Depp sued Amber in 2019 after she wrote a 2018 article about domestic abuse, which his legal team argued implied he was an abuser, even though she didn’t name him. (In 2020, he lost a separate libel case in the UK against tabloid The Sun, which had called him a “wife beater.”) Depp denied Amber’s allegations, and in 2022, a jury ruled that Amber had defamed him, ordering her to pay $15 million in damages.
Rihanna faced backlash for casting Depp in the show, with some people calling her “out of touch.”