How to Spin Bad News, Featuring Jonathan Majors and Johnny Depp

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 17, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 17, 2023 |

Media literacy is important, perhaps now more so than ever. It’s a crucial skill to know how to read the news as it’s presented to us, whether it’s CNN’s rightward swing or the British media’s achingly inescapable royal propaganda during the coronation. One should be able to dissect how a story is told, who is telling it, and what the intended endgame is. I’d argue this is of utmost importance in all areas of the press, but right now, it feels especially necessary for celebrity reporting. It’s a post-#MeToo world and any incremental progress we made in combatting industry-wide misogyny seems to have been sharply rolled back by the powers that be.

That brings me to two recent celebrity stories involving men accused of domestic violence, and the ways that both perpetrators’ camps are working overtime to spin recent headlines in their favour. Step forward, Johnny Depp and Jonathan Majors.

Let’s start with the latter. Majors, most recently seen on the big screen in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Creed III, was arrested in March of this year, accused of assault, strangulation, and harassment against a woman. Immediately, both Majors’ attorney, Priya Chaudhry, and TMZ went to work. As Chaudhry launched an offensive against the accuser, TMZ was one of the first publications to reveal the news of Majors’ arrest. Their headline: ‘Jonathan Majors Arrested for Assaulting Woman in NYC, He Denies It.’ The opening paragraph of the story noted the arrest and then immediately followed it with ‘but Jon’s team is calling BS.’ Note the familiarity there with the name ‘Jon’ and the need to have his denial in the headlines with as much weight as the accusation.

Later, they shared a video of Majors’ alleged victim seen ‘partying in new video from night in question’, and the implication is clear: how could she have been abused when, at this tiny point in her life, she seemed to be having fun? Other headlines prioritize his team calling the case a ‘witch hunt.’ The most recent TMZ piece on Majors claims that he’s dating Meagan Good, and this article is mostly padded out with Chaudhry’s supposed evidence. It’s essentially a puff piece for a man accused of putting his hands around a woman’s neck (something not mentioned in the piece, which only notes that Majors is accused of slapping her, as though that’s a minor oopsie rather than assault.)

It’s unsurprising how often TMZ is involved in this kind of spin. It seems to be their primary reason for being. Launched in 2005, the website was originally a collaboration with America Online and Telepictures, a subsidiary of Warner Bros., created with the goal of being an entertainment site to stand alongside the likes of Perez Hilton. Its co-creator Harvey Levin is a lawyer and the de facto face of the website, representing it on many news shows and fronting its still-running syndicated TV show. The selling point of TMZ is its rawness, its unfettered fetish and disdain for the industry it covers. As celebrity gossip softens in the post-Perez years, TMZ has remained consistently mean. Their intrusive tactics have garnered them much controversy over the years, from the aggressive chases their paparazzi inflict upon celebrities to the relentless misogyny directed towards women like Lindsay Lohan and Amber Heard. TMZ has also faced backlash for its irresponsible coverage of celebrity deaths. Their glorying in graphic details over the death of Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington went against the CDC’s guidelines for reporting on deaths by suicide. In 2020, dozens of former employees spoke to Buzzfeed about the racist and sexist workplace culture of TMZ.

All of this combines to reveal a couple of things: one, that TMZ is a hive of pure scum that puts ambulance chasers to shame with its tactics; and two, that its enduring status in the changing media landscape offers a blunt insight into the ways we consume celebrity culture. Nobody would ever admit to liking TMZ, yet they’ve retained this vague sheen of, for lack of a better word, reliability. Because they have landed enough exclusives for many to consider them journalistically accurate on some level, they’re able to wield a lot of power. And we see how that power is used. In the case of Jonathan Majors, it’s to soften the horrific nature of what he has been accused of. TMZ is notorious for doing this with crapbag men of all kinds, and Majors is but one extra string in their sizeable bow. There’s nothing surprising about them sowing the seeds of doubt in a domestic abuse case, then using a Black woman as an alleged abuser’s security blanket. TMZ operates under the guise of equal opportunity offence, but we all know what that looks like in execution: same old bigotry and the cruelty to go with it.

Then we come back to Johnny Depp, the accused wife-beater with a long and documented history of violence to his name. After dragging his ex-wife, Amber Heard, through a blatantly foul court system in the name of shredding her reputation, he’s trying to mount a comeback. I say ‘try’ because, while he’s hardly been ostracized from the business, he’s certainly not in Hollywood’s good graces. Years of being wildly overpaid and having a bad rep for on-set lateness and unpreparedness will hurt you way more than being accused of beating your wife, unfortunately. But he has a new film coming out, a historical biopic about Madame du Barry in which he’ll play King Louis XV. The film is directed by and stars Maïwenn, the former Mrs. Luc Besson, whom she began ‘dating’ when she was 12. This year, she admitted to assaulting a journalist.

The film will have its world premiere this week at the Cannes Film Festival, and Depp cultists are already cleaning up the Wikipedia page details, such as reports that Depp was a nightmare on set. There’s also no mention there of a recent Hollywood Reporter piece that detailed how the movie received post-production financing from the Red Sea Film Foundation, the Saudi Arabian film festival that’s run by the country’s royal family. That article also noted that the decision to fund this film was ‘weird’, and that Depp had formed connections with the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is accused of murder. Reporter Bradley Hope said that the two had become ‘very close friends’, which is always a good sign when the guy accused of beating his wife is BFFs with the man who the CIA said ordered the assassination and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi. Surely, this is the act of a true Southern gentleman.

The Depp cultists have already tried to spin Depp’s involvement with the Saudi dictatorship as some sort of act of artistic and feminist altruism, which is deranged even for them. But what fascinated me more was a recent news story, widely reported by the likes of Variety, regarding the accused wife-beater’s deal with the fashion house Dior. Recent news noted that he had re-signed with the company to be the face of its fragrance, Sauvage (or, at least his face from several years ago.) The framing against the Saudi Arabia news was obvious, a way to show that Depp is back on top and nothing can stop him, not even being pals with a guy who probably got someone killed. But this news? It isn’t new. This was previously reported last year, and received plenty of attention at the time. How could it not? Apparently Dior, the company that sells ‘We should all be feminists’ t-shirts for £690, is cool with putting an accused wife beater, who looks like he smells of cigarettes and low tide, on ads around your local pharmacy.

So, why is this news suddenly being reported as though it just happened? The timing is pretty interesting, right? My theory is that a certain has-been actor’s team got panicky over the Hollywood Reporter piece overshadowing the premiere of his so-called comeback film and they wanted to combat it. Plenty of publications definitely reported it as though it was breaking news. The Dior deal does, at the very least, note that hiring creeps with bad professional reputations who lost a libel case in the UK isn’t terrible for business. That’s a problem in and of itself (seriously, THAT’S the guy you want advertising your scent? The walking ashtray with seventeen unwashed scarves on him at any given time?) But it’s the media’s job to do more than copy-paste press releases. They should note the games being played here, especially since their tactics are painfully transparent.

The media has failed victims time and time again, often under the vague sheen of objectivity but also with their black hearts fully on their sleeves. We saw how too many vultures turned the Depp-Heard trial into a money-making assembly line of Etsy merchandise, memes, and reality TV-esque entertainment. This sort of spin helps to turn the public against victims, and not just those who are famous (although the way women like Heard, Megan Thee Stallion, Kesha, Angelina Jolie, and Evan Rachel Wood have become acceptable targets for mass misogyny in this realm is a revealing mirror of our wider world.) The Virginia trial set a grotesque precedent in terms of accused abusers being able to use the legal system to silence even the vaguest hints of accountability. It’s the media’s job to dig beyond the gloss, and it’s our job as consumers of the press to do more than accept what is presented to us as the truth.