By Mark R. Weaver

June 6, 2022

The jury believed Johnny Depp. After a six-week defamation trial that pitted Depp against his ex-wife, actress Amber Heard, a Virginia jury delivered a rare verdict: They awarded Depp $15 million in damages. The jury also said Depp's lawyer defamed Heard.

As the closing credits rolled on the courtroom lovers spat, a few things about this small screen drama are now clear. First, the vicious vitriol spewed between divorced spouses is wince-worthy enough when observed on a small scale, but it becomes downright detestable when played out on a world stage. Second, and perhaps less obvious, the trial drew back the curtain on the insecurities, vacuousness, and even nihilism that co-stars with many red-carpet celebrities.

As an on-air legal analyst for the Law and Crime Network, I've watched more of this trial than most Americans, but the trial was popular on social media with people reacting, choosing sides, and creating memes from the various courtroom antics. A car crash beckons rubberneckers, but so, too, does the collision of competing celebrity narratives.

From sordid accusations of infidelity to accounts of drug use that would make most libertines blush, the witness stand throbbed with tales of embarrassing excess and personal lives racked with dysfunction. (Who will ever forget Depp's accusation that Heard left feces in the marital bed?) The judge, ever calm and professional, did her bestto keep the spectacle suitable to the setting, but she could only do so much amid six weeks of clashing over nearly every charge and countercharge. I've prosecuted rape cases with less contentiousness.

While there wasn't quite an army of attorneys on each side, there was a small platoon, some of whom will now metamorphose into that oddest of species, the celebrity lawyer. Little good can come of that; the enticing buzz of celebrity acclaim was the dark undercurrent enveloping the entire affair.

The English poet Lord Byron reminded us that "fame is the thirst of youth." After years of seeking to quench their respective yearnings by gulping deep of this well, Depp and Heard approached the litigation hungover from that bender. Their endeavor was equal parts tabloid saga and cautionary tale.

I imagine even these two might quietly acknowledge that the celebrity culture that has captured and consumed our country demeans people on both ends of the obsession. All too often, luminaries genuinely believe they're brilliant, which makes their lives ever darker when the reality of their own mediocrity becomes obvious.

This phenomenon isn't unique to the entertainment world. It also happens in both political parties. Choosing leaders of the world's greatest republic based on whoever ranks highest on the celebrity meter is enough to vex a founding father. We can do better.

Improving on this score starts with recognizing that, whether or not the TV camera adds pounds, it certainly subtracts context. In both politics and show business, those nearest to the famous see the flaws most clearly. And unless they're called into court to testify, they keep it to themselves. After all, the closer one gets to a star, the more obvious it becomes that celebrity is nothing more than a chaotic ball of gas.

It would be reductive to describe this trial as a verdict on domestic violence. While that's a loathsome crime that brings about physical injuries, this was a civil trial over alleged reputational injuries. Money damages were the only possible remedy. But, although Depp essentially won the day, a judicially enforced eight figure Venmo transfer wasn't the ultimate goal here. Depp sought to impeach the credibility of his accuser, and he seems to have succeeded.

Despite the smorgasbord of sordidness on display in this case, I still find myself asking for grace for both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. We're all far from perfect, but we can accurately call these two famously broken. Even megalomaniac multi-millionaires suffering the predictable woes of a dissolute lifestyle are worthy of some scant measure of sympathy. Most Americans lead lives with less drama and more happiness. We can spare a little compassion.

In the end, this trial reminds us that, like entering the "eat the most wings with nuclear hot sauce challenge," notoriety is much sought after and, once achieved, much lamented. We don't need a director to yell "cut" to see that this chaotic scene is over.

This article originally appeared in Newsweek.

By Mark R. Weaver

October 12, 2022

James Madison never met Alex Jones. This side of heaven, we'll never know whether the author of the First Amendment would've listened to Jones' outlandish radio show. But Jones now knows that James Madison's hand-crafted First Amendment umbrella protects most—though not all—speech. On Wednesday, a jury awarded the parents of the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting $1 billion in damages; Jones had called the shooting a hoax and the parents crisis actors. The verdict followed a smaller but just as significant Texas jury verdict against Jones' lies about Sandy Hook.

Jones repeatedly defended himself on First Amendment grounds, arguing that he had a free speech right to his opinion, though he was not allowed to make this defense during the trial. One day he even arrived at court with "Save the 1st" written on a piece of tape he'd used to cover his mouth, and he referred to the trial as a "constitutional-destroying, absolute and total, complete travesty."

Yet for centuries—stretching back to British law, the parentage of American jurisprudence—defamation that causes damages were subject to redress. The jury was convinced that Jones' heartless lies piled grief upon the most unimaginable anguish the families of the Sandy Hook elementary students, when Jones' followers took to harassing them in the most brutal fashion on the internet.

But Alex Jones isn't the only one who's been cut up by the First Amendment and found its protection of free speech turn from a shield into a sword. It's been quite a year for stretching the First Amendment, as the actress Amber Heard discovered in June. Heard, too, frequently referenced the First Amendment during her own much-ballyhooed trial, in which her ex-husband Johnny Depp sued her for defaming him as a wife beater. Heard outlined her understanding of the First Amendment, parroting a line no doubt assembled by one of the lieutenants in her army of publicists, claiming the Constitution gives her "the freedom to speak truth to power."

But there's about as much legal substance in that remark as there are vitamins in potato chips. As in Jones' case, there is a threshold beyond which even the First Amendment does not offer protection. Appreciating our freedom—the highest level ever reached in the history of this globe—means respecting the limits of free speech.

The free speech absolutists will push back on this, but the American tradition has always had limits to free speech. And that's what these trials focus on: specifically, defamation.

The U.S. Supreme Court placed the strongest of girders under this key constitutional precept. In 1964, the high court handed down N.Y. Times vs. Sullivan, which looked at alleged defamation surrounding encounters between Black protestors and the police. The big takeaway from the case was that "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." But cruelly lying about innocent victims is not a lawful subject of public debate.

Hence these verdicts.

Of course, a Hollywood melodrama isn't even in the same hemisphere as mocking the murder of children. The Sandy Hook families deserve our sympathy and prayers. The deaths of their children were real. And Alex Jones' big mouth and small character caused real damage.

Still, Wednesday's giant verdicts will be significantly reduced on appeals. Jurors get angry and their hands grow weary adding zeroes at the end of the monetary award—then appellate judges, using state statues that limit recovery amounts, more soberly scratch out a few of the digits. And if Jones doesn't have the money to pay, he won't go away in handcuffs. Refusal to pay might lead to criminal contempt and jail (not prison) but inability to pay will probably lead to more of a shrug.

The Sandy Hook families deserve real compensation, but James Madison would be the first to warn us that these must be the rarest of cases. Free speech, after all, empowers a free nation.

This article originally appeared in Newsweek.