Instead, there’s been tremendous focus on Heard’s mistakes and worst moments over the course of her relationship with Depp. Wrath, indeed.īut mainstream coverage of the trial has not seemed to grasp this. What happens to women who allege abuse? They get publicly pilloried, professionally blacklisted, socially ostracized, mocked endlessly on social media and sued. Depp’s frivolous and punitive suit, and the frenzy of misogynist contempt for Heard that has accompanied it, have done a great deal to vindicate Heard’s original point: that women are punished for coming forward. Lost in the scandal and spectacle of the lawsuit has been this reality: it is Heard, not Depp, who has been put on trial, and she is on trial for saying things whose truth is evidenced by the very fact of the lawsuit itself. Since she published her Post piece, Heard’s life has been consumed by the rage and retaliation of Depp and his fans. But now, it’s not just with Depp, but with the whole country. In this way, Heard is still in an abusive relationship. One woman has been made into a symbol of a movement that many view with fear and hatred, and she’s being punished for that movement. We are in a moment of virulent antifeminist backlash, and the modest gains that were made in that era are being retracted with a gleeful display of victim-blaming at a massive scale. While most of the vitriol is nominally directed at Heard, it is hard to shake the feeling that really, it is directed at all women – and in particular, at those of us who spoke out about gendered abuse and sexual violence during the height of the #MeToo movement. The trial has turned into a public orgy of misogyny. Yet the actor and his fans claim that it was Heard, not Depp, who was the abuser in their marriage. That same trial found that Depp physically abused Heard on at least 12 occasions. UK courts are much more amenable to defamation claims than American ones, but Depp still couldn’t prevail: the British judge found that the Sun’s characterization of Depp was “substantially true”. In 2020, a British court heard Depp’s lawsuit against the British tabloid the Sun, which Depp sued for defamation after an article referred to him as a “wife beater”. This is not the first time Depp has sued over the allegations. This cruelty has now been joined in and compounded by the jury, who have gone beyond mocking her for telling her story, and now declared that she actually broke the law by doing so. The audio of her crying became a TikTok trend. Many performed mocking re-enactments of her testimony, lip-syncing along as she recounted the alleged abuse. They took screenshots of her weeping face and made it a meme. Afterwards, ordinary people, along with a few celebrities and even brands like Duolingo and Milani, took to social media to mock or undermine Heard. When Heard took the stand, she became emotional as she recounted how Depp allegedly hit her, manipulated and controlled her, surveilled her and sexually assaulted her. In the service of this myth, any cruelty can be justified. Online, the case has taken on a heady mythology, and belief in Depp’s righteousness persists independent of the evidence. These conspiracy theories are unsupported by the facts of the case, but that has not stopped them from spreading. She’s been accused of convincing the multiple witnesses who say Depp abused her to lie – repeatedly and under oath – for years. She has been accused of faking the photos of her injuries from Depp’s alleged beatings, painting bruises on with makeup. A broad consensus has emerged online that Heard must be lying about her abuse. Over the past six weeks, as the trial was live-streamed online, many of those who have tuned in to watch have treated Heard with the same contempt that Depp did in his texts. In that sense, women’s speech just became a lot less free. It will have a devastating effect on survivors, who will be silenced, now, with the knowledge that they cannot speak about their violent experiences at men’s hands without the threat of a ruinous libel suit. The strange, illogical, and unjust ruling has the effect of sanctioning Depp’s alleged abuse of Heard, and of punishing Heard for speaking about it. The verdict came after a trial that was televized – an extremely rare situation for a proceeding that concerns allegations of domestic violence – and which was subject to almost inescapable media coverage, nearly all of it in favor of one litigant, even as the jury was not sequestered. Bizarrely, the same jury found that one of Depp’s lawyer’s defamed Heard when he accused her of staging a “hoax” scene of abuse to which police were called at the couple’s home. On Wednesday, the case’s verdict came in, finding that Heard defamed Depp, acting with “malice,” when she described herself as a victim of domestic abuse.
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