In a January 2021 taped video played to the court Wednesday, Romero could be seen inside a car as he spoke about his limited interactions with the famous couple.
Alejandro RomeroĪ doorman for the Los Angeles apartment building Depp and Heard once lived in, Romero made it clear from the moment his recorded deposition began that he had better things to do.
But just as Depp’s own odd antics could ultimately backfire, his gaggle of colorful witnesses may leave jurors scratching their heads. Some of Depp’s witnesses may ultimately prove up to the task before them: of recasting him as the victim. Depp’s legal team did not respond for comment for this story.
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And Depp fanatics have taken to TikTok and Twitter to create harsh memes of Heard reacting to painful testimony.īut if plenty of eyes are on Depp and Heard, the supporting characters in the circus of a trial have threatened to steal the show for themselves.įrom a building manager vaping and driving during his video deposition to an expert who got heated about baked goods, the witnesses presented by the actor’s legal team have helped refashion the case into an absurdist drama. He has also repeatedly indulged in bizarro behavior in court, from coloring in impressionist art renderings to munching on gummy bears to giggling. Depp opined on the stand for four days about his lavish, drug-fueled lifestyle, painting himself as a victim, despite a British judge having already concluded there was “overwhelming evidence” he abused Amber Heard and left her in fear for her life. Nothing about the trial-which hinges on allegations of domestic violence-has been routine. But none of that matters when hate is spread under a thin veneer of “irony,” all in the name of a culture war.For three weeks, 12 jurors, a gallery of spectators, and hordes of online sleuths have been watching virtually every moment of the $50 million defamation saga between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard in Virginia. It isn’t hard to imagine how these tidal waves of disinformation and loathing could inspire bloodshed from the next lone wolf. This is the context in which Schmidt and the far-right obsessed with “exposing” queerness as sexual deviancy are operating. It’s no surprise that both of those nations have seen the influence of right-wing political movements that leverage anti-LGBT sentiment as a populist cause in a war against moral and cultural corrosion the U.S., meanwhile, is seeing an unprecedented wave of bills that suppress rights and protections for LGBT people. The conservative glee over labeling people as “groomers” and openly wishing fatal violence on them feels like a precursor to the kind of oppression and bloodshed that LGBTQ people are seeing in Europe, including in Ukraine and Poland, both of which had “LGBT-free zones” patrolled by neo-Nazi and far-right enforcers. Groomers face the wall and wait for the bang ?- Railey Djinn??? April 29, 2022 He’s called on his handful of supporters to pull similar stunts by confronting people themselves and recording the interactions, as he did at an LGBTQ-friendly church in Phoenix in early April. But his rhetoric is also a worrying symptom of the growing number of people who label their opponents as “pedophiles” and then explicitly advocate for violence against them, using bizarre turns of logic and layers of misinformation in their mission to depict queer culture and sexual education as a threat to kids.Īt various points in the past two years, Schmidt has reportedly dabbled in anti-Semitism, anti-Blackness and support of explicit white nationalists, all while racking up bans from social media platforms and crowdfunding platforms for a range of speech and activities, including allegedly assaulting people and trespassing in order to assert his anti-mask rights as well as getting banned from the Arizona Capitol earlier this year after reportedly harassing a Democrat with slurs and throwing Nazi salutes in its halls.
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In a vacuum, Schmidt is a tiny personality fighting for approval in a vast sea of right-wing agitators, many of whom have realized that the American conservative movement can grow through a series of disinformation campaigns and willfully ignorant moral panics.