The Depp-Heard Trial and What It Means in The Long Term
Hint: Ultimately nothing to the rest of us.
I’m going to start this off with two caveats: One, I didn’t watch the entire Depp-Heard trial; only snippets. And two, I’ve never been the perpetrator or the victim of conjugal abuse.
I have no skin in this game, so anything I say here carries about as much weight as the next person who also doesn’t know either Johnny Depp or Amber Heard personally or has ever witnessed them in action together.
I’m not here to make judgement on either of them. The dynamics of any relationship are always complex and not easy to define. It’s clear they’ve done things to hurt each other. It’s clear they’re still wanting to hurt each other. But where do we, the observers, fit it?
We don’t.
“Abuse” is a loaded word. It can mean anything from hurling ugly, hurtful words, from making impossible demands, from isolating the victim from friends and family, to causing physical pain and injury. Some of it is obvious because the abuser doesn’t care who sees it, but most often it isn’t. The bruises don’t always show. There isn’t always a split lip or a black eye. Sometimes the abuse is to the spirit.
I followed an interesting thread on Twitter yesterday, started by someone who had been in a long-term abusive relationship. They said because they’d had enough and finally hit back, if there had been a trial like this one they might have been accused of abuse, too. It opened up the floodgates to other victims who told their stories in much the same way. At some point they had to fight back and because their abusers were masters at manipulation and gaslighting, they’d be hard pressed to convince a jury they were the victims.
Often, they said, revenge was its own sweet victory. They had no regrets. But did that mean they hadn’t been victims? No, it didn’t.
It could be that that’s what made the Depp-Heard trial so interesting to so many people—those grey areas over which of them was the victim—but once it turned into a circus, thanks to the media vultures, it became frivolous and sickening. The jokes were endless and never really funny.
And neither Johnny Depp nor Amber Heard came away unscathed. They both looked less like victims and more like out-of-control monsters. They each had their haters and their supporters. It seems the entire country has an opinion now, and nothing is going to change that.
They’ll never go back to simply being actors. They’ll carry the scars of that trial with them forever. It’s how they’ll be known from now on, and not a single observer will ever know the entire truth. It will always be one’s word against the other, because it’s human nature to defend ourselves against scandal.
We can’t be as bad as it looks. And maybe we aren’t.
What do you think? As always, the comments are open. I just KNOW you have an opinion. Have at it!
Thank you for writing this. I wanted to write something in the same vein, but I’m not in the right head space to muster it up at the moment. We are living in a very polarizing time, and I believe that this trial is another example of how we continue to miss the nuance in everything, including intimate parter violence. In my experience as a social worker, two people can be abusive toward each other - it is less common, but it does exist. That being said, the media and court of public opinion demonized Heard and discredited her word using misogynist tactics that are old as time. The legal question was about defamation, but I am fearful that the precedent set here will reinforce the damning message that women who speak out about their experiences don’t stand a legal chance.
I stayed away from the trial as much as I could but, of course, it was everywhere. As a family psychologist, I've dealt with intimate partner violence and it's terrible. It's also complicated with many victims fighting back or sometimes even instigating the violence in order to get it over with (the cycle of violence is indeed real). People who've never actively experienced it often don't understand and form opinions they shouldn't. That's why this trial never, ever should've been publicized. Not only do people not realize how trials are structured (you only get a portion of the truth) but they've also been viewing it as entertainment. It's gross and damaging.
My deep fear is that, as a result of this trial, women survivors of IPV will keep their silence even more. Abusers will use the threat of defamation even more than they already do. That's already happening and I'm pretty sure that's what Depp did too. I read Amber Heard's op-ed and it never even mentioned him, not even obliquely. I also read snippets from the trial and what he did to her was abusive.
From a legal standpoint, it never even mattered if Heard was abusive to Depp. If he was abusive to her even once (and he clearly was), then she didn't defame him. The UK court got it right but leave it to Americans to be blinded by celebrity and so-called men's rights. It matters that the jury was made up mostly of men (5 men, 2 women). It also matters that right-wing extremist groups paid for Heard-hating pieces all over the internet. This was always about shutting women up and they were wildly successful.