An anonymous juror in the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard defamation trial has denied claims that the jury may have been influenced by social media. Throughout the trial, platforms including TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook were bombarded with anti-Heard content unlike anything ever seen before. However, the juror insisted none of the people deciding the outcome in the case paid attention to or even saw such posts.
- The campaign against Heard online has been unprecedented. Depp fans took to the internet en masse throughout the trial, creating memes and other content that painted Heard as a liar and insisting that Depp was the real victim. While it would have been impossible to have avoided such content, especially given that the jury was not sequestered during the trial, the juror in question has refused to acknowledge this.
- The male juror did an interview with ABC News this week. He claimed that the jury, made up of five men and two women, only relied on facts when deciding on a verdict. “We followed the evidence,” the juror alleged. “Myself and at least two other jurors don’t use Twitter or Facebook. Others who had it made a point not to talk about it.”
- Heard’s lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, isn’t buying it. As she said during her interview with Savannah Guthrie on the Today show, Heard was “demonized” throughout the trial and there’s no way that didn’t play a part in the outcome. “How can you not? They went home every night, they have families, the families are on social media. We had a 10-day break in the middle because of the judicial conference. There’s no way they couldn’t have been influenced by it,” she said.
- The anonymous juror said Heard’s story “didn’t line up.” He claimed that no one on the jury liked that Heard looked at them throughout her testimony despite the fact that Depp did exactly the same thing. “The crying, the facial expressions that she had, the staring at the jury. All of us were very uncomfortable… ” the juror said. “She would answer one question and she would be crying and then two seconds later she would turn ice cold…” he said. “Some of us used the expression ‘crocodile tears.'”
- The juror did admit that Depp was abusive as well. He went on to say that all the blame didn’t lay on Heard’s shoulders alone. “What I think is truthful was that they were both abusive to each other,” he said. “I don’t think that makes either of them right or wrong. But to rise to the level of what she was claiming, there wasn’t enough or any evidence that really supported what she was saying.”
