Basically, in an eleventh hour attempt to muddy the waters and further distract people from the purpose of the trial, Johnny’s team latched onto a supposed relationship between Amber and TMZ during the divorce in 2016. Its relevance to the case or her allegations is little, but Depp cultists have made it their latest fixation as it would somehow prove all of her allegations were a “hoax” and that she made it all up for attention.
Needless to say, it’s a whole bunch of nothing, and it’s a pretty hilarious claim considering TMZ was practically running interference for Johnny’s legal team back then. His two lawyers during the divorce, Blair Berk and Laura Wasser, are close friends of Harvey Levin’s, the orange guy with the iced coffee who runs TMZ. I did a little tweeting about it last week. For those who don’t know how TMZ works or how celebrity lawyers influence its coverage, I wrote about it in-depth during the Bill Cosby trial in 2018 - in short, where most celebrity outlets are shaped by publicists, TMZ is shaped by lawyers, particularly ones friendly with Harvey. One of my favorite examples is when Paris Hilton went to jail in 2007. The media was clamoring for that final shot of Paris before she surrendered to the authorities, but TMZ was the one to get it. How? Consider this: just a month later, the daughter of Paris’ attorney Richard Hutton got a job at TMZ. That’s how Harvey operates.
In the case of Amber and Johnny, after Amber filed for divorce there was a spate of negative stories about her on the site that appeared to come straight from Johnny’s side. I covered a lot of them when I did my “Team Amber” mega-post that summer (it’s kind of funny, but mostly sad, going through that post now and seeing how little things have changed and how the same accusations keep coming up again and again). The most egregious example was probably when they ran a photo of her shopping at Tiffany’s, claiming it was from just a day after she filed for divorce, when it was really from a month earlier. When people found out, they scrubbed the story from their site.
They also were the first to break the story of Amber’s 2009 arrest, which presumably had been fed to them by Team Depp, as Johnny had told Amber’s dad he’d known about arrest in a text message just a week before the story broke. When Amber’s ex Tasya issued a statement saying Amber had never abused her and that, at the time, the arrest had felt “homophobic,” TMZ immediately countered by reporting one of the two arresting officers happens to be a lesbian (whether she was out at the time of the arrest, who knows). They were working overtime to kill her credibility. When the notorious text messages from Johnny’s assistant, Stephen Deuters, to Amber apologizing for Johnny’s assaulting her during a plane ride in 2014 were leaked by Entertainment Tonight, TMZ ran a statement from Deuters saying the messages were “doctored” and that the incident had never happened. However in a classic act of tabloid one-upmanship, People magazine then fired back by obtaining a statement from a forensics expert confirming the texts were real, and the messages would later become a crucial piece of evidence against Johnny during the U.K. trial in 2020. When Deuters testified during that trial, he insisted that he’d never even spoken to TMZ, despite them quoting him directly, and that the 2016 story was fake; of the texts, he said he’d only discussed them with Johnny’s divorce team - so either way the connection is obvious. In numerous taped conversations between Amber and Johnny after the divorce, Amber accuses Wasser (and one of Johnny’s other attorneys, Marty Singer, who I talk about in the Cosby post) of leaking stuff to the site and of TMZ being in Johnny’s “pocket.”
So with that said, accusing Amber of being the one in cahoots with them is almost mind-boggling in its projection, but that’s how Depp fans operate. Whatever he does, Amber’s guilty of ten times over. Their evidence of this supposed relationship includes:
- Amber saying during her deposition in the 2016 divorce case that she didn’t want Johnny to find out about her filing from TMZ, whom she said had been alerted.
- Amber texting her friend iO Tillett Wright that she didn’t cooperate with the police on May 21st, 2016, the night Johnny last assaulted her, because it would’ve gone “straight to tmz,” though adding it would “happen on Monday anyway” when she filed for divorce.
- Paparazzi waiting outside the courthouse when Amber sought her temporary restraining order against Johnny on May 27th, 2016.
- A video that was leaked to the site later that summer of Johnny smashing cabinets in a drunken rage.
- And the testimony of a former TMZ employee who was called as a last-minute witness by Team Depp to testify about Amber’s relationship with the site.
Sigh. Let’s break it down.
On the first count, I think it’s pretty clear to anyone not swept up by DeppAnon that Amber didn’t suffer some sort of Freudian slip by name-dropping TMZ in her deposition. She said she knew they’d been “alerted” - OK, and? What does that prove? If she’d tipped them off, like the Deppies claim, then why did it take several days from the time she filed for the divorce on May 23rd for TMZ to finally break the story on May 25th? What she likely meant in the video was she’d been informed that TMZ had found out about the divorce filing - given Johnny’s lawyers are connected to the website, and also due to the fact TMZ has informants at the courthouse, which I’ll elaborate on in a moment - and they were going to run the story. It’s as simple as that. She didn’t accidentally reveal her evil master plan.
As for the text to iO, it’s obvious that by Amber referencing TMZ, it was as a generic name for the media as a whole. Like saying Kleenex instead of a tissue. TMZ was the foremost celebrity gossip outlet at that time, so by her saying that the divorce would appear on TMZ, it’s the same as her saying it would appear in the media. And, again, if she’d really cooperated with TMZ, then why did it take them days before they picked up the story?
Now regarding the crush of cameras outside the courthouse when she got her TRO, it’s important to note one thing: They arrived after she’d already gotten there. They didn’t show up before, waiting for her; they only gathered once she’d been inside the courthouse and was about to leave. This is a significant detail as it fits with TMZ’s MO: what always set the site apart from other gossip outlets was its legal slant. From the time it first launched in 2005, Levin would station multiple employees at the L.A. courthouse to sift through public legal filings. Because of this, many of the stories on TMZ in its earlier years were raw legal documents (lawsuits, restraining orders, divorce filings, police records, etc.); before TMZ, Levin had an outlet completely dedicated to this sort of stuff called Celebrity Justice, which I talked more about in the Cosby post I shared earlier.
Levin and TMZ also have a relationship with courthouse clerks, who tip the site off about new filings and celebrity comings and goings. So with that considered, it makes perfect sense that cameras were waiting for Amber as she left the courthouse. What likely happened was that she’d shown up, a clerk or stationed TMZ underling spotted her, and then paged the others. It’s really that simple. As for the presence of Amber’s publicist, Jodi Gottlieb, who was with her that day, it’s important to note that Jodi was as much Amber’s friend as she was her flack; Amber had confided in Jodi about the abuse and even called her the night of the May 21st to ask her advice on what to do. So Gottlieb’s presence at the courthouse isn’t at all suspicious if you’re aware of the nature of their relationship.
Finally, the video. I do believe someone on Amber’s team leaked it, but whether Amber was aware is a different story. I assume she was. For those who haven’t seen the video, you can watch it in its entirety here. The version that appeared on TMZ was clipped short.
I say it’s likely Amber’s side leaked it because TMZ appears to own the copyright over the video, which means the original copyright owner - Amber - most likely agreed to pass over the rights to it (though not necessarily, as copyright law is complicated and there’s certain circumstances under which Amber’s permission wouldn’t have been needed to post the video, but still, let’s play with the leak theory). It’s then important to note when this leak happened: August 2016. Nearly three months after the negative coverage of her began on the website. So let’s put that into perspective: Johnny Depp, his team, and his fans are steaming mad at Amber for doing to Johnny what he’d been doing to her for months at that point. Like I said before, these people are masters of projection. It’s like when MAGA-heads would accuse Fox News of becoming liberal for running one unfavorable story about Trump out of a thousand puff pieces. Only when it’s the coverage they like is it OK and not a conspiracy!
Johnny’s attorney, the dollar store Elle Woods, grilled Amber about the video on the stand repeatedly. Amber insisted she wasn’t involved in the leak - and maybe she wasn’t. Maybe her lawyers were. Who knows. And it doesn’t matter, since as I noted, the video was leaked three months after his side had begun the barrage of bad press against her - mislabeling paparazzi photos, dredging up her past arrest, casting doubt on the legitimate text messages proving her abuse, and quoting unnamed sources that insisted Amber was lying. Amber could’ve done a press conference in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard showing off her bruises and it wouldn’t have changed the fact that he threw the first stone, and kept throwing them for nearly three months straight. But, of course, on the stand Amber didtestify to what I said earlier: Johnny’s side had the TMZ hookup; Johnny’s side had Laura Wasser. But that fell on deaf ears, naturally.
But to milk their latest conspiracy a little more, Team Depp wheeled out a guy named Morgan Tremaine last week to testify about Amber’s supposed link to the site. Tremaine worked for TMZ for several years as a field reporter and says that he’d emailed Johnny’s lawyers the week prior about wanting to testify after he’d heard TMZ was being discussed at the trial. When he got on the stand last week I asked a few of my ex-TMZ acquaintances for his story, and it was pretty much what you’d expect. He has more than a few things in common with Johnny, I’ll leave it at that. When Tremaine was first reported to be testifying, TMZ tried to stop him, pointing out that not only would he be violating his strict non-disclosure agreement with the website, but also noting that he’d had no personal involvement in some of the stories involving Amber, despite his testifying otherwise.
Maybe they only said that to minimize what he had to say. Or maybe it’s true. That’s anyone’s guess. But there’s no clear proof beyond his word that he actually worked on any of the stories involving Amber, and his word is dodgy at best: in his testimony, he claimed TMZ had been specially tipped off to photograph Amber at the courthouse when she got the restraining order, insinuating that it was someone from Amber’s side who did it. He doesn’t say who, just that there was a tip, and made a point of saying the courthouse isn’t a “celebrity hotspot” crawling with cameras, thus suggesting someone from Amber’s side must’ve tipped them off - which, as I explained earlier, is a flat lie. TMZ has people there around the clock, and anyone who works there would know that, but he and Team Depp were likely counting on the average person to be clueless to that fact.
The next Amber-related assignment he said he worked on was dispatching paparazzi to get her arriving to a divorce deposition at a law office in August 2016, almost three months later (I guess we’re just supposed to ignore all the negative stories about Amber on TMZ in that three-month gap), but what he leaves out is whose office it was - Laura Wasser’s- and the tone of the story in question: it was negative.
So let’s sit with that for a minute: Team Depp essentially trotted this guy out to recount a time that Johnny’s side had probably tipped off TMZ, but omits the names and details so it sounds to the average person watching the trial that Amber was the one calling the paps.
Honestly, Amber’s team should’ve just called me to the stand. Are “TMZ experts” a thing? Since I would’ve ripped this wannabe Kato a new one.
Afterwards he talked about the kitchen cabinet video - he said it was sent via a Dropbox link and that they posted it to the site 15 minutes later. Amber’s lawyers would try to counter this in their closing arguments by pointing out she’d been on a plane when the video was emailed and published, but that doesn’t mean much since someone else from her team could’ve leaked it. It didn’t need to be Amber herself. Tremaine also claimed he was instructed to dispatch cameras the next day to Wasser’s office again to catch Amber, and once again he omitted the key detail that it was Wasser’s office. Isn’t that funny? Here’s a link to that story. He also denied that Johnny’s team had ever sent him tips - emphasis on him, not the site.
So that’s pretty much it. There’s no smoking gun. Nada. Just the delusions of a cult and the unreliable word of a blonde-haired Twitch-streaming twink fished out of a gutter in West Hollywood. Unfortunately the average person following the case doesn’t understand how celebrity gossip and the tabloids work, so they’ll take these conspiracies and half-truths as gospel. And Amber’s lawyer Elaine was right about Tremaine wanting his fifteen minutes of fame - he’s since taken to Twitter and TikTok to share memes of his testimony. I just hope the eventual legal bills are worth it. I’ll gladly look the other way this one time if Harvey wants to sue this guy into oblivion.
(I also have a pet theory that the gossip site The Blast put Tremaine up to testifying, but that’s peeling back a whole other layer of gossip industry machinations that’ll probably be boring to you guys.)