The verdict is in: Johnny Depp has won his defamation case against actress and ex-wife Amber Heard, who had accused him of multiple counts of domestic and sexual abuse that she graphically described in court over several days.
Despite her emotional testimony and the other evidence she brought to the court — including photographs and voice recordings and eyewitness statements — the jury decided that she had proved none of her accusations against Depp, and awarded him $15 million in damages for her alleged “defamation” of him. Not that he needs the money; his net worth is likely somewhere between $75 and $150 million, depending on which source you believe. (This result is a far cry from what happened the first time Depp brought Heard’s alleged defamation to court, when a UK judge ruled in 2020 that Depp was in fact guilty of the vast majority of the accusations Heard brought against him.)
The verdict must be nice for Depp, but the fact is that he had already handily won this case in the court of public opinion where, as Amanda Marcotte put it in Salon, “Depp’s toxic supporters, through sheer belligerence, have willed their false narrative into the public understanding of the case.”
For proof of this all you have to do it take a quick visit to YouTube or TikTok, where videos mercilessly mocking Heard have sprung up like mushrooms in a bed of bullshit. Her emotional testimony is transformed into comedy for the masses through “recreations” of her accusations and through artfully edited clips featuring out-of-context moments from her time on the stand, sometimes set to music. At times it seems — and must have seemed to her — that the whole weight of the internet was pressing down on her.
Watch a few of these videos and the video sites’ algorithms will fill your recommendations with more from what seems an endless supply. If you’re feeling righteous, you can choose videos focusing on moments of high drama in the courtroom: “BUSTED! Amber Heard’s Personal Diary Reveals Her Shocking Lies” and “[Depp Lawyer] Camille Vasquez shutting down Amber’s lies for 13 minutes straight.” Or you can search out lighter fare, including one now notorious video presenting cats in costumes “recreating” Heard’s stories of abuse.
It’s what a Guardian writer called “Trial by TikTok.”
Of course, these videos are only funny if you believe — as Depp’s lawyers want you to — that Heard is lying about every single accusation of abuse; if you have even the slightest sympathy for Heard they are crude and cruel attacks on an abuse survivor for going public with her story. Is it funny if a woman is hit so hard she falls to the floor? If a man chokes her and spits in her face? If she is sexually assaulted with a bottle? (You can find a full accounting of her allegations in this post from “Skepchick” Rebecca Watson.)
This court case has opened her up to harassment and death threats as well — including one, she told the court, from someone who promised to put her one-year-old daughter in a microwave.
Despite all of the allegations against Depp he managed to come across to many as an amiable, avuncular fellow doing his best to weather a host of false accusations from his “crazy” ex.
And that’s just what Depp wanted his audience to believe — that Heard was a lying harpy and he was a put-upon truth teller and general good guy. In a text from 2016 presented in court he told a friend that Heard was
begging for total global humiliation … She’s gonna get it … I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion, or what I once thought was love, for this gold-digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market. … I’m so fucking happy she wants to go fight this out!!! She will hit the wall hard!!! … And I cannot wait to have this waste of a cum guzzler out of my life!!!
Depp apparently writes a lot of texts like these, regarding them as examples of his “irreverent and abstract humor,” as he told the court about another text in which he declared Heard a “witch” and suggested he would like to “burn her.” He continued: “Let’s drown her before we burn her. I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.” In yet another text he referred to Heard as “the slippery whore that I donated my jizz to for a while.”
You can buy this last slogan on a tshirt, which tells you something about the battle for public opinion in this case.
“Total global humiliation” is a good summary of what Heard has faced — and is likely to face for many years in the future. The attacks on her have somehow been even worse than the attacks on practically every other woman who has faced this sort of opprobrium from the Great Internet Lady Harassment machine — from Gamergate on.
Some are happy to dismiss the harassment as no big deal, since (to them) Heard is just a big fat liar anyway, and didn’t she sometimes hit him too? But I can only imagine what all this looks like to any woman now contemplating bringing a suit against an abuser. Will they be mocked as a “crazy liar” on TikTok? Will their allegations be turned into “edgy” entertainment for a vast online audience? Will people threaten to microwave their children?
#MeToo may never recover from this.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@ginmar, I don’t agree. I certainly did not think that there was any kind of plan from the beginning at all, nor do I think that there would need to be. Also, remember that I formed my opinion with only evidence that was shown at the trial, if you’re talking about the stuff at the UK trial, I didn’t follow that, though I’m learning more about it and I didn’t look at any other outside information.
If you only watch the livestream trial without knowing anything else about the case, then it seemed to me that you’d have to disregard the testimonies 10-12 witnesses over just one in order not to believe his side of the story. I actually know more about the information that was not in the trial now and I’m not completely sure anymore but I’d rather look into it myself to determine the truth.