Who won and who lost in the sensational trial between ex-husbands Amber Heard and Johnny Depp is not only measured by the verdict of the seven-member jury made up of five men and two women.

The jury found that Amber Heard maliciously lied in a 2018 Washington Post article in which she described herself as a "domestic violence victim" and thereby implicitly accused Depp;

but also that Depp's lawyer Adam Waldman slandered Heard by claiming that Heard staged an assault by Depp for the police who had been called to help.

The judges judged differentiated - unlike the crowd that has formed in the past six weeks on the net.

"Johnny wins!" is the simple motto here, and: "Adios, Amber!"

Thanks to Judge Penney Azcarate's decision to allow two Court TV cameras in Fairfax County Circuit Court, Virginia, not only did truth-finding efforts in the Virginia courtroom become a PR spectacle for highly paid legal teams on both sides.

On social media, the live footage ignited a hysterical tribunal in which the roles of hero and villain were clearly assigned, where any new revelation of the mutual torment of two emotionally unstable people turned into demeaning memes, sardonic comments, nasty mini- video skits and nefarious rumours.

The spite and slurs were almost entirely directed at Amber Heard - as if MeToo never happened,

Ratings, Likes and Tweets

The trial of a serious allegation - that of physical and sexual violence - turned into a grotesque circus of ratings, likes and retweets: The tiny cable network "Law & Crime" Network, which also broadcast the images from Court TV, registered a record rating of 1,000,000 when the verdict was announced three million viewers, on Tiktok the hashtag #JusticeForJohnnyDepp recorded more than nineteen billion clicks for the malice circulating here about Amber Heard, which is based on new audio and video recordings from the courtroom.

Judge Penney Azcarate, whose camera-friendliness helped fuel the hype, may have instructed the jury to stay away from any coverage of the case — but how realistic is that in the world we live in?

How do five men and two women between the ages of twenty and sixty years (the exact identities of the jurors remain confidential for twelve months) switch off the media circus, radio and television, social networks, the Internet and the conversations at the breakfast table at home, over a period of six weeks, dominated in the supermarket and in the subway?

You'd have to live in a cave not to notice it.

The "Washington Post" explains why Depp may have lost a defamation lawsuit in England in 2020 against the English "Sun", which had described him as a "wife beater", and is now winning with his defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard: The British trial was decided by a judge who found the allegations made by the newspaper to be “proven” in 12 out of 14 cases.

At the American trial, the verdict was delivered by an impartial truth-telling jury who, while instructed not to read the trial, were not isolated.

The hearing of the mutual defamation lawsuits by Johnny Depp and Amber Heard reflects the rapidly shrinking capacity of Americans for important social debates, and it sets new standards of debate.

Networks like Tiktok and Twitter won, on which mockery and ridicule and disinformation led to enormous user engagement;

opportunistic publications such as the Daily Wire, which lured users to its sites with anti-amber commercials;

and the growing horde of online disinformation dealers, who once again found fertile ground for wild conspiracy theories.

A society has lost if it is no longer able to deal seriously with important issues.