“I’m in the mix,” Ryan Leone remarks in one of his more understated moments of self-promotion. The convicted felon-turned prison reform activist is discussing what he believed at the time to be the fate of Amber Heard in Warner Brothers’ upcoming sequel to Aquaman, and he’s claiming she’s been released from her contract for violating a moral clause. “I was told by some of my Hollywood friends that she will not be returning for the sequel. ‘Fired’ is probably the wrong term.”

His baseless claim is challenged by a few on his twitter thread, a development Leone isn’t used to, leading to a rapid-fire series of ad hominem tweets, Donald Trump-style.  His first target is Ms. Heard, whom he refers to as a ‘piece of shit bed shitter,’ before his ire is quickly turned on those who correctly point out no major Hollywood news publication is reporting anything remotely close to what he’s alleging.

“Name one person that you know in Hollywood. Just one. Please,” he demands after I tell him my Hollywood friends state the opposite about Amber Heard. He has me there. I can’t claim the same small b-list league of Hollywood players he says he can. My connections merely extend to those who write and report on the industry, none of who are reporting Leone’s initial allegation.

“Do you have any friends period?” he inquires, clumsily employing a red herring. “Silly right? This guy has no friends.”

Ryan wants to measure dicks. Before he tweets out a picture of his wife and child and states I’m jealous of everything he has, he demands, “let’s compare accomplishments. You go first!”

I decide not to take the bait. After all, the point of the discussion, if it can even be called a discussion, is whether anyone of his supposed Hollywood connections actually told Ryan Leone that Amber Heard was out as Mera in the upcoming Aquaman sequel or if he was throwing proverbial red meat to Johnny Depp’s truther army.

“She’s been fired. Public wager on anyone saying differently,” Leone digs in. “She will not be in it. So many insiders have told me that.” He then states anyone who doesn’t accept his wager must be broke after offering to put up $1,000.

Umberto Gonzalez, film writer for Hollywood newspaper The Wrap and founder of Heroic Hollywood, weighs in. “No, Amber Heard did not ‘get fired’ off of AQUAMAN 2.” This is a rare admission from someone who owns a fan site, many of which have been pandering to Comicsgate and aggrieved white males’ hostility to diversity and feminism in the geek community with misleading and outright fabricated stories about Ms. Heard. Mr. Gonzalez’s site has been more fair than most in their coverage but has, nevertheless,  contributed to the anti-Amber Heard campaign by posting some variation of the “Emilia Clarke is Replacing Amber Heard” rumor no less than four times in the last eight months, an average of every sixty days.

Ad clicks in the Amber Heard hate machine must be a lucrative business.

Leone later claims it was “the director” who told him Amber Heard wouldn’t be back, insinuating he has an inside line to James Wan.

“He left her ass,” Leone tweets, momentarily abandoning his initial argument and turning his ire back to Amber Heard who, actually, was the one who filed for divorce from Johnny Depp. “Why do you speak in shit if you don’t even know what you’re talking about. The worthless whore was cheating on him so he booted her. Then she divorced him because she’s an evil, sociopath.”

Leone’s misogyny is on full display now, mirroring the language Johnny Depp and his associates used in text messages revealed in Depp’s libel case last year in the UK in which he jokingly planned to murder her.

“She’s gonna look even more old and irrelevant in her prison uniform. We love it.”

Here he repeats a previous rumor that spread through the Depp Twittersphere – that Ms. Heard was going to jail for perjury. This was months before Johnny Depp lost his libel case against The Sun, then was subsequently denied an appeal. The UK courts believed Amber Heard’s account that she was assaulted by Mr. Depp at least 12 times in during their tumultuous marriage.

In those days Leone was counting his blessings. As he constantly reminded his twitter followers he does, indeed, have a beautiful family which would make many people envious. A prison-reform activist now, he wrote a well-received, though not exactly best-selling, semi-autobiography titled Wasting Talent during his first time in prison, a five year sentence the circumstances of which are often downplayed when he’s referenced. For example, IMDB summarizes the documentary of his life, Idiot Savant, by saying he took a “trumped up criminal case” to trial. But that description is dramatically understated.

Leone served time for actions surrounding his involvement with a notorious international heroin cartel called The Mendoza Clan. For two decades, they smuggled heroin through Tijuana into Southern California, generating millions in profits and committing multiple assaults and murders along the way. There’s no indication Leone was directly involved in killing people but court records indicate prosecutors considered him a flight risk and described charges against him as carrying a potential life sentence.

After his release, Leone served another three months in a case that involved child protective services and, later, served time again for violating the terms of his parole in a case that involved pimping and pandering. Leone claims that incident was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Leone has made several attempts to turn things around but, as they say, it hardly makes him a reliable source for much of anything. It might explain why he’s attracted to people like Johnny Depp, a multi-millionaire who wants his fans to believe he’s a tortured soul.

Apparently Leone and Heard go way back – back further than he and Depp, Leone says. He claims to have been her drug dealer of choice, and interestingly once described Heard in the way most who knew the couple – doctors included – described Depp at the time – having delusional and paranoiac fits that could last for days. Users of the stuff know all too well what heroin can do. Leone himself was no mere peddler of it, he was a user, too, who has allegedly relapsed several times, including quite recently, and has spent a considerable amount of time in rehab and prison because of it.

He’s also a peddler of fabricated stories, the source of many of the more heinous rumors about Amber Heard that spread like wildfire through the Depposphere but were never proven, never taken seriously by anyone of import, and died on the vine with everyone except the more conspiracy-minded. Aside from oft-repeated claims she’d been fired from Aquaman II and was going to jail for perjury, Leone seems obsessed with drug rapes, at one time claiming Heard accused a ‘famous director’ of drugging and raping her then claiming she had group sex with Elon Musk and underaged girls who were high on MDMA before, finally, claiming he had evidence she drugged and raped a female model.

It’s the latter charge that appears to have contributed to Leone’s disappearance from Twitter, leaving his hardcore Depp fan followers hanging. After several of them began questioning his various claims that are never proven, he vanished under the guise usually reserved for politicians about to be embroiled in scandal: to spend more time with an ailing family member. His parting shot was the promise of a police report being filed with an investigation to follow. That was months ago and the alleged police report has yet to materialize, let alone any proof beyond a convicted felon and drug addict’s tweets.

Lately some rather disturbing news about the Wasting Talent author has come to light courtesy of a Reddit Group that tracks Leone’s social media activity away from Twitter and the Depposphere. He has allegedly been involved in a Patreon scam to defraud his followers, claims to have attempted suicide twice, overdosed twice, put his child in danger, and in the irony or ironies, has stated someone recently roofied him in the same way he’s accused Amber Heard of doing to the previously mentioned model.

Because Ryan Leone came from a very wealthy family it would difficult to feel one ounce of pity for the guy under normal circumstances. But because someone who is apparently as gifted as he is chose to turn his ire towards an imperfect actress in an obsessive defense of an actor with a decades-long history of assaults and abuse is the very definition of wasting talent.

The Geek Buzz previously explored former Johnny Depp attorney Adam Waldman’s connection to Russian bots and paid trolls, an association that ultimately led to him being barred from the court room in the upcoming Fairfax, VA case next year.

Amber Heard is currently in the UK filming Aquaman II.