Hollywood vampires Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the celebrity exploitation machine

Review by Booklist Review

The highly publicized legal showdown between former spouses Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was contentious and fraught. Investigative journalists Loudenberg and Wholey, who covered the trial in real time, aim to offer deeper nuance for both parties. Through interviews with those closest to the couple and their legal teams, readers will find tragic Shakespearean characters on both sides of the courtroom. The book starts with the actors' early lives and relationship. Both were raised in homes with abusive, alcoholic parents, and their courtship, from all accounts, was loaded with toxicity. Only Depp and Heard know the extent of what went on behind closed doors, but there is much to explore about their dynamic and how it was used to uphold simple public narratives--what happened between the two doesn't mesh with the black-and-white dichotomies of abuse our society understands. Very public trials in the UK and U.S. unfolded in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, all of which influenced the events in a myriad of known and unknown ways. If it's unclear what future generations will see when they look back on this case and time in history, Loudenberg and Wholey offer a much sharper picture for all.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Filmmakers Loudenberg and Wholey debut with a thorough if salacious account of the marriage between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and the vitriolic online response and lawsuits that followed their divorce. Depp and Heard met in 2008 during casting for the Depp-produced film The Rum Diary. Soon he was buying her lavish gifts, including a replica of the film's beach bar. The couple married in 2015, and their relationship was filled with substance use, verbal abuse, and physical altercations that resulted in Heard filing for divorce and a restraining order. Though their divorce was settled quickly in 2016, two subsequent trials brought notoriety: a 2018 libel suit in England after The Sun published an article calling Depp a "wife beater," and an American jury trial, televised live in 2022, in which both parties sued each other for defamation. Loudenberg and Wholey incorporate rigorous research, but their analysis of the wider societal implications can get overwhelmed by tawdry details, which undermines their stated objective to "complicate simplistic narratives and convenient assumptions that have come to surround" the case. Readers may well wind up feeling complicit in the "celebrity industrial complex" the book is meant to impugn. (June)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An investigation of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's litigious split, encompassing assault accusations, "Poopgate," Elon Musk, and more. Celeb watchers spent the spring of 2022 enraptured byDepp v. Heard, in which thePirates of the Caribbean star sued his ex-wife for alleged defamation in aWashington Post op-ed she wrote about sexual assault. Loudenberg and Wholey's report on the events leading to that trial was a documentary project before it was a book, and the two have a gift for scene-setting, from their subjects' whirlwind romance on the set of an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's novelThe Rum Diary, which Depp produced, to drug-fueled jaunts, to physical violence. To escape this "toxic roundabout of fighting and making up," they divorced in 2016 after slightly more than a year of marriage. But the aftereffects of their relationship lingered: Did Heard really cut off part of Depp's finger with a vodka bottle? Did Depp rape her? How did Musk insinuate himself into Heard's life? Who left a pile of feces in Depp's bed? It's all unseemly stuff, but the authors go to ground on the mess, covering everything from inside Depp and Heard's respective legal war rooms to a homeless man's reward for returning Depp's phone, which Heard allegedly threw out a window ("$420, chicken tacos, chips, apples, and Fiji water"). The authors had more access to Depp than Heard, and the book does take a slightly Team Johnny bias, reflecting Depp's win in the 2022 trial (though he lost a similar suit in 2020 in a U.K. court). Loudenberg and Wholey feign disgust with the whole affair, but the riffs on Jean Baudrillard's brainy media critiques and the garment rending over women's freedoms would be more persuasive in a book that didn't dive so eagerly into the deep end of the celebrity gossip sludge pit. Thoroughly lurid. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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