Screenshot of headline saying Depp/Heard trial was 'the female Holocaust' is fake

08 June,2022 06:55 pm

(Reuters) An opinion piece in The Guardian newspaper about Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard was not headlined: “The Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial was the female Holocaust” as a screenshot circulating on social media showed. There is no evidence that this headline was ever published by The Guardian, and the author of the piece said that images showing such a headline were fake.

The Guardian published an opinion column by Moira Donegan on June 1 with the headline: “The Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial was an orgy of misogyny”. The piece said that public reactions to Heard were part of a backlash against feminism, that the outcome of the trial was unfair, and, as a result domestic abuse survivors will be discouraged from speaking about their experiences (here).

Donegan’s article on The Guardian’s website did not make any reference to The Holocaust and there was also no such reference on the date it was published, based on archives of the webpage captured that day (here).

Shortly after the piece appeared on The Guardian’s website, images of the article appeared online with an altered headline that described the trial as “the female holocaust” (here). Images of the fake headline were re-tweeted multiple times and shared on Twitter (here) and (here), and Facebook (here) (here) (here) (here) and (here).

The altered headline was also featured in a comic strip used to discredit feminism (here), (here) (here) (here).

Donegan tweeted about the images online, saying: “Someone photoshopped a fake headline for my piece about the Depp trial to make it look incendiary and dumb, and now it’s gone viral as fact and lots of credulous Depp supporters are yelling at me about it. Proving, of course, that they’re not at all susceptible to disinformation” (here).