In a first for The Present Age, today’s edition will be a guest post.
Michael Hobbes
– P.M.
Content warning for vulgar language and descriptions of abuse.
Yesterday afternoon, a Virginia jury found Amber Heard liable for defaming her ex-husband, Johnny Depp.
Officially, it was the conclusion of a six-week defamation trial between two relatively obscure celebrities. In reality, it was the culmination of the largest explosion of online misogyny since Gamergate — and a chilling vision of the future of the internet.
At the center of this case is a wildly plausible, evidence-backed story of abuse.
He thought she already knew and that her question was a way of mocking him. He slapped her. She laughed, so baffled by his response that she thought it must be an expression of his dark sense of humor. He slapped her again and again and again. She fell off the couch as he screamed, “You think you’re funny, bitch!?”
He stormed off, then came back, burst into tears and apologized. “I believed it,” Heard said on the stand. “I believed there was a line that he wouldn’t cross again.”
Here
The airplane explosion became the template for the rest of their relationship. Nearly every future incident of violence followed a similar pattern: Depp experienced an external stressor — one blowup followed a meeting where his financial advisors told him he had lost millions; another happened after his mother died — and he self-medicated with alcohol and drugs. Then, feeling emasculated and ashamed of his addiction, he took out his feelings on Heard. He accused her of cheating or nagging, then exploded into a rage.
Afterwards, he retreated into denial. Nearly all of the violence took place when he was drunk or high, often blacked out, and his life was deliberately structured to allow him never to confront the consequences of his addictions. His checkbook took care of the trashed hotel rooms; his employees soothed his self-bruised ego; doctors gave him meds to get him through shoots; his celebrity status ensured he never lost work.
“I’m out. I’m done,” he wrote to his sister after the airplane incident, a period when Heard was giving him the silent treatment. “Her actions have added more drama than necessary […] that’s what people call falling off the wagon … It’s happened to a lot of my friends. … Their wives don’t stop calling them.”
As their marriage fell apart, Depp became even more reliant on drugs and alcohol, disappearing for longer periods and returning with even more paranoid accusations. Heard became increasingly brittle, rolling her eyes at his bizarre denials about his addiction and ignoring his empty promises to get sober.
The last straw was a series of escalating incidents in which he disappeared for nearly a week, then showed up late and drunk to her 30th birthday party, then blew up at her afterwards. In the middle of their final argument he threw his phone at her, hitting her in the cheek. She filed for divorce the next day and a restraining order a week later.
Heard’s story is remarkably unremarkable.
Every beat of Heard’s narrative — the honeymoon period, the relentless escalations, the day-one apologies followed by day-two denials — follows well-established patterns of interpersonal violence.
-
Photos:
Heard’s injuries and the damage Depp caused to their homes are well-documented. Heard took photos of herself in the later stages of the relationship and her injuries appeared in at least one red-carpet picture. The LA Times reportfrom the day she filed her restraining order notes that she arrived at the courthouse with visible bruises.
-
Contemporaneous communications:
Both Heard’s and Depp’s texts from their relationship confirm her basic outline of events. From the earliest incident of violence, Heard told friends and family about his jealousy, his attacks, and his denials. The UK trial includes a text from Depp’s assistant after the private-jet blowup saying, “when I told him he hit you, he cried.” Both trials have featured numerous textsin which Depp admits to becoming a different person when drunk or high. “My illness somehow crept up and grabbed me,” he said in a message to Heard. “I of course pounded and displayed ugly colors to Amber on a recent journey,” says a message to a friend. His sistertexted Depp to say, “Stop drinking. Stop coke. Stop pills.” -
Witnesses:
Numerous people describe seeing Heard with bruises, cuts and missing chunks of hair. Depp’s staffers testify to the damage he caused to their homes and hotel rooms. Heard’s acting coach says she had to schedule a longer session with Heard to help her work through the trauma of the relationship; a makeup artist says she helped cover bruises. The final alleged abuse incident, in which Depp threw his phone at Heard, was witnessed in full by her friend on the other end of the call. Two more friends testified that they saw him acting aggressively toward her on one occasion and her sister confirmed another (she also testified in the US trial that Depp once held her dog out of the window of a moving carwhen he was drinking). -
Tapes:
Numerous audio recordings include tacitor explicit acknowledgments by Depp that he exploded in anger at Heard — as well as some of those explosions themselves. In one she says, “I cry in my bedroom after I dumped you a week prior after you beat the shit out of me,” and Depp replies, “I made a huge mistake. I won’t do it again.” In anotherHeard says, “put your cigarettes out on someone else” and Depp replies, “Shut up, fat ass.”
-
Video:
Heard surreptitiously recordedone of Depp’s outbursts. He doesn’t hit her and this isn’t one of the incidents presented in the UK trial, but it shows his anger and how it interacts with his alcohol consumption.
And that’s not even the best reason to believe her.
The most convincing evidence is the big picture.
So far we’ve been talking about Heard’s evidence of individual incidents of violence. Context matters in domestic abuse cases, and the context of this one is Depp’s well-documented history of misogyny, drug abuse and violent outbursts.
“He is so sweet the rest of the time […] and just of couple of times he comes on like the bloodbeast terror,” Newell said.
Call it bias if you want, but I simply don’t find it difficult to believe that a troubled man with a history of drug problems and violent outbursts — not to mention all the entitlement that comes with being a beloved and wealthy movie star — brought that pattern into his marriage.
Heard’s big-picture account of the facts makes sense; Depp’s doesn’t.
Depp’s account of events doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny. Heard’s first text messages to friends and family alleging abuse were from 2013 — two years before she even married Depp, much less divorced him. For his narrative to align with the available evidence, Heard would have had to convince numerous friends, ex-friends, professional contacts and neighbors to lie numerous times, under oath, for years — all while leaving no trace of her diabolical plan in the form of texts or e-mails.
I find it difficult to believe that Heard spent years fabricating texts and photographs (long before #MeToo, by the way), only to get a modest divorce settlement to which she was already entitled, then stay silent for more than a year.
Depp’s narrative doesn’t hold together under its own logic. Heard is smart enough to fake abuse almost as soon as the relationship starts, but so dumb she accidentally reveals her plan in a verbal slip-up on the stand? She paints bruises on her face but wipes them off before she gets spotted by doormen and paparazzi? She fabricates photos and manipulates metadata but doesn’t bother making her injuries severe enough to be unassailable?
Heard’s actions make no sense as a scheming black widow. As an abuse victim, however, they align internally and with all external evidence.
So why do so many people refuse to believe her?
The internet assassination of Amber Heard started as soon as the trial.
If you’re surprised to learn Heard’s narrative or the scale of the evidence supporting it, that’s because it has played almost no role in the internet free-for-all that has surrounded this case for the last six weeks.
Regardless of whether you were remotely interested in these people or this trial, your social media feed likely filled up with memes, videos, and audio clips implying that Amber Heard had been caught fabricating evidence and committing perjury.
The narrative of Heard as a scheming manipulator was so un-controversial that brands got involved. In the early days of the trial, Heard’s lawyer held up a concealer kit to demonstrate her point that Heard’s bruises often weren’t visible in photographs because she covered them with makeup. Almost immediately, Depp’s supporters zoomed in on the image, identified the makeup brand, and started tagging it on Instagram.
But it didn’t matter. It was a gotcha, a technical discrepancy that didn’t require listening to her claims or assessing her big-picture narrative against her ex-husband’s.
The greatest and most effective gotcha was her charity donations. After she negotiated her $7 million divorce settlement, Heard announced that she was donating half to the ACLU and the other half to Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Over the course of the trial, Depp’s lawyers revealed that the charities hadn’t received the full amounts and that Heard had lied about giving the money away.
As with all of these gotchas, it looks bad until you show the tiniest shred of human interest in discovering the facts. While it’s true that Heard hasn’t donated the full amount, all evidence indicates that she intends to. In 2016, after her divorce was finalized, she entered into an agreement with the ACLU to give them the full $3.5 million over 10 years. She made the first payment but delayed the rest because Depp started trying to sue her into oblivion (she says she’s spent $6 million on her legal defense so far; who knows how much more it will cost to appeal to Virginia’s verdict).
Could she have been more precise? Sure. But a minor misstatement — or, at worst, a slight exaggeration of her generosity — doesn’t demonstrate that she’s capable of the kind of sociopathic calculation necessary to fake abuse claims, lie under oath, and convince nearly a dozen people to commit perjury.
All of this — the bad-faith scrutiny, the obsession with minor discrepancies, the confidence that vast conspiracies can be discovered on Google — is instantly recognizable from previous explosions of internet-enabled misogynistic bullying. The “body language experts” that swarmed around Heard spent years applying the same junk science to Amanda Knox, Meghan Markle, and Carole Baskin. The gremlins who targeted Anita Sarkeesian during Gamergate pretended to be offended by the (extremely minor) technical errors in her videos rather than her presence in their boy’s-only treehouse.
The trial was a nationwide tutorial on how to blame victims.
I’d love to say that the toxicity on social media never seeped into the courtroom, but in many cases, Depp’s lawyers amplified and even originated the worst arguments against Heard.
All of these arguments are utterly illiterate about the nature of abuse and actively harmful to victims. By definition, most domestic violence takes place behind closed doors. Victims have numerous reasons to hide their injuries, from internalized shame to fear of their abuser to, in Heard’s case, legitimate worries about ending up on TMZ. Even if you think male survivors face real challenges in coming forward — and they absolutely do — casting doubt on victims that didn’t get hurt enough or once said something nice about their abuser is a bizarre way to address them.
Could this incident be considered abusive? Perhaps. I have no doubt that Depp felt belittled by his partner and frustrated that she had turned his special evening into an argument. Consider, however, that this event took place in late 2013, roughly six months after Depp’s first fall off the wagon. Heard had already experienced at least three incidents of violence in their relationship, all of which took place when Depp was drinking — and after which he had promised to stay sober.
If you entertain the possibility that Heard has not concocted an elaborate hoax but is in fact an actual domestic abuse victim, having an emotional reaction when her husband shows up and merrily announces that he has broken his promise to her — a broken promise which may put her safety at risk — her actions suddenly make more sense.
Depp’s legal strategy worked. Victims and abusers are listening.
So how did Heard lose such a winnable case? Two words: Jury trial.
And outside the courtroom, America’s march backward toward the 1950s continues apace.
Correction: Earlier version said Heard was found “guilty.” This has been corrected to read that she was found “liable.”