of abuse; at least 218 of
them had been convicted or plead-
ed guilty to sex crimes over two
decades. Some of them, the papers
found, remained in their positions
at the church or returned after
serving prison time.
After the newspaper series pub-lished in 2019, the Chronicle set
up a confidential tip line that was
contacted by more than 400 peo-
ple with accounts of being abused.
The newspapers followed up with
another three-part series with
more victim accounts. “Their
courage made all the difference,”
said former Chronicle executive
editor Steve Riley, who also over-
saw the investigative team at thetime.
One victim, who was abused as
a child by a former pastor, wrote to
the Chronicle that “over the years
I’ve learned to cope with this and
I’ve also realized that I am not
alone. Your article reaffirms this
and I feel more empowered know-
ing that more people will now
better understand what is really
going on.”The newspapers reprinted
“Abuse of Faith” and distributed it
free at the 2019 annual SBC meet-
ing in Birmingham, Ala., where
the sex abuse crisis dominated
discussion. In 2021, thousands of
delegates at the annual meeting
overwhelmingly voted in favor of
having a task force oversee a third-
party investigation, rather than
the Executive Committee.
“There had been survivor advo-
cates who had been pushing and
trying to raise awareness for a
long time before we came along,”
Tedesco said. “We were part of that
puzzle. I think our story opened a
lot of eyes, but there were eyes
already opened and trying to alert
people to the problem before us.”
The Chronicle broke online
readership records with the se-
ries, and other media organiza-
tions around the country relied on
their database to investigate
abuse cases in their own coverage
areas.
But compiling the database —
which involved a detailed and ex-
tensive corroboration of every
case, some relying on court files
that could be retrieved only in
person — required the efforts of
more than a dozen journalists. “In
a newsroom of 200, that’s a pretty
big commitment,” said Riley. He
fears that many local and regional
newspapers, struggling with
shrinking circulation and ad rev-
enue, will be increasingly unable
to tackle similar stories in their
own backyards.
“If it is only the New York Timesor The Washington Post and Pro-
Publica who are able to do this
kind of work, then they’re going to
miss a lot and they’re not going to
be around to follow up once it’s
done,” he said.
And yet local news reports from
smaller media organizations that
the Houston and San Antonio re-
porters dug out of archives played
a vital role in helping them uncov-
er the big story.
“Sometimes things happen in
plain sight: A pastor gets arrested
and reassigned from a church and
it’s a daily story that maybe gets
forgotten,” said Tedesco. “Some-
times you have to put those pieces
together, and there’s real value in
taking the time to do that.”
It’s all the more reason why the
public should be alarmed by the
state of local news, said Downen,
“because we are absolutely losing
the source material for so many
other investigations.” Since 2005,
about 2,200 local newspapers
have closed across the country,
and over 200 counties across the
country have no newspaper at all,
according to a University of North
Carolina study.
“That’s why it’s crucial for peo-
ple to support the press financial-
ly and in other ways,” Downen
said. “You don’t think that the
small-town paper with a reader-
ship of 5,000 could be the genesis
of a massive and historic report 25
years later, because it is some local
journalist writing about a local
abuse case. But we can’t know
what we can’t see.”Tex. papers devoted vast resources to build Southern Baptist abuse database
MARK HUMPHREY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Incoming Southern Baptist Convention President Ed Litton, center left, with outgoing President J.D.
Greear, center right, at a Southern Baptist Convention meeting in 2021.S0114 6X2.25
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