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      Johnny Depp’s Win in Court Could Embolden Others, Lawyers Say

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      The actor’s victory against his ex-wife Amber Heard in one of the highest profile defamation cases to go to trial could inspire others to try their luck with juries.As the #MeToo movement fueled a public airing of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, defamation lawsuits quickly became a tool for both the accused and accusers to seek retribution and redemption.Men accused of misconduct have increasingly turned to defamation suits to try to clear their names, as have victims accused of making false allegations. But between the high costs of lawyers’ fees and the fears of revealing embarrassing details in open court, many such cases are settled before they ever reach trial.The bitter legal battle between the actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard was closely watched in part because it was one of the highest-profile defamation cases to make it to trial recently, and several lawyers said that Mr. Depp’s victory in a Virginia court on Wednesday — when he was awarded more than $10 million in damages — could embolden others accused of abuse or misconduct to try their luck with juries, despite the real risks of airing dirty laundry in public.Ugly charges of physical abuse and lurid testimony came to define the Depp-Heard trial, which included one line of questioning about actual dirty laundry: the couple’s fierce argument over how the sheets in a Los Angeles penthouse where they were staying had become befouled. But the jury found in the end that Ms. Heard had defamed Mr. Depp in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”“Some people will definitely look at this as a playbook for suing your accuser,” said Charles Tobin, a First Amendment lawyer who practices in Fairfax, Va., where the trial played out over six weeks, and who briefly represented the former employer of a witness called in the Depp case. The proceedings were broadcast and livestreamed far beyond the walls of the courtroom.The $10.35 million award to Mr. Depp was offset by a $2 million partial victory for Ms. Heard, who countersued Mr. Depp for defamation after a lawyer representing him made several statements to a British tabloid calling her abuse accusations a “hoax.” The jury did not find two of those statements defamatory, but found that a third — in which the lawyer had accused Ms. Heard of damaging the couple’s penthouse and calling 911 “to set Mr. Depp up” — did defame her.Mr. Depp praised the verdict, saying that “the jury gave me my life back,” while Ms. Heard described it as “heartbreaking.”The outcome differed from that of a case in Britain, where a judge had ruled two years ago that there was evidence that Mr. Depp had repeatedly assaulted Ms. Heard. That ruling came in a libel suit that Mr. Depp had filed after The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. While Britain is sometimes considered hospitable to libel cases, the judge who heard that case, Andrew Nicol, found that there was sufficient proof to conclude that most of the assaults Ms. Heard described had occurred, and he determined that what the newspaper had published was “substantially true.”Several high-profile defamation cases in recent years have been settled before they reached trial. In 2019, seven women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, and then sued him for defamation after they were accused of lying, settled their claims; a spokesman for Mr. Cosby said that his insurance company had decided to settle the cases without his consent. And the casino mogul Steve Wynn recently agreed to a settlement of a defamation suit he had filed against the lawyer Lisa Bloom, who said she would retract a statement accusing him of inappropriate behavior involving a client.In the wake of the Depp verdict, several lawyers and legal experts said, people accused of assault and misconduct may now be more inclined to try to bring defamation cases to trial. And some advocacy organizations and lawyers worry that the case could have a chilling effect on the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, adding to their fears that they could be punished for speaking out.“I do think that well-resourced individuals who feel slighted by speech that embarrassed or criticized them in some way may feel emboldened by this verdict,” said Nicole Ligon, a First Amendment law professor who provides pro bono legal advice for people considering going public with sexual misconduct accusations. “I imagine part of the reason they’ll feel emboldened is beyond the verdict itself but the public reaction to it.”The trial was captured by two cameras in the courtroom that allowed the testimony to be packaged into memes and online commentary — much of which mocked Ms. Heard’s accusations of abuse. In an interview with NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, said that the cameras had turned the trial into a “zoo.”Before the trial, Ms. Bredehoft had sought to persuade the judge to block cameras from the courtroom, arguing that Ms. Heard would be describing incidents of alleged sexual violence and predicting that “anti-Amber” networks would take statements out of context and play them repeatedly.“The potential for saturation of an unsequestered jury is a tremendous risk in this case,” Ms. Bredehoft argued, according to a court transcript from February.Judge Penney S. Azcarate ordered that cameras be allowed, maintaining that Ms. Bredehoft’s argument about victims of sexual offenses would only pertain to criminal trials. The judge suggested that allowing cameras could make the make the courthouse “safer” by giving a broader audience of viewers access to the case remotely.Mr. Depp may have won a victory in court, but it may take more than that to revive his career, or for Walt Disney Studios, which has cast Mr. Depp in several starring roles, to get back into business with him.The studio declined to comment, but two Disney executives privately pointed to his box office track record as the primary reason: None of his Disney movies have succeeded outside of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise since “Alice in Wonderland” in 2010. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a misfire in 2016, taking in 70 percent less than its predecessor worldwide. “The Lone Ranger” was a big-budget bomb in 2013. Except as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates” films, he has not been a box office draw recently.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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      Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Verdict: The Actual Malice of the Trial

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      In this post-#MeToo moment, misogyny and celebrity go hand in hand.The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial was, from gavel to gavel, a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle. Now that it has ended with the jury finding in favor of Depp on all questions and in favor of Heard on only one, it’s clear that the confusion was the point.Why did Depp, who had already lost a similar case in Britain, insist on going back to court? A public trial, during which allegations of physical, sexual, emotional and substance abuse against him were sure to be repeated, couldn’t be counted on to restore his reputation. Heard, his ex-wife, was counting on the opposite: that the world would hear, in detail, about the physical torments that led her to describe herself, in the Washington Post op-ed that led to the suit, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”Even before the verdict came in, Depp had already won. What had looked to many like a clear-cut case of domestic violence had devolved into a “both sides” melodrama. The fact that Heard’s partial victory, which involved not Depp’s words but those spoken in 2020 by Adam Waldman, his lawyer at the time, can be spun in that direction shows how such ambiguity served Depp all along. As one commenter on The New York Times site put it, “Every relationship has its troubles.” Life is complicated. Maybe they were both abusive. Who really knows what happened? The convention of courtroom journalism is to make a scruple of indeterminacy. And so we found ourselves in the familiar land of he said/she said.The Depp-Heard trial was a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle, both inside the courtroom and out. Craig Hudson/Associated PressWe should know by now that the symmetry implied by that phrase is an ideological fiction, that women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault have a much harder time being listened to than their assailants. I don’t mean that women always tell the truth, that men are always guilty as charged, or that due process isn’t the bedrock of justice. But Depp-Heard wasn’t a criminal trial; it was a civil action intended to measure the reputational harm each one claimed the other had done. Which means that it rested less on facts than on sympathies.In that regard, Depp possessed distinct advantages. He isn’t a better actor than Heard, but her conduct on the stand was more harshly criticized in no small part because he’s a more familiar performer, a bigger star who has dwelled for much longer in the glow of public approbation. He brought with him into the courtroom the well-known characters he has played, a virtual entourage of lovable rogues, misunderstood artists and gonzo rebels. He’s Edward Scissorhands, Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, Gilbert Grape.We’ve seen him mischievous and mercurial, but never truly menacing. He’s someone we’ve watched grow up, from juvenile heartthrob on “21 Jump Street” to crusty old salt in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. His offscreen peccadilloes (the drinking, the drugs, the “Winona Forever” tattoo) have been part of the pop-cultural background noise for much of that time, classified along with the scandals and shenanigans that have been a Hollywood sideshow since the silent era.Depp is someone audiences have watched grow up onscreen, in movies like (clockwise from top left) “Edward Scissorhands,” “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”Clockwise from top left: 20th Century Studios; Paramount Pictures, via RGR Collection/Alamy; Universal Pictures, via TCD and Prod.DB/Alamy; Disney, via Moviestore Collection Ltd/AlamyIn his testimony, Depp copped to some bad stuff, but this too was a play for sympathy, of a piece with the charm and courtliness he was at pains to display. That he came off as a guy unable to control his temper or his appetites was seen, by many of the most vocal social media users, to enhance his credibility, while Heard’s every tear or gesture was taken to undermine hers. The audience was primed to accept him as flawed, vulnerable, human, and to view her as monstrous.Because he’s a man. Celebrity and masculinity confer mutually reinforcing advantages. Famous men — athletes, actors, musicians, politicians — get to be that way partly because they represent what other men aspire to be. Defending their prerogatives is a way of protecting, and asserting, our own. We want them to be bad boys, to break the rules and get away with it. Their seigneurial right to sexual gratification is something the rest of us might resent, envy or disapprove of, but we rarely challenge it. These guys are cool. They do what they want, including to women. Anyone who objects is guilty of wokeness, or gender treason, or actual malice.Of course there are exceptions. In the #MeToo era there are men who have gone to jail, lost their jobs or suffered disgrace because of the way they’ve treated women. The fall of certain prominent men — Harvey Weinstein, Leslie Moonves, Matt Lauer — was often welcomed as a sign that a status quo that sheltered, enabled and celebrated predators, rapists and harassers was at last changing.A few years later, it seems more likely that they were sacrificed not to end that system of entitlement but rather to preserve it. Almost as soon as the supposed reckoning began there were complaints that it had gone too far, that nuances were being neglected and too-harsh punishments meted out.This backlash has been folded into a larger discourse about “cancel culture,” which is often less about actions than words. “Cancellation” is now synonymous with any criticism that invokes racial insensitivity, sexual misbehavior or controversial opinions. Creeps are treated as martyrs, and every loudmouth is a free-speech warrior. Famous men with lucrative sinecures on cable news, streaming platforms and legacy print publications can proclaim themselves victims.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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      in Television

      What to Know About Bill Cosby’s Civil Trial on Sexual Assault Accusation

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      Ms. Huth has sued Mr. Cosby, asserting that he sexually assaulted her in the 1970s when she was a teenager.Bill Cosby is being sued by Judy Huth in civil court in Los Angeles. The trial started Wednesday after a jury was selected last week.Ms. Huth has accused Mr. Cosby, 84, of sexually assaulting her as a teenager and sued him in 2014. But the civil suit was largely put on hold while Mr. Cosby was being criminally prosecuted in another case where he was accused of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand.Mr. Cosby’s criminal conviction in the Constand case in Pennsylvania was overturned last year by an appellate court, and he was freed from prison.Ms. Huth’s case is being followed by some of the many women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual misconduct, in part because it is the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial.Mr. Cosby has denied sexually abusing Ms. Huth and the other women who have made that accusation against him, suggesting any sexual encounters were consensual.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has now reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.What does Ms. Huth say happened?In court papers, Ms. Huth says that she and a friend met Mr. Cosby in 1975 when they wandered onto a movie set in a park in San Marino, Calif., where Mr. Cosby was shooting a film.Days later, at his invitation, they went to his tennis club, she says in court papers, where he gave her and her friend alcohol before taking them to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. There, Ms. Huth says in her lawsuit, he forced her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom. She says Mr. Cosby tried to put his hand down her pants and then forced her to fondle him.What does Mr. Cosby say?Mr. Cosby acknowledges meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion but denies her allegation of sexual battery and has challenged her contention that she was a minor at the time.His lawyers have pointed out in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection regarding when the encounter occurred has changed. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16, according to court papers. The law in California, then and now, holds that a 16-year-old is classified as a minor, but Mr. Cosby has contended that he did not meet Ms. Huth until several years later.Why is this a civil trial?In 2014, when she filed the civil case, Ms. Huth also reported her accusation to the police. But the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.Ms. Huth was able to file a lawsuit because under California law, in some cases, the statute of limitations can be extended for adults who contend they were victims of sexual abuse as children but repressed the experience.In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil court.Is Mr. Cosby facing other civil suits?The civil case is one of the last unsettled lawsuits against Mr. Cosby.He has already faced multiple other civil cases filed against him by women, many of whom sued him for defamation after his legal team dismissed as fictions their accusations of sexual misconduct by him. Eleven civil cases ended in settlements, with 10 of the settlements having been agreed to by Mr. Cosby’s former insurance company over his objections, according to his spokesman.Mr. Cosby also settled a civil case Ms. Constand brought against him in 2006 for $3.4 million.One other ongoing civil case was filed last year by Lili Bernard, an actor and visual artist, who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Atlantic City in 1990, when she was 26. Mr. Cosby has denied her account. The Bernard case is still in its early stages.Why was Mr. Cosby released from prison?Mr. Cosby was found guilty in 2018 of drugging and sexually assaulting another woman, Andrea Constand, at his home near Philadelphia and was given a three to 10 year sentence in state prison.But that conviction was overturned last year on due process grounds. An appeals court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case.How does this civil case differ from the criminal case?In this civil case in Los Angeles Superior Court, the burden of proof is lower than in a criminal trial. It will be in front of a 12-person jury, with at least nine of 12 votes needed for a verdict. It is expected to last seven to 10 days. Ms. Huth is seeking damages.Mr. Cosby has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify and will not attend the trial, his spokesman has said. Ms. Huth is expected to testify, as is the friend who she has said accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion in 1975. More

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      in Music

      New Effort Aims to Bring More Contemporary Music to Orchestras

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      An initiative by the League of American Orchestras will enlist 30 ensembles to perform works by six living composers, all of them women.Many orchestras, eager to demonstrate a commitment to contemporary music, have taken pride in programming works by living composers in recent years. But when the glamour of the premiere fades, many of those works all but disappear from the standard repertoire, rarely to be performed again.Now a group of nonprofit leaders is working to make new music a more permanent part of the artistic landscape. The League of American Orchestras on Thursday announced an initiative that will enlist 30 ensembles over the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women.“There’s too much great music that gets lost and is never heard after its premiere,” Simon Woods, the league’s president and chief executive, said in an interview. “We thought, ‘We need to solve that.’”While many orchestras are eager for the prestige of commissioning new works, Woods said they are not as focused on playing pieces that have premiered elsewhere.“Orchestras should be patrons of new work,” he said. “But still, the second performance and the third performance are really important. Because it’s only when one hears a work a few times that it sort of snowballs and it has a chance of getting a toehold in the repertoire. Building that momentum is really important.”The League, in partnership with the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and American Composers Orchestra, has been working since 2014 to bring more diversity to orchestral programming, including awarding commissions to female and nonbinary composers.The initiative announced on Thursday will build on those efforts, pairing each of the six composers with five ensembles. The program, which will cost at least $360,000, will be financed by the Toulmin foundation.The six composers are the British-born Anna Clyne, who works in the United States; Sarah Gibson, who is also a pianist; the Hong Kong-born Angel Lam; Gity Razaz, an Iranian American; Arlene Sierra, an American based in London; and Wang Lu, a China-born composer and pianist, who lives in Providence, R.I.Wang said in an interview that it was often difficult for contemporary composers to find orchestras interested in playing new works after they have premiered.“As a composer, I can’t just like knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, this is my music, why don’t you play it?’” she said.Wang, who is working on a new piece that the New York Philharmonic is to premiere in January, said the league’s initiative would give artists more opportunities to develop. “You can only get better by working with orchestras,” she said in an interview. “Only by listening can you improve.”The initial group of orchestras taking part are the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Kansas City Symphony and the Sarasota Orchestra. Those ensembles will begin to premiere and perform the works by the composers next season.In the coming months, the league will choose the remaining 24 ensembles that will take part in the program. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Fanny: The Right to Rock’ Review: Still Kicking

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      Started by two Filipino American sisters in California, the influential band is claiming its rightful rank in rock ’n’ roll history.Jean and June Millington, Filipino American sisters and lifelong bandmates best known for their 1970s rock band Fanny, have over 50 years of history in the music industry to reflect on in the documentary “Fanny: The Right To Rock.”When Fanny was signed to a recording contract in 1970, there was no one in rock music quite like them. Though the group’s lineup has had several iterations, all its members have been women, and two — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians. Their musical chops earned them gigs at venues like Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, where they won the respect of musicians like David Bowie, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Bag and Cherie Currie of the Runaways.The group disbanded in 1975, but three original members — the sisters June and Jean (Millington) Adamian, and Brie Darling — reunited for an album, “Fanny Walked the Earth,” released in 2018. The thought of the group’s struggles brings a smile to Jean’s face in the movie. “We dealt with the prejudice against girls and feminism, and June says, now we’re bucking ageism!”The director Bobbi Jo Hart decided to show the group’s story through a combination of archival footage and present-day interviews with band members and their famous fans. The film’s most novel sequences come when Hart joins the band for recording sessions for their 2018 album, and finds that even if the voices warble a bit more than they did in the screaming days of youth, Fanny’s sound remains heavy. But the conventional vérité footage doesn’t add new depth to the guitar licks and improvisations, the signals of musicianship that make Fanny feel artistically vital as white-haired rockers. What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.Fanny: The Right to RockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      New York Theater Workshop Names Patricia McGregor as Artistic Director

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      The freelance director will succeed James Nicola, who has led the Off Broadway nonprofit since 1988.Patricia McGregor, a freelance director who has worked Off Broadway and around the country, has been named the next artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, a midsize nonprofit with an outsize track record of producing important work.McGregor, 44, will succeed James C. Nicola, who has served as the theater’s artistic director since 1988. Nicola, 71, announced last year that he would step down this summer; he is being honored next month with a special Tony Award in recognition of his successful tenure.New York Theater Workshop, founded in 1979 and located in the East Village, has a long track record of discovering, developing and supporting new plays and musicals, but it will forever be known as the birthplace of one huge hit, “Rent,” which opened there in 1996 and, after transferring to Broadway, spun off royalties for years that helped the theater flourish.The theater has had several other notable Broadway transfers, including the Tony-winning musicals “Once” and “Hadestown,” as well as the acclaimed plays “Slave Play” and “What the Constitution Means to Me.” It has also staged a large volume of adventurous work that has remained downtown; among the artists who have worked there often are the writers Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill and Mfoniso Udofia and the directors Ivo van Hove, Sam Gold, Lileana Blain-Cruz and Rachel Chavkin. (Chavkin was one of two leaders of the artistic director search committee.)McGregor has been affiliated with New York Theater Workshop as a “usual suspect,” which is the theater’s term for artists with whom it maintains an ongoing connection. She plans to assume the artistic director position in August; Nicola has programmed next season, including revivals of “Merrily We Roll Along” starring Daniel Radcliffe and “Three Sisters” starring Greta Gerwig and Oscar Isaac. McGregor will choose the programming starting in the fall of 2023.And what will her programming look like? “Visceral, relevant, challenging, joyful, delightful,” she said. “And really looking at fusions of form.”Her directing career has focused on new American plays, but she said she also has an affection for classics (she directed a mobile unit production of “Hamlet” for the Public Theater in 2016) and musicals (she worked as an associate director of “Fela!” on Broadway). Among her New York credits was a 2012 production of Katori Hall’s “Hurt Village” at Signature Theater; she is currently finishing work on three projects, including an oratorio about gentrification, called “Place,” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Old Globe in San Diego, and her first feature film, “1660 Vine,” about social media influencers.McGregor was born in St. Croix, the largest of the United States Virgin Islands, and moved frequently as a child, living in Hawaii, California, Illinois and Florida. Her father, who is from St. Croix, is a fisherman and engineer who served in the Navy, and her mother, born in England, is an artist, teacher and union organizer; when she assumes her new role McGregor will become one of only a handful of Black women serving as artistic directors of nonprofit theaters in New York City.“I have a pretty broad range of lived experiences racially, economically and geographically,” she said. “I think a lot about the Workshop being both hyperlocal in its roots and international in its reach, and that feels very aligned with my lived experience and appetite to know about and engage with the world.”McGregor said she embraced theater as a middle school student in Florida, where she first encountered Shakespeare in a theater class. “I loved it,” she said. “I had seen a production of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in this terrible-acoustics auditorium, and there was something both athletic and magical. I said, ‘I can tap into this.’”She studied theater at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and then studied directing at the Yale School of Drama. She lived in New York off and on for 16 years; she has spent the last seven years in California, and now lives in San Diego, where her husband, Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, is an associate artistic director at the Old Globe; they have two young children.Working with her sister, Paloma, she co-founded an organization called Angela’s Pulse to produce performance work that highlights stories about Black people. She has also worked with Arts in the Armed Forces, an organization founded by the actors Adam Driver and Joanne Tucker.“My mom said, ‘What tools do you have to build the world that you want?’” she said in an interview. “And the tool that I have is being an artist and being a community builder through art.”New York Theater Workshop has a staff of about 45 people and an annual budget projected at $10 million next year. The organization has three buildings on East 4th Street, including a 199-seat mainstage theater and a smaller venue that can accommodate up to 74 patrons.McGregor said she views the leadership transition as a “baton pass,” noting that she already knows many people who work at the organization. She said among her priorities will be broadening the theater’s audience. “If there’s one thing I want to revolutionize, it’s that point of accessibility and welcoming,” she said. “It’s not a quick ‘We send you a flier and you come to the show.’ It’s a long-term process.” More

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      in Movies

      The All-Female Band Fanny Made History. A New Doc Illuminates It.

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      The group put out five albums in the ’70s and counted David Bowie and Bonnie Raitt as fans. The filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart, dismayed its story hadn’t been told, took action.In spring 2015, the documentary filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart was clicking around the Taylor Guitars website, looking for a new instrument for her 10-year-old daughter, when she came across a short profile of June Millington, the singer and lead guitarist for the pioneering 1970s all-female rock group Fanny.Hart, now 56 and living in Montreal, grew up in a hippie household in California “with piles of LPs all over the place”: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on. But she had never even heard of Fanny, despite the fact that it was the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label.Fanny put out a total of five albums between 1970 and 1974, one of which was produced by Todd Rundgren. The band scored two Top 40 hits — the swinging, soulful “Charity Ball” and the doo-wop-flavored “Butter Boy” — and played in the United States and abroad with Slade, Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, the Kinks and Chicago. The group backed Barbra Streisand in the studio and performed on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and “American Bandstand.”In 1999, Bowie hailed Fanny as one of the finest rock bands of its time in Rolling Stone. He also lamented that “nobody’s ever mentioned them.”Kathy Valentine, the bassist of the Go-Go’s, a later all-female band, wished more people had spread the word about Fanny. “If their visibility had been higher,” she said in an interview, “we would have seen a lot more women in the rock landscape.” Valentine didn’t hear about Fanny until 1982, she said, by which time the Go-Go’s were making their second album.When Hart, the filmmaker, first learned about Fanny online, she had a visceral reaction. “It really pissed me off,” she said. “It was just another example of amazing women that we don’t know about.” Hart reached out to former band members about the possibility of a documentary, but determined that at the time, the Fanny story didn’t have the “forward-momentum narrative” she was looking for.Then, in January 2017, Hart attended the Women’s March in Washington. She was watching Madonna speak on the Jumbotron when she spotted a woman with “flaming gray hair” onstage, filming the proceedings on her iPhone. It was June Millington. The sighting spurred Hart to call Millington, who had some news: Three members of Fanny — Millington, her younger sister, the bassist and singer Jean (Millington) Adamian, and the drummer and singer Brie Darling, a fellow Filipina-American — were about to make a new album on an indie label. The moment for a film had arrived.The resulting documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock,” opens in New York on Friday before hitting other major markets and, on Aug. 2, video on demand. (It will come to PBS in 2023.) The movie documents the making of that album, recorded under the name Fanny Walked the Earth and released in 2018, and features interviews with five members from the original group’s frequently shifting lineup. (The reclusive keyboardist Nickey Barclay, who has said she hated her time in the band, notably did not participate. She also declined to speak for this article.) Valentine, Bonnie Raitt and the Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott are among the talking heads.From left: Jean Millington, Nickey Barclay, Brie Darling, Alice de Buhr and June Millington practice in the basement of their band’s famed home, Fanny Hill.Linda WolfThe documentary lovingly recounts the history of Fanny, beginning with the sisters June and Jean Millington, who were born in the Philippines to a white American naval officer father and a Filipina socialite mother. In 1961, the Millington family moved overseas to Sacramento, Calif., where the sisters, as early adolescents, had a difficult time fitting in. Racism was a constant part of life. (In the film, Jean recalls the father of a boyfriend of hers telling his son, “I’ll buy you a Mustang if you stop seeing that half-breed girl.” The boyfriend opted for the car.)The sisters found solace in music, forming an all-girl band in high school called the Svelts, which played the radio hits of the day. The Svelts morphed into Wild Honey, a Motown cover group that decamped to Los Angeles in 1969 to make it big. Wild Honey signed with Warner Bros. Records’s Reprise label later that year. Not long after, the band, looking for a new name with a female identity, chose Fanny, which in the United States is slang for bottom.“We thought it was a double entendre that would work,” said June Millington, 74. It wasn’t until the band members toured overseas that they discovered that in Britain, fanny is slang for female genitals.Early on, the band lived in Fanny Hill, a house in West Hollywood that Millington, in the film, calls “a sorority with electrical guitars.” Joe Cocker and the lead singer of the Band, Rick Danko, hung out there, and the group Little Feat would come over and jam; Raitt was a houseguest for a time. A libertine, clothing-optional spirit prevailed. “It was a wonderful, creative environment,” said Darling, who is 72 and lives in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t people just getting high” and having sex.The film highlights the fact that two of Fanny’s members — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians, something that the band never dared speak about publicly in those days. “People would ask us, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’” recalled de Buhr, now 72 and residing in Tucson, Ariz. “And I’d say, ‘I’m taken.’ I hated not being able to say, ‘Well, I’m in love with a woman.’”Predictably, Fanny was subjected to a great deal of sexism, often being treated as a novelty act. “Most of society didn’t see girls with a guitar between their legs,” said Patti Quatro, 74, who replaced Millington as lead guitarist in 1974. (Quatro, of Austin, Texas, is an older sister of Suzi Quatro.)Millington said that the “condescension and sneering” that would greet Fanny at concert appearances was “so palpable it was almost physical.”Both Millington and her sister recalled, however, that Fanny would ultimately win over the crowd. “I felt like it took at least 10 minutes for everyone to realize there was not a boy band playing behind us,” said Jean (Millington) Adamian, 73, who lives in Davis, Calif. “They were waiting for us to fall down. And once we proved it was really us playing and singing, it was generally a big, uplifting experience.”Rock critics weren’t always swayed though. “We were battered by the reviews,” Millington said. “Every once in a while, they’d say, ‘Oh, they’re good.’” She cited a generally positive 1971 concert review in this newspaper headlined “Fanny, a Four-Girl Rock Group, Poses a Challenge to Male Ego.” “‘What will it do to the male ego?’ Well, who cares?” she said. “Why don’t you guys just deal with it and dig us?”“The fact is that Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” June Millington said.Linda WolfJUNE MILLINGTON EXITED Fanny in late 1973 in part because of a near “nervous breakdown,” she said in a video interview. “I’m glad I left, because I knew that my life was on the line on some major level.” She was sitting in front of a crackling fire at her home on the campus of the Institute for the Musical Arts, a nonprofit recording and retreat facility she co-founded with her longtime partner, Ann Hackler, in Goshen, Mass. On the mantel were various Buddhist objects — Millington is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism — and a framed photo of Jimi Hendrix.“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Millington said, was the record company’s insistence that Fanny, whose members favored ’70s California chic, dress up in glammy, more revealing outfits onstage. (“My top was $45 worth of American coins, looped together, that just pinched my nipples,” de Buhr said.) Millington saw it as a sign that Reprise had lost faith in the band. “I took it as an insult,” she said.A new version of Fanny — featuring Adamian, Barclay, Darling and Quatro — signed with Casablanca Records and released a final album, “Rock and Roll Survivors,” in 1974. That record featured the single “Butter Boy,” which Adamian said was inspired by — but not about, as has been widely reported — her then-boyfriend, Bowie, and his gender-bending ways.“‘He was hard as a rock, but I was ready to roll, what a shock to find out I was in control of the situation,’” Adamian said, reciting the song’s opening lines. “I mean, those kinds of lyrics were very tongue-in-cheek and intended to be provocative.” “Butter Boy” became Fanny’s biggest hit, reaching No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1975. But by that time, the band had split up for reasons both artistic and personal.Fanny has technically never reunited. But in 2016, Millington, Adamian and Darling played together at a concert in Northampton, Mass., a collaboration that led to the self-titled album “Fanny Walked the Earth.” That LP includes appearances by de Buhr and Quatro, plus Valentine of the Go-Go’s and members of fellow all-female groups the Runaways and the Bangles.A tentative plan to tour behind the Fanny Walked the Earth album was scuttled when, two months before the record’s March 2018 release, Adamian suffered a stroke that affected the right side of her body. Today, she uses a wheelchair to get around. “I cannot play bass,” she said. “I keep looking at my two fingers, going, ‘If just one of you would move, that would be good.’ It’s absolutely frustrating.”Fanny Walked the Earth’s Jean Adamian, Darling and June Millington.Marita MadeloniMillington has experienced health issues of her own. Her snow-white hair was noticeably shorter than it had been during the Fanny Walked the Earth era, the result of chemotherapy she received last year to treat breast cancer that is now in remission.“I knew I was going to live because my work is not done,” she said. “So anything can happen.” She didn’t discount the idea of some version of Fanny recording or touring again. As for the latter scenario, she said it would take a lot of money to do so properly, given the medical situations she and her sister faced. (Adamian has sung live with Fanny Walked the Earth since her stroke; her son, Lee Madeloni, filled in on bass.)In the meantime, Millington said, she was looking forward to the release of “Fanny: The Right to Rock.” Hart, the director, expressed the wish that the documentary would lead to far wider appreciation for the band. “A not-so-secret dream that I have is if they would get that recognition to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Hart said.Millington isn’t waiting for a call from the Rock Hall. “Is it ever going to happen? I don’t know,” she said. “And at this point, I don’t care.” She said she was comfortable resting on her laurels. “I’m fine with it, because I never imagined anyone would mention Fanny ever again,” she said. “For 30, 40 years, we couldn’t get arrested.”The internet, she said, is exposing new audiences to the band. “Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” Millington continued. “It is igniting people all over the world of different ages and different sexes. It’s like the Olympic torch, and that is really something to be proud of.” More

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      Lawsuit Accusing Bill Cosby of Sexual Assault Heads to Trial

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      A civil suit accusing Mr. Cosby of assaulting a teenager in the 1970s, which he denies, will be the first to head to court since his criminal conviction was overturned last year.Judy Huth met Bill Cosby when she was still a teenager, she has recounted in court papers. It was the mid-1970s, and Mr. Cosby had already had his breakthrough on the TV series “I Spy” and become a movie star, but was still years away from his huge success on “The Cosby Show.” Ms. Huth and a friend spotted him on a film set in a park in San Marino, Calif., and ended up meeting him in person, according to her court filings.Days later, she asserts in the filings, she went to Mr. Cosby’s tennis club at his invitation, where he gave her and her friend alcohol before taking them to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, where she accuses him of forcing her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom. Mr. Cosby has described her account as a fabrication since the case was first filed in 2014.This week the job of deciding who is credible will fall to a jury in Los Angeles Superior Court, as the civil trial of Mr. Cosby on Ms. Huth’s accusations that he sexually assaulted her is scheduled to get underway.Ms. Huth’s recollection regarding when the encounter occurred has changed. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16, according to court papers. Since the beginning, she has said in court papers that she recalled Mr. Cosby telling her and her friend to claim they were both 19 if asked at the mansion.The change of dates has led Mr. Cosby’s team to further dispute her account. Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said in a statement that Ms. Huth had “made inconsistent statements since the inception of filing this civil suit against Mr. Cosby.” Ms. Huth has said that recently released information supplied by Mr. Cosby’s team had led her to reconsider what year it occurred.Judy Huth, left, in 2015 with her attorney, Gloria Allred.Anthony McCartney/Associated PressThe civil case, one of the last unsettled lawsuits against Mr. Cosby, was largely put on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued the criminal case that resulted in his 2018 conviction on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. But the conviction was overturned, and Mr. Cosby was released from prison last year when an appellate panel found that his due process rights had been violated when prosecutors ignored an assurance from a prior district attorney that Mr. Cosby would not be prosecuted.With the criminal case overturned, the significance of Ms. Huth’s suit has risen in the minds of some of the many women who have accused Mr. Cosby of being a sexual predator.“I think that Judy’s trial may be our last stand for justice and seeing accountability come to fruition in our stand against Bill Cosby,” Victoria Valentino, who says Mr. Cosby drugged and raped her in Los Angeles in 1969, said in a text. (Mr. Cosby has denied all allegations of sexual assault, and said any encounters were consensual.) She said she plans to attend part of the trial, which, barring a last-minute settlement, is set to begin with jury selection this week and opening arguments expected June 1.Patricia Steuer, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said that she saw the Huth civil trial as a chance to get a measure of justice. “There is no other recourse at the moment,” she said. “It probably is the only avenue available.”Mr. Cosby, now 84, has already faced multiple other civil cases filed against him by women, many of whom sued him for defamation after his legal team dismissed as fictions their accusations of sexual misconduct by him. Eleven civil cases ended in settlements, with 10 of the settlements having been agreed to by Mr. Cosby’s former insurance company over his objections, according to his spokesman.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit is poised to become the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. In court papers, Ms. Huth says that in a bedroom at the Playboy Mansion, Mr. Cosby tried to put his hand down her pants and then forced her to fondle him.Ms. Huth filed her suit in December 2014, at a time when Mr. Cosby was facing allegations by many women who said he had drugged and sexually assaulted them, in incidents spanning several decades.She also reported her accusation to the police, but the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.Her lawyers argued that the period for a civil claim had not expired, however, because in California it is extended for adults who say they were victims of sexual abuse as minors but repressed the experience. The deadline to file such a suit is determined in part by when the person, as an adult, becomes aware of the severe psychological effect of the abuse, her lawyers said.In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil court.Ms. Huth’s revised timeline, which says Mr. Cosby assaulted her when she was 16 rather than 15, should not affect her ability to pursue the suit since the law views a 16-year-old as a minor, Ms. Huth’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, said.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers argued in legal papers that they felt ambushed by the sudden change in Ms. Huth’s account. They said that their research had been geared toward establishing Mr. Cosby’s and Ms. Huth’s whereabouts in 1974, and said they had prepared evidence to show that the entertainer was not at the Playboy Mansion in the period she suggested in 1974.Log books from the Playboy Mansion for 1974 do not list either Ms. Huth or her friend as having visited, according to Mr. Cosby’s lawyers.At a hearing last week, the judge asked Playboy to produce records for 1975 and agreed that Ms. Huth and the friend who accompanied her should sit for a further deposition before the trial begins.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have also questioned whether she had only remembered the alleged abuse a short time before filing the suit because, they said, she had contacted a tabloid about it 10 years earlier.Mr. Wyatt, the spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said in the statement, “We feel confident that the Playboy records along with Ms. Huth changing her timeline of events from 1974 to 1975 in the 11th hour will vindicate Mr. Cosby.”Mr. Cosby acknowledged meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion, and Ms. Huth has produced photographs of them together that she said were taken there, according to court papers. But he has denied that she was a minor when they met.“While defendant does not deny that he socialized with plaintiff at the Playboy Mansion, as he did other women and men who frequented the club,” his lawyers said in court papers, “defendant vehemently denies that plaintiff was underage.”Ms. Huth has said that she changed the timeline of her account in part because she only recently realized, as a result of documents put forward by Mr. Cosby, that the filming of the movie “Let’s Do It Again,” where she says they met, took place later than she had recalled.The trial is expected to last two weeks, and Ms. Huth, who is seeking damages from Mr. Cosby, is expected to testify, along with the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion. Mr. Cosby has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify. He will not attend the trial, Mr. Wyatt said.During pretrial hearings, Ms. Huth had asked for a bench trial, but the trial will be in front of a 12-person jury, with at least 9 of 12 votes needed for a conviction.Mr. Cosby settled a civil case Ms. Constand brought against him in 2006 for $3.4 million. The other civil cases were settled for undisclosed terms by the insurance carried on Mr. Cosby’s home policy, which provided “personal injury” coverage in a range of circumstances, including lawsuits that accused the policy holder of defamation.The other ongoing civil case against Mr. Cosby was filed last year by Lili Bernard, an actor and visual artist, who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Atlantic City in 1990, when she was 26. She was able to file the suit, which is still in its early stages, because in 2019 New Jersey overhauled its laws on the statute of limitations for sexual assault cases, extending the time limit for filing suits and creating a special two-year window allowing people to bring cases regardless of how long ago the alleged assaults might have occurred. More