Every once in a while, a celebrity legal trial captivates the nation in unprecedented ways. For one generation, it was O.J. Simpson’s televised trial, which decades later was turned into a ratings-grabbing FX series. And lately, the legal squabble between Pirates of the Caribbean superstar Johnny Depp and Aquaman star Amber Heard generated endless amounts of commentary, news stories, and social media buzz. For a long period of time, it felt like you couldn’t turn anywhere without seeing some type of coverage – real and satirical – regarding the ongoing Depp-Heard trial, but that buzz never really reached the people involved in the case.
Johnny Depp’s attorneys, Benjamin Chew and Camille Vasquez, sat down for an interview with the Beverly Hills Bar Association, during which they addressed the amount of noise raised by the trial, and whether or not it impacted the way that things eventually played out. If they are to be believed, the buzz around the trial didn’t impact them very much at all, with Vasquez saying:
We really lived in a bubble during the trial. We had [every] reason to believe the jury acted in the same way. We had a job to do. We had very little time to do much of anything but work. That time that we did have it was to sleep. We started noticing this was taking a life of its own probably midway through the trial.
Almost every aspect of the trial existed under a microscope, from Johnny Depp’s reaction to seemingly ridiculous questions to Amber Heard’s testimony about Depp having to sell his boat. Even after the verdict was announced, Heard’s legal team immediately filed an appeal, which had legal analysts questioning if that was the right move moving forward.
There was a moment, though, when Camille Vasquez admits that the public’s interest in their ongoing trial started to permeate the bubble that she spoke of, and it happened over the most mundane of activities. Vasquez explained:
I went to grab a coffee one morning over the weekend and this sweet, young girl with like braces, you know, said my name and handed me my coffee and she looked at me and [gaped] in like the cutest way. And I thought, ‘Oh god, do I have something on my face?’ And then she said, ‘You’re Johnny Depp’s lawyer.’ And I was like, ‘How do you know that?’ But no, it really didn’t play a role in our strategy at all.
That’s definitely one of the repercussions of an extremely public trial such as the Depp-Heard brouhaha. You can’t keep the white-hot spotlight off of the case. You just have to assume that the jurors deciding the case aren’t impacted by anything they are hearing. Especially when so many of them revolved around Johnny Depp and Camille Vasquez, and whether or not they were involved in a romantic relationship. There was even continued buzz when the two reunited at a rock concert.
Perhaps they were continuing to lay out his legal defenses? Just stay off of social media, kids. You are still generating headlines, memes and TikToks, and it likely won’t slow down any time soon.