Courtney Love has chimed in on the ongoing Depp v Heard trial

“I don’t really wanna make judgements publicly,” Courtney Love begins. “I just wanna tell you that Johnny gave me CPR in 1995 when I overdosed outside The Viper Room.”

In a video posted to @houseinhabit, an Instagram account run by Jessica Reed Kraus, the singer-songwriter spoke about Johnny Depp’s impact on both her own life, and that of her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.

Love goes on to say that while she was struggling with substance abuse issues, the daughter she shared with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was forced to struggle through the experience surrounded by social workers.

Revealing that Depp wrote Frances a four-page letter that Love still hasn’t seen, she also says that the actor sent limos to her school to bring her and some friends to see Pirates of the Caribbean, and that her daughter has told her more than once that he saved her life.

In addition to sharing her own personal experiences with the actor, Love advocates for compassion to be shown to Amber Heard. “I’ve been the most hated woman in America,” she says. “I’ve been the most hated woman in the world before TikTok, and I have a lot of empathy for what that must feel like for Amber. F*ck, man, can you imagine being her?”

However, she immediately follows up with a statement aimed at Heard: “If you use a movement for your own personal gain, and you inhabit queer feminist intersectional spaces and you abuse that moment… then, I hope justice will be served, whatever it is.

“I think we should have less schadenfreude and more empathy for all concerned,” the Celebrity Skin singer says. A pretty apt term to describe the public response to the ongoing Depp v Heard defamation trial, schadenfreude refers to the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.

Finishing up by saying that “it’s not like anyone asked for [her] opinion.” Courtney Love has since taken to her own Instagram account to clear a few things up after expressing these thoughts online.

“Was [the post] my own (granted, massive, a character defect, ego?) Was it a genuine expression of support for someone who’s been a wondrous presence in our lives? Is it ANY OF MY F*CKING BUSINESS? No.”

In her caption, Love writes that she recorded the videos to “show neutral support for a friend” without intent to bully. “I did not want to express my own bias / internalized mysoginy (sic) … I want nothing to do with contributing more online bullying to someone enduring being bullied like noone ever has been online. Ever.”

Citing a teaching from her recovery programme that says ‘when we were wrong, we promptly admitted it’, she ends her post with an apology for those she may have hurt and expression of sincere empathy for both parties concerned.

Jessica Reed Kraus, who runs the Instagram account the original statement was posted on, has since elaborated on her stories, saying that “Courtney knows a lot of Johnny’s friends are watching and tuning in, and she felt like it was the right audience to direct a message.”

The @houseinhabit account is said to provide an alternative pop culture narrative, and has been covering this celebrity defamation trial extensively, though quite one-sidedly.

Weaving together public information gleaned from the court reports with theories and information from undisclosed sources, the account previously posted that the aim surrounding her coverage was to open up a “space to let the good stories and the voices of real people shape the tale”.

Regardless of Courtney Love’s attempt to provide an off-the-record character witness for Johnny Depp, the account has since been either deleted by the owner, or suspended by the platform.

While the internet bubbles over with hot takes, extreme bias and outcome predictions, it is ultimately down to the jury members gathered in Fairfax County Circuit Court to reach a final verdict.