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.
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Just absolutely disgusting. Although not unexpected given how the news just keeps getting worse and worse lately.
I avoided that trial, not only because of the sensationalism involved, but because of the unfathomable support for Depp. I remember one “insult” he accused her of – she had called him “old”. The nerve. Just because he’s 23 years older than she is. Cough. Also, I couldn’t stand his affected English-sounding accent. Dude was born in Kentucky, for pity’s sake.
I didn’t follow the entire thing and I doubt it will change anything to the Metoo movement whatsoever. Plus, the movement’s effect on placing back sexual harassment at the center of public discussion and consciousness is already a pretty big success no matter what. Feminism rarely wins ”media fights”, but in the end it wins in society. Gamergate wasn’t “defeated” by feminists or allies, but today the movement is remembered and considered as a big fat bullying campaign by a bunch of psychotic man-children; a subject of shame.
The Heard and Depp story was basically a big fat ball of Hollywood drama. It seems Depp won this lawsuit after losing a very similar one in the UK (which is weird because libel laws are harsher in the UK than the US and I would have expected the opposite). There is a high chance that both of Depp were abusive assholes at various points in their relationship hence why both are suing each other for millions.
Depp may exult in his victory, but I will never be able to watch any of his work again.
I watched some of the trial. My take – this was a car accident and both are toxic. I’m an ex Depp fan. I don’t do Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, etc. Imho, the correct ruling would have been 0 for both and eat the rich.
I wasn’t following this, but I did have a video with a title like “[Depp Lawyer] Camille Vasquez shutting down Amber’s lies for 13 minutes straight” recommended to me on YouTube.
My vague impression was that both were abusive to each other, but perhaps that was the narrative pushed forward at the expense of the truth? In any case, Depp’s violent jokes and others’ cruel ones are a definite WTF.
…On a lighter note, Happy Pride Month to whoever celebrates/marks this in June!
I’m quite sure that both Depp and Heard are guilty of abuse. Depp is obviously the better actor, as is evident from the verdict. Further, as I understand, his ex-girlfriends supported him for the most part and that made a huge impact on the jury. Will it end #MeToo? I doubt it. No one will remember this trial in several months. #MeToo thrives on evidence. With all due respect to those who disagree with me, I do not think this has much to do with #MeToo. It’s a big celebrity soap opera.
Well this should keep me from finding unsolicited Depp Heard shit off my youtube main page for a while.
I have little to say about this, since I haven’t been paying too much attention to the trial as a whole. I will say the real test of who’s more ‘believable’ will likely be which of the two gets any acting work over the next several years. Assuming this whole mess hasn’t made both Depp and Heard too toxic for Hollywood these days (not a fan of either, so I haven’t been paying attention if they’ve been working while suing each other).
An OT that nobody here wants to read about, I’m sure – there was a shooting at a Tulsa, Oklahoma hospital earlier today. Four dead, including the gunman. No word as of yet if this was a targeted assault or not (it happened on the second floor, in the orthopedic ward, I think).
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna31551
In other news, Gov. Gregg Abbot got booed and jeered at when he attended the Uvalde memorial service a few days ago.
https://thehill.com/news/state-watch/3505724-abbott-booed-at-uvalde-memorial-service-we-need-change/amp/
I followed the trial moderately closely. Although I certainly didn’t take in all 122 hours of evidence (the judge ran the case on a chess clock; each side got 61 hours).
I had a policy of not commenting on the merits of the case itself; for various reasons.
It’s been a mixed thing. I do think televised trials can be a useful way of explaining court procedure and legal principles to lay audiences. And we have been doing a lot of that on Twitter. Ironically it got me loads of followers.
But what I have found a bit distasteful is how so many people treated this trial like it was entertainment or a reality TV show. Maybe that’s a selection bias thing as I guess social media amplifies that. But whatever people may think of the respective parties, everyone involved is a real human being. Court case are traumatic at the best of times; but this was a case where every intimate and sordid aspect of people’s lives were forensically dissected in full view of the braying masses. I feel for all involved.
But in a detached abstract sense, this trial did provide some useful illustrations of both competent and bad advocacy, trial strategy, and how to comport yourself as a witness. I do that advocacy training for the new barristers and I have already been using examples from the trial with them. I also have to design an exercise for a gap on the syllabus; and I will probably base it on something that happened in the trial.
So if any good can come from this then I can console myself that a generation of barristers may gain something from it; and then they can use their skills to help victims and vulnerable people. Should they so choose of course. A big problem with the legal profession at the moment is that stiff like crime and family are so despairing and poorly remunerated that people are avoiding/leaving those fields in droves for less stressful and more lucrative work.
This was my sole twitter commentary on the actual case FWIW:
Just in case anyone is interested in the respective trial strategies, and why this was more than just a trial, here’s some Twitter commentary. Not just from me; some actually competent friends too. I’m not sure how Twitter actually works. But I think if you click on the links that should take you to the relevant threads.
https://twitter.com/HouseChambers/status/1531228193407082496
https://twitter.com/HouseChambers/status/1531663863611105280
Like a lot of other folks, I barely followed the trial at all. I didn’t watch any trial footage other than clips. I wouldn’t even have cared about it if not for a high school friend blathering on about Amber Heard in Facebook public post responses. His comments got very nasty, wishing for Heard to get fired from her movie roles, having her character in Aquaman 2 die a horrible death, etc., though, never to the point of wishing violence on the actual person.
Eventually I came across two videos. The second is the Rebecca Watson video that David has posted up. The first was this, by Princess Weekes, my only major engagement with this trial, and really the only content I could find on it that wasn’t a content vulture pile-on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec7o2uJeFDE
This, ultimately, is why I feel I need to finally post about this, somewhere it’s being talked about. Like I said, I barely followed this and I get how people can come to the conclusion that both sides were majorly at fault. However, no matter how I slice it, it’s a very simple matter. An earlier trial determined that 12 of 14 accusations against Depp were true. This one was purely about whether Heard defamed Depp in one article, and technically Depp won, but also he committed defamation too…
I made the mistake of going on Twitter right after the verdict, and it was full mask-off for most of the posts I found on the trending topics. These people have a very poor grasp of reality. I cannot overstate how straightforward this is. It’s basically like all the other right-wing harassment campaigns, except a lot of women claiming to be feminists seem to have been roped into it, too. Well, maybe even that isn’t exceptional. She’s not a “perfect victim”, so she must have lied about everything, and everything claimed about what she did must be true.
This is incredibly disheartening. The credibility deficit that women face, especially women accusing high-status men of abuse, is a serious social problem.
.
This was a huge thing which swayed “floating voters” I think. For whatever reason, Depp came across as likeable, Heard as inauthentic. Of course, all those bloody Tik Toks didn’t help.
The fact is this isn’t a straightforward “serial abuser hiding in plain sight toppled” story – I can believe that Depp (apart from horrible misogynistic language in his texts/emails ABOUT them, if not to them) hasn’t abused partners before, as they report. My personal interpretation is that a toxic entitlement and insecurity – he clearly felt the age difference – combined with the absolute worst behaviour of active addiction made this an awful, abusive relationship. And now he’s destroyed her for sharing her experiences – with the sense she also sometimes acted abusively totally clouding that Depp should *still be held accountable for his own obviously horrible behaviour*.
Unfortunately, not being straightforward, this has tested both the capacity for nuance and reactive misogyny of the public and we’ve fallen short on one and massively revealed the other.
Sorry for the OT, but there seems to have been a shooting spree in an hospital in Tulsa, with currently at least 5 deads (the shooter included).
Laura Ingraham is on the case, and she’s found out exactly what causes all of the US mass shootings.
It’s weed. It’s always weed.
See, kids these days are angry that their parents won’t let them use cannabis, so they go out and get a gun so they can steal all the weeds. Then they use it all at once. Then they come down with a terrible case of the reefer mads, and shoot up a mall or something.
The solution, obviously, is to bring back the drug war. Thanks, Laura!
(The above is barely even an exaggeration, unfortunately)
People who think she’s clearly lying should look at the actual evidence (not the one sided evidence on Social Media)
On 24th May on a private plan Amber says Johnny accused her of cheating (quite possibly correctly) with James Franco, pushed a chair at her, slapped her and kicked her. Johnny said in his Witness Statement he remembered the flight clearly, he was sober and she was acting aggressively towards him. Stephen Deuters, his PA, said JD was quiet on the flight. Johnny sent Paul Bethany a text about that flight and referenced being on cocaine and described himself as “An angry, aggro injun in a fuckin blackout, screaming obscenities and insulting any fuck who gets near”. Is that consistent with Ambers story or Johnny and Deuters?
9 March 2015 – Amber and her sister both say that Johnny repeatedly hit Amber and was aggressive towards Whitney and that Amber hit Johnny to protect her sister. He denies violence towards either. Johnny’s Nurse Debbie Lloyd was in the flat and texted the next day “Good thing he called or they would have hurt each other. We had to physically restrain both of them.’ Johnny’s on tape saying Travis (his bodyguard) pulled him off Amber. If only Amber was violent why would she and he have said that?
August 2015. The Eastern and Oriental Express in South East Asia. Amber says Johnny hit and pushed her against a wall by the throat causing her to fear for her life. Johnny did not recall either him or Amber being violent in his evidence. In an audio recording, Johnny said “Since Australia we’ve been on our honeymoon other than the fact that we had a fight on the train, which was physical…”. Again who’s evidence is that more consistent with?
May 21 2016 Amber says JD threw the phone at her face hard. He denies this. JD’s witness Laura Divenere says in a recording that AH had a red and swollen face not long after. Officer Saenz observed reddening on Ms Heard’s cheek but attributed this to crying. Photographs that day of Amber with an injury to her eye timed just after the security cameras show Johnny left so not enough time to put makeup on. IT expert testified that the Photos have not been altered for time or data, edited or otherwise manipulated. The photographs were taken in different lighting conditions and that is a good reason why what can be seen differs from one to another
Source for the evidence (Trial transcript) https://80b08171-ce73-4488-b369-fe3934b0504a.filesusr.com/ugd/5df505_e62f89f69f22437cbb8262c77fe54519.pdf
“ I can believe that Depp (apart from horrible misogynistic language in his texts/emails ABOUT them, if not to them) hasn’t abused partners before, as they report.”
Elk Barkin testified that he threw a bottle at her and he dated Winona Ryder when she was only 17 and he was an adult. So people saying he never abused any exes are wrong
From what I gathered (though I am not an expert by any stretch), this case doesn’t disprove the 12 out of 14 allegations of abuse that were proven in the UK case (the one Depp lost). This case was about an article (that didn’t even mention Depp by name) where Heard mentioned facing backlash over speaking out about abuse.
Even if the outcome of this case is correct, it doesn’t prove JD innocent of the abuse as some people seem to claim it does. I’m more worried over the precedent that this case sets for women speaking out about abuse in the future.
People who say “both are bad” have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of abuse and the role of power dynamics in abusive relationships. Even assuming Heard did and said things half as bad to Depp as he did to her, Depp is older, bigger, wealthier, and far more influential than Heard. These acts could never be on a level playing field, and that is by design. Heard was a victim of abuse. She fought back, and she’s been punished for it several times over, with no end in sight.
@ battering lamb
We now have a situation where a judge in a UK court found there was DV and a jury in the US court has found there wasn’t. So obviously that’s prima facie inconsistent. Inconsistent findings of fact are something courts like to avoid. So within the same jurisdiction there are procedures to minimise the risk. That’s things like linking any cases where the same issue is in dispute so there’s one decision that applies to all the parties. There are also rules that prohibit the parties re-litigating the same issues where a court has already made a decision as to the facts. We use terms like ‘res judicata’ and ‘issue estoppel’ to describe the concept.
Where different jurisdictions are involved that can of course be more tricky. AH’s team did try to argue that the US trial should not go ahead as the UK court had already ruled on the issues. There were problems with that argument though. Firstly Virginia law only allows for issue estoppel when there has already been a case between the parties. But in the UK trial AH was not a party (JD was suing a newspaper) she was just a witness. The judge also found that because the UK and US claims were different and there was a counterclaim the UK court had not been asked to address all the issues.
Note that the judge did not say the UK trial was unfair per se; just that it did not give JD a fair opportunity to deal with the issues in the US case. That’s a very different thing.
The law though does recognise that different people can reasonably come to different conclusions from the same evidence. That crops up in appeals. Appeal courts may state that they might have come to a different decision, but they won’t substitute their own views on the facts for those of the trial judge (or jury).
In civil trials the standard of proof is ‘balance of probabilities’. So the fact finder can say “We have no idea of which account is correct but we find this one slightly more likely than the other”. But the law is binary. There is no provision for a verdict of ‘maybe’. So once a party crosses the threshold, even if by a hairs breadth; then as far as the law is concerned, that is what happened (or didn’t happen)
As to the relevance of the UK judgement in the US proceedings, the starting point is that judgments are just opinions (albeit of a judge) but opinion evidence isn’t admissible.
The exception is expert evidence. Experts can give opinions. But only on matters that are outside the competence of the jury. Here the judgment is an opinion merely on the facts of the case. And courts recognise that judges are in no better position than lay people in making findings of fact.
So legally the only significance of the seemingly different results is that one person came to one conclusion on the evidence and some other people came to a different conclusion. That happens all the time in real life.
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
That is pretty much what happened, as the comments by epronovost, Dreamer and Malintzin sadly demonstrate. There is no such thing as mutual abuse, there’s always a primary aggressor who forces the conflict, and in this case it was obviously Depp, as Lorna just pointed out. Besides, just look at the power differential. Who has the most established career? The most fans? The most money? Depp does, and with their help he was able to manufacture and push forward his own reality, similar to what Trump and Putin did at a larger scale. This circus of a trial has reinforced a dangerous idea for victims all over the world: dare to fight back, and you might be considered just as bad as your abuser.
Lollypop – yes! Thank you for a view I can back. I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy a Depp movie again and I don’t get his fans being so abusive to Heard.
@ epitome of incomprehensibly
Indeed. But I think this case illustrates a problem with the reactive violence model.
It can just result in crude analyses as to “Who started it?”. And once that is established then any violence flowing the other way is automatically characterised as non abusive.
But that’s a double edged sword. At the risk of breaking my no comment rule, my own view was that JD’s admitted behaviour could be categorised as abusive (such that it would provide a defence to the claim)
But if the jury believed it was in fact AH who was the instigator then JD’s own behaviour suddenly gets excused.
I don’t know if the jury actually applied the label reactive violence, neither side raised that as a consideration, but they may well have applied that sort of reasoning.
I would also add this. I can understand people’s disappointment at the result, but I am wary of attacks on juries. That’s becoming ever more prevalent in all sorts of cases; and indeed attacks on judicial decisions. And it’s dangerous. You get press stories about how people who find in a way that the author doesn’t agree with are “enemies of the people” as if the public is all of one mind. But that puts people in real danger.
People are obviously free to disagree with the jury, or indeed the UK judge, but to suggest they didn’t apply their minds to the case and reach what they believed was an honest and just result I think is a bit disingenuous. They are the ones after all who actually were in the court for the whole of the proceedings.
And their job wasn’t to use the case as a referendum on wider issues. Such issues are important of course. But the jury’s remit was solely to make a decision in relation to one particular case, not a societal issue. And whilst not equating the two cases factually, this does remind me of the OJ Simpson case. That trial was used as an opportunity to highlight how the police treat black black people; which obviously is a necessary and worthy cause, but I don’t think the verdict did justice to the actual issue at hand.