On June 1, the District Court of Fairfax County, Virginia, announced a verdict on the most scandalous Hollywood lawsuit of the last decade. The trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard made an extraordinary resonance in the society and attracted a huge audience. The trial was broadcast on YouTube, and its fragments spread across the web in forms of memes and funny video compilations: many even dubbed this case the “TikTok Trial". Streams Charts collected data on viewership statistics, the popularity of the court broadcast on YouTube and the number of mentions of the trial in Twitch chats.
Johnny Depp has filed a claim for damages from significant financial losses for his career in the amount of $50 million against his ex-wife Amber Heard, with whom he was in a relationship from 2012 to 2017. She also filed a counterclaim in the amount of $100 million. Depp previously filed a defamation lawsuit against The Sun in 2019 as a response to the publication of an article by Amber Heard in The Washington Post in December 2018, where she accused her “intimate partner” of domestic violence and abuse: Depp lost that case. On April 12, the opening statements of both sides were heard and the trial began, which lasted for 6 weeks.
As a result, Amber Heard was found guilty of libel and now has to pay a total of $15 million to Johnny Depp. But Johnny Depp also has to pay Amber Heard $2 million in compensation.
How many people watched the Johnny Depp trial
In six weeks, the broadcast has amassed a total of 83.9 million Hours Watched with a 3.5 million Peak Viewers during the announcement of the verdict. The first three days of the trial, at which Johnny's friends and family testified, gathered only 600K Hours Watched with only 41K Peak Viewers. However, as soon as Johnny himself began to testify in court, the number Hours Watched increased by 4.5 times (to 2.7 million HW), and the Peak Viewers count reached 214K. Further, these numbers only increased.
During the third week of the trial, Johnny Depp provided as evidence the testimony of the housekeeper, who stated: “Miss Heard behaved like a spoiled teenager and drank two bottles of wine a day.” The number of Hours Watched of broadcasts of the third week was about 9 million HW with 500K Peak Viewers.
At the beginning of the fifth week of the hearings, Amber Heard's side presented a photo confirming the physical injuries she allegedly received from Johnny Depp: the number of Hours Watched increased to 18 million. The final week of the trial became the most popular, exceeding the watch time of the previous week by almost half — 33 million Hours Watched with 1.4 million Peak Viewers.
On June 1, the verdict was announced, and on that day the largest audience gathered on the channel broadcasting the trial.The broadcast peaked at as many as 3.5 million concurrent viewers!
Mentioning the trial in Twitch chat
To find out the popularity of this topic among Twitch chat users, we tracked the number of mentions of the trial itself, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. On the first day of the hearings, the “trial” was mentioned 8K times in Twitch chats, and the names of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard were mentioned 960 and 979 times, respectively.
Mentions of the trial and Amber Heard went up again after the photos with, presumably, bruises on the actress' face from a thrown bottle were presented, as well as a speech by Depp's lawyer, when he suggested that it was Heard who threw it at Depp. The word “trial” was mentioned 16K times, and Amber Heard appeard 9K times in chats.
The largest number of mentions of Johnny Depp (14K times) occurred on May 27, the final day of the hearings, when Heard emotionally told about the “horrors and physical injuries”. At the same time, the closing speech of Depp's lawyer took place as he recalled the importance of a fair investigation of the case of domestic violence against men.
On June 1, the court officially ruled that that the headline and the two statements made in Heard's interview defamed Depp with actual malice. Mentions of the actor on Twitch skyrocketed: his last name appeared in chats 24K times.
The most popular YouTube trial broadcasts
From April 12 to June 1, the Law&Crime Network channel was the leader among YT channels by Peak Viewers for 10 days, and the number of concurrent viewers reached 3.5 million people during the announcement of the verdict.
In addition to the trial, there were several others channels that were quite interesting to YouTube users. In particular, the VTV thể Thao channel with broadcasts of football matches of the Vietnam national team at SEA Games reached from 1.1 million to 2.5 million Peak Viewers, and Marca Claro football channel, where the Mexican League match between Pachuca and Atlas was streamed, reached 1.4 million Peak Viewers.
In addition, many well-known streamers also actively obserbed the court. Among the top creators of Twitch one can name Asmongold and xQc, and a well-known lawyer and blogger Emily Baker covered the trial on YouTube.
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Depp vs. Heard trial was definitely one of the biggest newsworthy events of the last month. Trial highlights gain hundreds of thousands of views and a lot of comments in TikTok, YouTube and other social networks. Some users are even sad now: when else will it be possible to follow live something that thrilling?
