Gold dust | Who Trolled Amber Ep 2

Speaker 1 Hey friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

Speaker 4 I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver.

Speaker 5 My kids are obsessed.

Speaker 6 Yoto is a screen-free audio player where kids just pop in a card and listen.

Speaker 10 Hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more, and no screens or ads.

Speaker 11 With hundreds of options for ages 0 to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again.

Speaker 14 Check it out at yotoplay.com. y-o-t-o-p-l-a-y.com.

Speaker 15 A lot of supplement brands chase trends, but if you're serious about your health, we know research-backed science is what actually moves the needle.

Speaker 18 Momentous works with the best brains in human science to create every formula, and every batch is made of pure ingredients tested for safety and does not contain fillers.

Speaker 22 So you get the best long-term results possible.

Speaker 24 Creatine isn't just for muscle gains, it's essential daily fuel for your brain, body, and long-term performance.

Speaker 25 Momentous Creopure Creatine is backed by leading performance experts like Dr.

Speaker 18 Andrew Huberman and Dr.

Speaker 20 Stacey Sims.

Speaker 16 Sourced exclusively in Germany, Creopure sets the gold standard for creatine, delivering the purest form creatine monohydrate that's rigorously washed and never cut with fillers.

Speaker 25 With over 2,5-star reviews, over 112,000 customers have seen the results firsthand.

Speaker 19 With Momentous, the fundamentals are done right.

Speaker 30 Right now, Momentous is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first subscription order with promo code ACAST.

Speaker 28 Go to livemomentous.com and use promo code ACAST for up to 35% off your first subscription order. That's livemomentous.com, promo code ACAST.

Speaker 35 This message is brought to you by AT ⁇ T. You know, we spend a lot of time here separating fact from claim.
And when it comes to mobile networks, that distinction matters.

Speaker 35 When AT ⁇ T makes a claim, it's one you can count on. AT ⁇ T is America's fastest and most reliable wireless network, and that's not opinion, it's data.

Speaker 35 Based on Rootmetrics United States Root Score Report, 1H 2025, tested with the best commercially available smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types.

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Speaker 37 Tortoise

Speaker 39 Just a warning before we start, this series contains strong language and descriptions of violence.

Speaker 40 Emmanuel, leave it alone. Emmanuel, don't do it!

Speaker 41 Emmanuel!

Speaker 42 Let me tell you a story.

Speaker 21 Not about Amber Heard or Johnny Depp, not on the face of it at least, but about an Emu.

Speaker 45 The year is 2022.

Speaker 46 Emmanuel the Emu, or Emmanuel Todd Lopez to give him his full name, is in in his prime.

Speaker 53 He's got millions of followers on TikTok, where he's become famous for his aggressive behavior and for interrupting his owner's videos.

Speaker 40 Don't choose violence today. Please, every day we go through this.
Gosh.

Speaker 46 He even appears on the Jimmy Fallon show.

Speaker 56 This flightless bird is a celebrity, maybe not on Johnny Depp's level, but pretty big.

Speaker 48 But a week after he's on TV, tragedy.

Speaker 39 Emmanuel suddenly dies, struck down at the height of his fame.

Speaker 62 The hashtag RIP Emmanuel starts trending on Twitter.

Speaker 48 His fans are distraught.

Speaker 40 I wanted to marry him.

Speaker 38 He was such a great meme.

Speaker 6 Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see Emmanuel.

Speaker 34 R.I.P. legend.

Speaker 50 But then something strange happens.

Speaker 39 The EMU's owner, a woman called Taylor Blake, posts a message on Twitter.

Speaker 40 I literally sprinted out to the barn to see if it was true. Emmanuel is not dead.

Speaker 47 Emmanuel lives, resurrected from the grave.

Speaker 45 I never thought I'd learn about the global disinformation industry from an EMU, but here we are.

Speaker 43 You see, Emmanuel's death was staged to prove a point by a group called Team Jorge.

Speaker 36 Team Jorge are shady contractors specializing in hacking and online disinformation, including running bot campaigns.

Speaker 53 Their operations were exposed last year by a team of international reporters who went undercover posing as clients.

Speaker 65 Let's make one candidate together. Let's take one, I don't know, United Kingdom, female, let's do a search.

Speaker 65 Isla Sawyer, let's say I don't like the name, it's not, oh, Sophie Wilde, I I like the name, British. Already she has email, date of birth, everything.

Speaker 49 Team Jorge thought that the reporters were legitimate clients, so they were happy to tell them about their prized asset, a piece of software able to create hundreds of fake social media profiles almost instantly.

Speaker 65 So, this is our platform that we developed for online impact.

Speaker 43 Each profile had its own digital backstory that went back years, making them look completely genuine.

Speaker 53 At a click of a button, this bot army could be deployed to promote whatever message the client chose.

Speaker 49 To demonstrate just how good their tech was, Team Jorge told the reporters that they could kill off a certain well-loved internet bird called Emmanuel.

Speaker 53 They instructed their bot army to post RIP Emmanuel messages across social media.

Speaker 39 Thousands of these posts began flying across Twitter and Facebook, reaching millions of people.

Speaker 43 And it didn't take long for this fake story to be picked up and spread by real fans.

Speaker 62 Soon everyone believed that Emmanuel was dead.

Speaker 72 We were extremely surprised by how powerful they were and how the artificial intelligence was used by them and so presented a great big danger for all of us.

Speaker 67 That's Laurent Richard.

Speaker 38 He's the founder of Forbidden Stories, a non-profit group of journalists who coordinated the Team Jorge expose.

Speaker 72 This information for services is really a very lucrative business as well. It is a very, very international and globalized market.

Speaker 64 Team Jorge were able to make a lie go viral in just a couple of clicks.

Speaker 37 It didn't take weeks of planning.

Speaker 53 The infrastructure was already in place.

Speaker 39 There's nothing linking Team Jorge to the Amber Heard case.

Speaker 59 But if Amber was targeted by bots and trolls, this is exactly the sort of firm that would have the ability to do it.

Speaker 72 If you're able to pay some millions of dollars, then they can postpone an election, they can kill the reputation of an opponent.

Speaker 72 So this is the kind of industry we are facing now that is including more and more private actors.

Speaker 37 What was once the preserve of nation states like Russia is now everywhere.

Speaker 53 Misinformation tools are available to pretty much anyone who can afford them.

Speaker 52 And the really scary thing is that these campaigns are almost impossible to detect.

Speaker 53 If it hadn't been for Laurent's team, the world wouldn't know anything about Team Jorge or its capabilities.

Speaker 43 But in our case, we do have reason for hope, because 4,000 miles away in Miami, someone has been sitting on valuable evidence.

Speaker 39 Evidence that will help us investigate whether a similar campaign was carried out against Amber Heard.

Speaker 73 Without any coordination, it's hard to imagine that this would have happened naturally or organically, right?

Speaker 55 I'm Alexei Mostris, and this is Who Trolled Amber.

Speaker 43 Episode 2, Gold Dust.

Speaker 34 Good afternoon, and welcome to my Yacht.

Speaker 62 I land in Miami in the middle of the hottest summer ever recorded.

Speaker 37 Florida is sweltering.

Speaker 38 I'm here with my producer, Xavier.

Speaker 56 We're going to interview Ron Schnell,

Speaker 74 who is a computer expert who testified for Amber

Speaker 21 at the trial.

Speaker 74 He was going to come on to see us on his Segway because he really likes playing Segway polo.

Speaker 68 But apparently the wheels are shredded, so he can't do that anymore.

Speaker 74 He said that he had been doing some work on the broader question: was there a bot campaign against Amber Heard?

Speaker 34 But that he hadn't been able to speak about that at trial, because by the time the trial came around,

Speaker 37 that wasn't an issue anymore.

Speaker 76 So I think that he might have, hold on, let me just turn right.

Speaker 74 I think he might have evidence about bots that he didn't present at trial. And what I hope is that he's going to show us that evidence.

Speaker 39 Ron Schnell works in a swanky block in downtown Miami.

Speaker 34 Hi. Hi.
How's it going, Edding? Good, thank you.

Speaker 39 Today, he's a managing director for a global consulting firm specializing in issues like antitrust law.

Speaker 63 But at his heart, Ron is a computer whiz.

Speaker 66 And at that point, there was like an option for you to go straight to college.

Speaker 73 Right, yes. NYU asked me when I was 14 if I wanted to become a freshman in college.
It was a difficult decision for me because it would have been cool and I felt like I was ready in a way.

Speaker 73 But then I also thought, well, I like girls and

Speaker 73 what is that going to look like? And I decided it wasn't going to be good. So I decided to go to high school instead.

Speaker 54 Alongside his day job, Ron has used his computer skills to become an expert witness.

Speaker 59 He testifies in several cases a year across the US.

Speaker 59 Many of these are quite dry commercial disputes.

Speaker 45 But in August 2020, he's asked to help on the Amber Heard case.

Speaker 39 He's paid by Amber's team, and that's important to note up front.

Speaker 53 He's not a completely neutral party.

Speaker 45 But expert witnesses have a duty to be factual.

Speaker 47 And when I speak to Ron, it's clear that for him, the data comes first.

Speaker 77 And before before that point,

Speaker 77 had you ever heard of Amber Heard?

Speaker 73 Yes, big fan of Pineapple Express in particular.

Speaker 77 Okay, okay. What about Johnny Depp?

Speaker 77 Did you have any opinions about him?

Speaker 73 Nope, I thought he was a great actor.

Speaker 77 So you came into it quite neutrally?

Speaker 73 Yes. And really, when I testify in court, I always come in quite neutrally.
And I try to remain neutral and only speak from the point of view of science.

Speaker 53 Ron comes onto the case a a few months after Johnny Depp files legal papers against Amber.

Speaker 54 The actor is suing his ex-wife for $50 million, claiming that she lied about him being a domestic abuser.

Speaker 79 The truth, he says, is that it was Amber who abused him.

Speaker 70 He claims that she threw vodka bottles at him, demeaned him, kicked and punched him.

Speaker 60 He even says that Amber's allegations are lies designed to drum up publicity for her latest movie.

Speaker 45 In other words, Depp isn't just denying that he abused Amber, he's coming after her with everything he's got.

Speaker 47 But Amber doesn't take this lying down.

Speaker 52 A few months after Depp sues her, she launches her own claim against him.

Speaker 39 And that's where wrong comes in.

Speaker 77 So at that point in time, at the point when you were instructed, essentially there were two

Speaker 68 objectives.

Speaker 77 One relating to quite a narrow issue to do with statements made by Adam Waldman. Correct.

Speaker 77 And the other was quite a broad question about whether bots had been used to attack Amber Heard.

Speaker 78 Right, and they were related.

Speaker 39 This next bit is a little complex, so please bear with me.

Speaker 45 Amber's team asks Ron to focus on two things.

Speaker 60 The first are statements made by Johnny Depp's lawyer, a guy called Adam Waldman.

Speaker 62 Waldman is Depp's main advisor.

Speaker 51 He doesn't represent him in court, but he's a constant presence.

Speaker 66 In the lead-up to the trial, Waldman tells journalists that Amber's claims of domestic abuse are a hoax.

Speaker 54 Ron is asked to look at whether these statements stirred up online hatred against Amber.

Speaker 45 So, to answer that question, he downloads this huge database of tweets.

Speaker 21 Almost a million messages posted in the two years before the trial, all containing anti-AMBA Heard hashtags.

Speaker 51 Ron maps that data against the statements made by Adam Waldman, and he finds that thousands of tweets trashing Amber were posted just after Waldman called her a liar. That's good for Amber's case.

Speaker 47 And he finds something else too, something I find really odd.

Speaker 73 There were a total of over 1.2 million tweets with the negative hashtags and there were 224,194 that mentioned Waldman, 96,181 that mentioned Waldman Young.

Speaker 67 A huge number of the anti-AMBA tweets mention Adam Waldman by name or by his nickname.

Speaker 73 I found that 25%

Speaker 73 of the negative hashtag tweets mentioned one or the other.

Speaker 58 25% of all the negative tweets posted about Amber Heard

Speaker 77 using the hashtags, 25% one in four mentioned this lawyer.

Speaker 73 That's right.

Speaker 77 That's surprising?

Speaker 73 I'd say yes, it was pretty surprising.

Speaker 61 This part of Amber's counterclaim, the bit about the Waldman statements, went all the way to trial.

Speaker 39 But there was another part that didn't make it, an allegation that Depp's team launched a global bot campaign against Amber.

Speaker 63 A judge struck out that part of the counterclaim more than a year before the hearing. But by then, Ron had already done a couple of months' work on this question too.

Speaker 49 Work he wasn't allowed to talk about on the stand.

Speaker 73 If I started talking about that at trial, Mr. Depp's attorneys could object, and the judge would likely say, no, you're not disclosed as having that opinion, you can't talk about it.

Speaker 37 One of the things that Ron did was run all the Twitter accounts he'd collected through a bot detection program called Botometer.

Speaker 77 You can see here that I'm just looking at the screen now that, I mean, at least the first 40,

Speaker 77 maybe more, have a higher than 90% chance that they are bots.

Speaker 80 And then we go down.

Speaker 49 When I talked to him over the phone, he wasn't willing to divulge the results.

Speaker 53 But now I'm here in front of him, he's more ready to talk.

Speaker 51 Ron says he identified significant numbers of bots tweeting about Amber.

Speaker 73 And it's also,

Speaker 73 when you look at, even if you just spot check some of these tweets,

Speaker 73 the wording is conspicuously exactly the same.

Speaker 73 So that's also something really interesting to look at. And if you put Adam Waldman aside,

Speaker 73 clearly this is a huge number of tweets. Without any coordination, it's hard to imagine that this would have happened naturally or organically, right? This appears to be some sort of organized attack.

Speaker 38 At that moment, my producer, Xavier, jumps in.

Speaker 75 Can I ask Bon, is that in terms of scale or the suddenness of it? Is it the fact that it happened?

Speaker 73 I would say it's both scale and suddenness. It's not something you typically see organically.

Speaker 46 So if you...

Speaker 43 Could we now go to the raw numbers? Because I remember listening to you.

Speaker 39 Ron thinks there probably was an organised attack against Amber.

Speaker 39 But he's not 100% sure.

Speaker 59 Could you zoom in on Ron of the Mm-hmm? The counterclaims dismissal stopped him before he could complete his research.

Speaker 52 If this is a marathon, I'd say he's run the first five miles.

Speaker 57 But Ron is happy to help us finish the race.

Speaker 38 He's giving us his database of anti-Amber Heard tweets.

Speaker 49 And this is Gold Dust.

Speaker 45 Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2022, he's basically prevented researchers and journalists from downloading large quantities of data.

Speaker 64 And even if we could download a similar number of tweets today, lots of the accounts which were tweeting back then have since been deleted or suspended.

Speaker 51 Ron's data set is like a layer of sediment, perfectly preserving the fossils of internet hate towards Amber.

Speaker 39 And he's got the only copy.

Speaker 51 And Dan, do you mind if we go off and do our own digging and then come back and show you what we've found?

Speaker 73 Oh, that sounds great.

Speaker 50 That'd be very interesting.

Speaker 54 We leave Ron's office excited about the data he's given us. I think we should.

Speaker 34 We've got a whole new hard drive, so I think that we need to find a way of analysing those files.

Speaker 39 But we know we don't have the skills to examine it properly.

Speaker 47 We need an expert, a specialist, someone who can help us search these tweets for clues about who trolled Amber.

Speaker 62 I'm anxious to get back to London so I can start looking, but I don't want to leave America quite yet.

Speaker 67 There's one other person I want to see.

Speaker 34 And then, yeah, I think we just need to kind of step up speaking to people, other witnesses in the trial who might know something about the social media campaign.

Speaker 50 As we leave the city, we pass under some gleaming skyscrapers and I notice this huge billboard with Johnny Depp's face on it.

Speaker 53 It's an advert for an aftershave called Sauvage by Christian Dior.

Speaker 76 Depp has been the face of the fragrance since 2015.

Speaker 39 Despite a British judge finding that Depp had abused his ex-wife Amber Heard on 12 occasions, Dior stood by him.

Speaker 76 In fact, just months before we flew out to the US, Depp signed a new $20 million deal to extend his Dior contract for another three years.

Speaker 50 The tagline of the fragrance is Sauvage, Wild at Heart.

Speaker 52 It's quite a bullsy slogan for an alleged domestic abuser.

Speaker 51 And for me, it's hard to see this sign and not think of Amber herself.

Speaker 62 She used to have a similar contract with L'Oreal, another beauty company.

Speaker 40 When I believe in something, I'm all in.

Speaker 40 So if I'm going to be blonde, it's got to be great.

Speaker 53 She no longer has that contract.

Speaker 37 Now, Depp fans would say this is all fair enough. Depp may have lost the UK case in 2020, but he won in the US two years later.

Speaker 39 And actually, that's got to mean something.

Speaker 69 I'm not in a position to say whether Johnny Depp abused Amber or not.

Speaker 39 I know a lot about the case, but I wasn't in court every day.

Speaker 60 Even though the British judgment against Depp is compelling, I have to respect the fact that a US jury came to another conclusion.

Speaker 45 I've always been interested in something different.

Speaker 55 Not whether the jury's decision was right, but whether it was fair.

Speaker 64 If Ron's initial conclusions are correct and some of the hate came from bots and trolls, could that have deprived Amber of a fair trial?

Speaker 64 And if it did, is it right that Johnny Depp's name is still in lights while Amber has all but disappeared?

Speaker 1 Hey friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

Speaker 4 I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver.

Speaker 5 My kids are obsessed.

Speaker 6 Yoto is a screen-free audio player where kids just pop in a card and listen.

Speaker 10 Hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more, and no screens or ads.

Speaker 11 With hundreds of options for ages 0 to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again.

Speaker 14 Check it out at yotoplay.com, Y-O-T-O-P-L-A-Y dot com.

Speaker 15 A lot of supplement brands chase trends, but if you're serious about your health, we know research-backed science is what actually moves the needle.

Speaker 20 Momentous works with the best brains in human science to create every formula, and every batch is made of pure ingredients, tested for safety, and does not contain fillers.

Speaker 22 So you get the best long-term results possible.

Speaker 24 Creatine isn't just for muscle gains, it's essential daily fuel for your brain, body, and long-term performance.

Speaker 25 Momentous Creopure Creatine is backed by leading performance experts like Dr.

Speaker 18 Andrew Huberman and Dr.

Speaker 20 Stacey Sims.

Speaker 16 Sourced exclusively in Germany, Creopure sets the gold standard for creatine, delivering the purest form creatine monohydrate that's rigorously washed and never cut with fillers.

Speaker 25 With over 2,000 five-star reviews, over 112,000 customers have seen the results firsthand.

Speaker 19 With Momentous, the fundamentals are done right.

Speaker 30 Right now, Momentous is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first subscription order with promo code ACAST.

Speaker 28 Go to livemomentous.com and use promo code ACAST for up to 35% off your first subscription order. That's livemomentous.com, promo code ACAST.

Speaker 35 This message is brought to you by AT ⁇ T. You know, we spend a lot of time here separating fact from claim.
And when it comes to mobile networks, That distinction matters.

Speaker 35 When AT ⁇ T makes a claim, it's one you can count on. AT is America's fastest and most reliable wireless network.
And that's not opinion, it's data.

Speaker 35 Based on Rootmetrics United States Root Score Report, 1H 2025, tested with the best commercially available smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types, your experiences may vary.

Speaker 35 Rootmetrics rankings are not an endorsement of ATT.

Speaker 45 We've flown north to Jacksonhole, a rodeo town in the heart of Wyoming.

Speaker 34 And in the mountains on my right, kind of silhouetted against the sky.

Speaker 34 And even though I'm on a road with other cars, it kind of feels like the least polluted place in the world.

Speaker 53 It might be in the middle of nowhere, but Jackson Hole is something of a Hollywood enclave.

Speaker 52 Next to two national parks, the likes of Karnier West and Harrison Ford have sprawling estates in the area.

Speaker 34 Hey! Hello! Hi, hi, thanks so much for having us. Oh, sure, come on in.
Wow. You guys have made a long trip.
Hi, it's nice to meet you too. This is amazing.

Speaker 34 Well, welcome to our home in Wyoming.

Speaker 40 So cool. Hollywood is 100% a relationship business.

Speaker 40 It's all about who you know and the long-standing relationships that you create and the trust that you create.

Speaker 43 I'm here to see Catherine Arnold, a Hollywood producer who spent decades in the industry.

Speaker 66 She has this beautiful house with these enormous glass windows.

Speaker 80 Yeah.

Speaker 75 See the mountains.

Speaker 40 I was hoping the moose will come.

Speaker 51 How often do you see them on the CCTV?

Speaker 40 No, we just look up there and they're right there.

Speaker 67 And they're right there.

Speaker 66 They're right there.

Speaker 52 Like Ron Schnell, Catherine was an expert witness for Amber Heard.

Speaker 40 So initially I was hired to defend Johnny's claim that Amber's op-ed piece had caused him damages to the amount of about $50 million,

Speaker 40 whether that was caused by the loss of Pirates of the Caribbean or any other work that he may have gotten in that time period.

Speaker 40 And then about a year and a half later, Amber made a counterclaim against Johnny for the damages that she had incurred since the

Speaker 40 intense social media onslaught, negative onslaught against her. I was hard to analyze what her career trajectory would have been if that campaign had not ensued.

Speaker 62 Depp claims that Amber's piece in The Washington Post made him a pariah in Hollywood.

Speaker 43 But Catherine isn't convinced.

Speaker 40 It had a news cycle of less than 48 hours. Most people didn't even know about the op-ed.
Most people hadn't read the op-ed. The executives at the studios hadn't read the op-ed.

Speaker 39 She says Depp's problems started way earlier.

Speaker 40 Issues prior to the op-ed had affected Johnny's career, the drinking and being late to set, and Depp's lawyers dispute these claims.

Speaker 68 But this is his former agent, Tracy Jacobs.

Speaker 81 Late to set consistently

Speaker 81 on virtually every movie, I would get yelled at. I never said to him, you're a difficult client, but I was very honest with him and said, you've got to stop doing this.
This is hurting you.

Speaker 81 And it did.

Speaker 59 By the time Depp sues Amber, he's still a global superstar.

Speaker 39 but there are questions about his work ethic.

Speaker 49 Amber doesn't have the same pulling power as Depp, but she's recently landed the role of a lifetime.

Speaker 56 After appearing in a bunch of indie movies, including a stoner comedy called Pineapple Express, she's cast in Aquaman, a proper Hollywood blockbuster.

Speaker 40 You know, after Aquaman, she had a really big moment. She had this honeymoon period where everybody was looking at her.
What is she going to do next?

Speaker 40 The directors had raved about her performance, the producers had raved about her performance. She was part of a billion-dollar movie.

Speaker 47 Aquaman is a huge deal.

Speaker 39 It becomes the highest-grossing DC comics film ever.

Speaker 49 It should make Amber a star, but there's something else dragging her down to earth.

Speaker 67 Online hate.

Speaker 59 It starts when she files the restraining order against Depp in 2016, but it reaches a fever pitch four years later when Depp loses his case in London.

Speaker 54 A few days after the verdict, Warner Bros.

Speaker 50 removes the actor from the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

Speaker 37 The internet goes into overdrive.

Speaker 36 Thousands of accounts accuse the studio of punishing an innocent man.

Speaker 52 An online petition calling for Amber to be removed from Aquaman's sequel attracts millions of signatures.

Speaker 62 It's a lot of noise, and Hollywood, it notices.

Speaker 40 When she had promoted other movies prior to Aquaman 2, she was on the cover of magazines around the world. There was no press done on her for Aquaman 2.

Speaker 40 She wasn't allowed to go to any of the big media events that the other actors were taken to. She wasn't on the posters.

Speaker 53 Amber's role in Aquaman 2 is drastically cut.

Speaker 46 She's not even in the trailer.

Speaker 48 I don't know if studio executives believed what they read online about how Amber was crazy, about how it was Amber who was the abuser.

Speaker 53 But in a place where reputation is king, they do think it's a problem.

Speaker 21 And Amber feels the impact.

Speaker 40 She couldn't get an audition, she couldn't get a reading, she couldn't. Directors and casting directors and producers were saying, we can't touch Amber right now.
It's just too noisy around her.

Speaker 40 And no one would hire her.

Speaker 45 The trolling continues today.

Speaker 53 Amber is living in Spain, far away from Hollywood, trying to rebuild her career through small independent movies.

Speaker 44 But hold on.

Speaker 64 There's lots of reasons why a star can fall out of favor.

Speaker 61 Maybe Amber wasn't a fantastic actor, or maybe she had a bad reputation on set.

Speaker 39 And then another Hollywood source hands me some emails.

Speaker 38 Emails from agents, producers and managers.

Speaker 52 And they seem to confirm what Catherine's telling us.

Speaker 82 He confidentially told his agent that he can't go anywhere near her now with what's going on in the press and with Johnny.

Speaker 40 She's losing so many opportunities. I only find out a fraction of them.

Speaker 46 Emails explicitly saying, we can't touch her.

Speaker 53 There's too much noise.

Speaker 82 We can't bring her name up right now.

Speaker 40 Too much negativity around her.

Speaker 62 I'm also passed an email from Amber herself, confirming that Aquaman's studio Warner Bros.

Speaker 47 banned her from posting about the film.

Speaker 39 After speaking to Catherine and seeing those leaked emails, I think it's fair to say that online hate did affect Amber's career, even if it might not have been the only factor.

Speaker 62 But could it have led to an unfair trial?

Speaker 53 I think potentially it could.

Speaker 53 The online campaign against Amber Heard was relentless, literally millions of tweets insulting and demeaning her, undermining and distorting her testimony in real time.

Speaker 1 Hey friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro.

Speaker 4 I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver.

Speaker 5 My kids are obsessed.

Speaker 6 Yoto is a screen-free audio player where kids just pop in a card and listen.

Speaker 10 Hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more, and no screens or ads.

Speaker 11 With hundreds of options for ages 0 to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again.

Speaker 14 Check it out at yotoplay.com. Y-O-T-O-P-L-A-Y dot com.

Speaker 15 A lot of supplement brands chase trends, but if you're serious about your health, we know research-backed science is what actually moves the needle.

Speaker 18 Momentous works with the best brains in human science to create every formula, and every batch is made of pure ingredients, tested for safety, and does not contain fillers.

Speaker 22 So you get the best long-term results possible.

Speaker 24 Creatine isn't just for muscle gains, it's essential daily fuel for your brain, body, and long-term performance.

Speaker 25 Momentous Creopure Creatine is backed by leading performance experts like Dr.

Speaker 18 Andrew Huberman and Dr.

Speaker 20 Stacey Sims.

Speaker 16 Sourced exclusively in Germany, Creopure sets the gold standard for creatine, delivering the purest form creatine monohydrate that's rigorously washed and never cut with fillers.

Speaker 25 With over 2,5-star reviews, over 112,000 customers have seen the results firsthand.

Speaker 19 With Momentous, the fundamentals are done right.

Speaker 30 Right now, Momentous is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first subscription order with promo code ACAST.

Speaker 28 Go to livemomentous.com and use promo code ACAST for up to 35% off your first subscription order. That's livemomentous.com, promo code ACAST.

Speaker 54 As I mentioned in the last episode, the US jury weren't sequestered.

Speaker 43 They could go home after the trial every night, talk to their families.

Speaker 47 They could easily have looked up what was happening online, even if they weren't supposed to.

Speaker 52 And that's not the only thing.

Speaker 47 Amber received thousands of online threats during the trial.

Speaker 40 People want to kill me, and they tell me so every day.

Speaker 59 And so did her witnesses.

Speaker 21 Amber's psychologist received death threats which were deemed credible by the FBI and I note that other people were put off from testifying altogether.

Speaker 67 Even Catherine got trolled while she was giving evidence.

Speaker 40 It happened fairly immediately. So there's two parts of any expert's testimony.
One, you're on direct, which is when your side's lawyers are questioning you. And then there's a cross-examination.

Speaker 40 And that's when the other side's lawyers start questioning you. And in this case, because it was so long, I had a break between direct and cross.

Speaker 40 When I got off from direct and I went over to my phone to look and see if there were any messages, I saw an onslaught of people making all kinds of strange accusations and comments, and

Speaker 40 I was very surprised. It was really ugly, personal

Speaker 40 comments about my looks, about my health, about my experience level. They used a lot of really foul language,

Speaker 40 both online and text, and to my voicemail on my cell phone.

Speaker 39 Catherine won't say it herself, but I've seen some of the comments made against her.

Speaker 59 They're pretty disgusting.

Speaker 43 So here's what we have.

Speaker 53 An unsequestered jury, witness intimidation, the trolling of experts in real time, all in a major case with millions of dollars on the line.

Speaker 40 I think this case was tried in the Court of Public Opinion more than it was tried in the legal system and that's my experience of this trial.

Speaker 62 I leave Wyoming with a much better sense of how online attacks against Amber impacted her life and how they might even have denied her a fair trial.

Speaker 53 The question now is how much of that hate was manufactured.

Speaker 53 Sav and I land back in the UK armed with Ron's database. We focus on finding someone to look at all those preserved tweets.

Speaker 34 Hi, this is Alexei Moscherson.

Speaker 50 It's easier said than done.

Speaker 53 The pool of people actually capable of digging into such a large file is depressingly small. A few researchers don't even want to touch the story.

Speaker 49 They think it's too controversial, that they might get attacked if they get involved.

Speaker 44 yeah, okay.

Speaker 60 But eventually, we strike lucky.

Speaker 57 Twice.

Speaker 83 Based on the behaviors of the robots, what we called coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Speaker 80 Across the whole data set, I think at least 50%

Speaker 80 of tweets were generated by inauthentic accounts.

Speaker 55 Next time on Who Trolled Amber, we uncover a global campaign.

Speaker 65 All of those accounts look suspicious.

Speaker 83 That's a typical bod behavior.

Speaker 15 I think it's 100% inauthentic.

Speaker 52 And we start looking for culprits.

Speaker 84 It's actually fundamentally anti-democratic. You might actually be able to narrow down who's running this.

Speaker 69 We contacted Johnny Depp while making this podcast, but he didn't respond.

Speaker 80 Thank you for listening to Who Trolled Amber.

Speaker 39 Who Trolled Amber is written and reported by me, Alexey Mostrus, and by Xavia Greenwood.

Speaker 58 The producer is Xavier Greenwood.

Speaker 56 Additional reporting by Katie Riley.

Speaker 64 Sound design is by Carla Patella.

Speaker 80 The narrative editor is Gary Marshall.

Speaker 58 The editor is David Taylor.

Speaker 80 Thank you for listening to Who Trolled Amber. If you're enjoying the series, please take a moment to give it a rating and recommend it to your friends and family.
It really does make a difference.

Speaker 39 While you wait for next week's episode, search for Tortoise and hear more from our award-winning newsroom wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 59 You can binge the entire series by subscribing to Tortoise Plus or the Tortoise app.

Speaker 59 Tortoise

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