More than 500 million people watched the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, livestreamed by the Law and Crime network on its YouTube channel.
While the jury deliberates its verdict, clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland at Victoria University of Wellington and Umbrella Wellbeing explains why so many people are tuning in.
Actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp leaving court in the final day of his libel trial against News Group Newspapers, in London, on July 28, 2020. Photo: AFP
He tells Afternoons this case taps into our interest in both celebrities and high-profile court cases.
“I think in these cases you’ve got a double whammy really or in fact in this case a triple whammy, because you’ve got a court case and you’ve got two celebrities not just one celebrity.”
Livestreams, online updates, and the immediacy of social media has meant that we’ve sort of been forced into paying attention to it in some ways, Sutherland says.
“It’s that accelerated exaggerated, concentrated dose of this big high-profile thing that’s in our faces for just a short period of time, seven or 10 days, although it feels like that trial has been going on for longer than that.”
The human need for justice to be served has propelled many into taking sides and expressing their views on social media, he says.
“So if we believe that for example Johnny Depp is in the wrong then it gives us license if you like to say humorous bad things about him because ‘clearly he’s an evil person’, or vice versa, we might think he’s completely in the right and therefore we’ll say terrible things to disparage Amber Heard.”
It also links back to our false sense of intimacy with celebrities, also known as para-social interaction, Sutherland says.
“Many of us have this sense of ‘oh yeah I know Johnny Depp, I know what he’s like, he wouldn’t do that’, and of course if you stand back and look at it, that’s clearly not the case.
“99.9 percent of us don’t know Johnny Depp and never met him but we feel like we know him, we feel like we have an attachment and a relationship to him which I think is part of what’s called this celebrity worship or cult of celebrity that’s often talked about in the psychological literature.
“In fact, often in the literature around celebrity worship, they say we should just be thinking of these relationships as extensions of our normal social relationships, albeit they’re only one-sided.”
Knowing the ins and outs of the latest also serves a social function, he says.
"I think that's a pretty normal human behaviour to have. We like to talk about things with other people, we like to have things that we can engage in with others, it makes us feel part of a group."
But Sutherland worries about the potential negative flow-on effects of social media comments directing hate and accusations towards Heard.
“One theory I had about that was that possibly Johnny Depp is better known and has a stronger, bigger fan base than Amber Heard and therefore there are some people who are passionate and if you go back to this idea we feel like we know the celebrities then if you’ve got this big fanbase … then yeah we’re going to defend [him from] anybody that tries to attack him.
“So on some levels it makes sense but it’s particularly sad I think in these sorts of cases where there has been allegations of domestic violence and you worry about the impact that would have on just normal people wanting to report or go to trial when this sort of thing has happened.”
