Some Johnny Depp fans, inspired by Depp’s win in his defamation suit against former wife Amber Heard, are hoping Marilyn Manson can win a similar case against former girlfriend and Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood.
In addition to losing her court case, Heard faced endless opprobrium online from a legion of hardcore Johnny Depp fans and opportunists who turned mockery of Heard on Tik Tok and YouTube into a cottage industry. Depp said he wanted to see Heard brought low by “total global humiliation” and his fans obliged him with videos mocking her and “reenacting” the abuse she said Depp had dealt her for comic effect.
The social media attacks on Wood have already begun; as have the videos, which first started appearing a year ago shortly after Wood first made her allegations against Manson public.
The current controversy started when Wood, who was in a relationship with the decades-older Manson for several years in the late 2000s, wrote on Instagram early last year that Manson “started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years,” keeping her “brainwashed and manipulated into submission” and, after she had extracted herself from the relationship, too afraid of possible retaliation from Manson to accuse him publicly.
After Wood publicly named Manson as her abuser, in early 2021 more than a dozen other women came forward to accuse the aging goth rocker of similar abuse. Many of these women appear in an HBO documentary Phoenix Rising, centering around Wood’s successful crusade to lengthen the statute of limitations for domestic violence in California — and her account of what she says were years of abuse at the hands of Manson. Several of these women — including model Ashley Morgan Smithline and Game of Thrones actor Esme Bianco — filed their own complaints against Manson, accusing him of sexual and physical abuse. (To see all the various things Manson has been accused of over the years, see Billboard’s tally here.)
Manson claims these allegations are false, all part of a plot by Wood to ruin his life and career. In early March, he filed a defamation suit against Wood, accusing her not just of “malicious falsehood” but also of organizing a conspiracy of lies against him, with the help of sometime girlfriend Ashley “Illma” Gore. The lawsuit claims that
Gore and Wood have secretly recruited, coordinated, and pressured prospective accusers to emerge simultaneously with allegations of rape and abuse against [Manson], and brazenly claim that it took 10 or more years to ‘realize’ their consensual relationships with [Manson] were supposedly abusive.
As Billboard notes, the lawsuit goes on to allege that the two
impersonated an FBI agent, provided scripts to “prospective accusers,” solicited his private information from former employees, and created a fake email address to manufacture evidence that he had sent illicit pornography.
We can expect to hear a lot more about these seemingly far-fetched accusations once the #IStandWithMarilynManson crowd gets to posting and YouTubing in earnest.
After Wood publicly named Manson as her abuser, he was dropped by his record label and removed from two television projects. But at this point he doesn’t have that much of a career to destroy, at least compared to his 1990s heyday. His last big hit record was released nearly a quarter of a century ago and the Onion’s classic article “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People” article was published only a few years later than that.
While Manson presumably hopes his defamation suit will go as well as his longtime friend Johnny Depp’s did, he has one accuser he may not be able to shut up with legal or other threats. That’s himself.
In his autobiography, written with future The Game author Neal Strauss and published in 1998, he accused himself of sexual and other forms of abuse, boasting about his “trick” of getting his “victims” so drunk they passed out, leaving them open to being “tormented.” In one case he described how (he says) he and Trent Reznor poked their hands into the vagina of one such “unsuspecting” victim and burned her pubic hair with a lighter. Reznor, for his part, says the story is a straight-up “fabrication,” and Manson now insists that all of his sexual encounters have been consensual, with “like-minded partners.”
On the JusticeForJohnnyDepp subreddit — with more than 60,000 subscribers — many of the commenters are readying themselves, with no small enthusiasm, to turn Wood into ‘Amber Heard 2.0.”
am0x1c1ll1n seems to have swallowed Manson’s argument and his “facts” whole:
Well, according to the lawsuit filed by MM, ERW and her girlfriend Ilma Gore impersonated an FBI agent, contacted several of MMs past girlfriends and gave them a checklist of things they needed to do. They systematically filed sexual assault charges in last year. Then Ilma Gore hacked and planted child pornography on his devices. They called the cops to check up on him, had his devices ceased and scanned.
ChemicalWord6529 largely agrees:
He’s definitely no saint, but he’s also not the devil incarnate. . …
I’m biased from what I’ve found out about the accusers and their past behaviour, the lack of actual evidence, the timing, the fact there’s actual proof that Ilma Gore and ERW went out of their way to recruit people for this whole thing.
Not all of Amber Heard’s tormenters are looking forward to bashing Wood. Some commenters seem a little less than convinced by Manson’s denials.
“I never said [Manson] was the Devil incarnate,” writes someone called Lord_Snowfall, who describes himself as “a firm Depp supporter.”
But he has 16+accusers, a conviction. For assault and sexual misconduct, spent years bragging about abusing people, dated an 18 year old when he was 37 and filmed an intro video for his website of him beating the shit out of her, bragged about massively emotionally abusing her, threatened to kill journalists, etc. he crafted a persona of being an abusive POS and did so in part by being an abusive POS in public. So when he’s accused of doing the same in private I don’t believe him when he says it’s not true and he is a saint run private.
I suppose the easiest way to bring the Manson skeptics on board the “Amber Heard 2.0” crusade would be for Depp himself to come out for Manson. Because they just happen to be longtime friends. Because of course they do.
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FYI David, Dr. Charlotte Proudman isn’t one of the useful idiots pushing this narrative. She’s a human rights barrister, ardent feminist, and has written book about FGM. You might want to make that clear.
Dr Charlotte Proudman has been extremely critical of Depp and his lawsuit. And it’s greater effects in damaging women. When she says “next witch to burn” she is, and has been, literally calling it a witch hunt where women are attacked based on the lies of powerful men.
I doubt Manson has as many fans as Depp. That gives me hope.
Wait, so all people who agree with verdict in the Depp defamation trial are tormentors of Amber Heard or misogynists, eh? That’s a pretty big assumption. Lot’s of people believed that Depp was a wife beater but changed their mind during the trial. To suggest that people supporting Depp would suddenly support Marilyn Manson because they were friends is rather cynical. Besides, juries are generally selected to avoid biases, I doubt that even if there were support of Marilyn Manson on social media, that would effect the outcome in an actual defamation case. I don’t believe that the jury decision on Johnny Depp had anything to do with fandom either.
Er, no. To quote an article by Michael Hobbes:
“Clips of Heard’s testimony became fodder for visual memes and celebrity re-enactments. Depp supporters doctored footage to make it look like she took cocaine on the stand and spread false rumors that she had plagiarized her testimony and even her sexual assault allegations. Dozens of Youtubers and Twitch streamers became full-time Amber Heard smear machines, reacting to her testimony in real time and sending their followers onto the internet to argue with anyone defending her.”
The article includes links to examples, if, by some miracle, you haven’t been blasted by the firehose of anti-Heard content. Also, Ben Shapiro funded anti-Heard propaganda.
I’m editing to re-write my reply. That tweet looks really bad out of context, but I just read more of her tweets and she’s not making an accusation, she’s making a prediction.
David Futrelle,
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1533906032413523969
Milo Yiannopolus has recently joined as an intern for vocal Qanon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene.
If you could publish a piece and reminder of some of Milo’s worst hits towards minorities that would be swell.
I know it’s been about six years now and I am heartily sick and damn tired of this particular contingent of white men with their perpetually open and spewing mouths! Do they EVER shut the f*ck up? And what exactly are they winning here? The right to be bigger a$$holes than they already are? Do not these mediocre neck beards have lives at all? How do people keep up this level of vitriol against the rest of humanity? Because it’s got to be fckn exhausting to be this damn tiresome!
Excuse my French but Im pretty sure I’m not the only one who has had waaaay too damn much of these men! They’re like biting horseflies, on every website, comment section, and social media app. Ugh!
@LouCPurr, I’m trying to say that it’s possible to be a Depp supporter and not agree with those social media posts.
That was much lower stake, but I really didn’t like Jason Aaron’s run on Thor. You know the one… the one that included Jane Foster as Thor and the Internet Misogynist Contingent loved to hate (despite her being the least of its problems).
But somehow I never felt the need to drop into conversations about the IMC with “but what about the people with legitimate criticism?!(tm)“.
Manson has a career to ruin?
In my opinion, yes absolutely anyone who supported Depp during his “global humiliation” defamation trial against Heard is a misogynist.
Depp is a blatant, lifelong woman hater whose race, gender, looks, power, popularity and money have inoculated him against any consequences for his behavior for decades. He has a well documented and easily googlable history of assault and violence going back to the 1980s. He has described HIMSELF numerous times as jealous, controlling and possessive in relationships. He consistently pursues women much younger than himself, ensuring a power imbalance. He calls women (not just Heard, but all the women in his life, including the mother of his children) cunts, cum guzzlers, floppy fish markets, whores and gold diggers; he says their pussies are “rightfully his.” He openly fantasized about raping Heard’s corpse after burning her to death, then lied and said he was quoting part of a Monty Python sketch (he wasn’t). He encouraged and allowed his 15 year old daughter to shack up with her 23 year old boyfriend, and then lied to the police to shield the boyfriend from facing any consequences for statutorily raping his child. He himself dated Winona Ryder when she was 17 and he was 25. Whatever you think of Heard personally, Depp has never been anything but a dishonest misogynist who hates and exploits women and girls, including his own daughter.
If someone can align themselves with, or identify with, a man as searingly misogynistic as Depp, support for Manson is a horizontal move. I see no difference between the two.
The Depp stans have been very internet-active and very horrible for quite some time. Was rough seeing so many folks be influenced by them recently. I don’t know that Manson has the stans to pull this off. I still run into Depp fans from time-to-time, icluding many folks I would expect to be more discerning. I only ever see ex-Manson fans. They mostly seem to realize that his whole schtick wasn’t a brave act of rebellion, but just a horrible person finding an excuse to be horrible in public.
@ Jono
“Some Johnny Depp fans”
So the pro-child exploitation crowd has crawled out from under their rocks. Oh, joy. Although Heard was more than two decades younger than Depp, at least she was an adult when she began the relationship with him. Wood, on the other hand, no. There’s no excuse for exploitation. Manson or whatever his birth name is – is a creep.
For anyone who wants some of the more technical aspects of defamation demystifying, I just did a thing with another barrister about some of that. Dealing with questions from viewers mainly.
Dan does a really good job of explaining the concepts simply and practically. I just keep going off on tangents about animals.
Meanwhile actual abuse victims despise amber heard because she reminds them of their abusers.
Wood seems credible. It doesn’t matter that toxic rape apologists watcher to lose because the same abuse victims that support depp (because they were paying attention) support wood.
But hey that ruins your narrative in support of spousal abuse.
Er, no. To quote an article by Michael Hobbes:
You mean the guy who took heards testimony verbatim without question.
Yes. Shitty people also hate heard for shitty reasons. But trying to gaslight abuse survivors is some seriously low rhetoric
You might as well say that people suing the catholic church for sexual abuse are in agreement with the kkk
TheLilithian,
Congratulations. You didn’t pay attention to the trial. Or your abuse victim friends if you have any left. Or any if depps girlfriends who vouched for him.
Or amber heards ex whom she abused.
But an adult woman cam be considered a child in your eyes.
So you love the patriarchy
@ TimLeider
You know in the absence of quotations all your comments read like you’re ranting into the wind?I suspect they’d read like that anyway, but you could try to make sense.
@Jazzlet:
I think he sprained himself attempting the mental gymnastics needed to defend Depp.
@Surplus to Requirements, nobody needs to do any mental gymnastics to defend Depp because a jury found in his favour.
@Jono: Why are you still butthurt over the fact that that didn’t convince everybody that he isn’t a giant flaming arsehole?
@Surplus to Requirements, I’m not. I never even said that and I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything, nor do I need to. I’m just stating the facts. Your reply says a lot more about you. Projection much?
@tim
I don’t know how to tell you this but a 17 year old is not an adult. That is a minor. Still a child. A man 10 years older then her doesn’t have any business trying to stick his penis in her