The link and logo you may have just clicked on (from our homepage), once went to the profile page of a friend and artist who had entered “Johnny Depp’s” “The People’s Artist” contest.
I regret giving any legitimacy to the contest, and regret asking you to support it even with free votes.
Instead of now deleting that link and logo, it feels right to point them here.
Summary
I don’t regret supporting a friend. I regret not doing my homework, giving legitimacy to this specific contest, and personally donating.
Donating made me part of the pay-to-play problem that many are calling out—not me, but the concept (this isn’t damage control lol)—but it also taught me more about how the pay-to-play scheme might work. Or more specifically, that a $500 donation put my friend in “1st place” before I was outbid in under three seconds.
The two red flags I noticed personally were:
1) Instagram pulled a Story I put up for something like deceptive practices or data harvesting scams, though I forget the exact wording they used. After visiting the contest’s official Instagram account, I see 8-10 others saying Meta disallowed sharing links to it.
2) Bing, the search engine, de-indexed our entire website from its search results, after we added a link to the contest on our homepage.
This isn’t to say that I don’t see other red flags now, just that those caught my eye before ever visiting the official accounts of this contest or searching YouTube.
Videos From Others Who’ve Looked at This
Others have looked into and covered this contest a lot more thoroughly than I have, so their videos are a better resource. In addition to these, I also looked for more “positive” videos and can’t find any, but even these videos are objective and accurate to my knowledge.
(Here’s the contest’s official intro video—and the comments on it are turned off.)
Thank you, video creators, for doing these:
“Is the Johnny Depp People’s Choice Artist a Scam?” — Lachri Fine Art, May 14, 2026
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Facebook Post by Daniel Fried
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The Scam of Johnny Depp’s (and other celebs) “The People’s Artist” Awards — @Gullerude, May 7, 2026
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