HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES

An investigation of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s litigious split, encompassing assault accusations, “Poopgate,” Elon Musk, and more.

Celeb watchers spent the spring of 2022 enraptured by Depp v. Heard, in which the Pirates of the Caribbean star sued his ex-wife for alleged defamation in a Washington Post op-ed she wrote about sexual assault. Loudenberg and Wholey’s report on the events leading to that trial was a documentary project before it was a book, and the two have a gift for scene-setting, from their subjects’ whirlwind romance on the set of an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel The Rum Diary, which Depp produced, to drug-fueled jaunts, to physical violence. To escape this “toxic roundabout of fighting and making up,” they divorced in 2016 after slightly more than a year of marriage. But the aftereffects of their relationship lingered: Did Heard really cut off part of Depp’s finger with a vodka bottle? Did Depp rape her? How did Musk insinuate himself into Heard’s life? Who left a pile of feces in Depp’s bed? It’s all unseemly stuff, but the authors go to ground on the mess, covering everything from inside Depp and Heard’s respective legal war rooms to a homeless man’s reward for returning Depp’s phone, which Heard allegedly threw out a window (“$420, chicken tacos, chips, apples, and Fiji water”). The authors had more access to Depp than Heard, and the book does take a slightly Team Johnny bias, reflecting Depp’s win in the 2022 trial (though he lost a similar suit in 2020 in a U.K. court). Loudenberg and Wholey feign disgust with the whole affair, but the riffs on Jean Baudrillard’s brainy media critiques and the garment rending over women’s freedoms would be more persuasive in a book that didn’t dive so eagerly into the deep end of the celebrity gossip sludge pit.

Thoroughly lurid.