“She’s begging for total global humiliation... She’s gonna get it”

The witch hunt against Amber Heard has set domestic violence attitudes back decades

Amber Heard testifying in court last week

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I said I wasn’t going to do this, but this week I hit a wall. I’ve been circling around Johnny Depp and Amber Heard for weeks now. When the trial started in Fairfax, Virginia* what feels like 935 days ago I was determined to ignore the whole charade. As I saw it then. The irresponsible headlines plastered all over the internet were too depressing. The graphic descriptions of things he allegedly said and did too triggering. The #TeamJohnny v #TeamAmber hype often discussed, in the UK at least, in a bizarre hall of mirrors parallel with #TeamColleen v #TeamRebecca. As if the two trials had anything in common other than happening simultaneously and the vilification of two not especially likeable women. (And we all know the importance of likability if you’re a woman.)

And then the memes started. Funny, I guess, if you’re that way inclined. Cruel, vicious, mocking in a way anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of a playground pillorying will recognise. But this wasn’t the playground this was the internet, and not just the internet, this was a woman’s life and livelihood. Team Johnny was noisy, vocal, obsessed, relentless. Not fans but stans. And Team Amber? There was no Team Amber, so far as I could see – or if there was, they had been silenced.

There was nothing Heard could say or do that wasn’t turned into a meme within seconds of it coming out of her mouth. There was no facial expression she could make that couldn’t be played for comedy. She was routinely accused of being a liar, mentally ill, an abuser herself, of acting (badly). And the more she cried, the more the internet laughed.

Whatever you think of Amber Heard – and I’m not deluded, I don’t by any stretch of the imagination think she’s perfect – there is no doubt she has not asked for this. Contrary to a text Depp sent in 2016, “She’s begging for total global humiliation... She’s gonna get it”, she was not begging for it. As she told the court last week, she was begging him not to. “I was begging Johnny to not make me prove what I’ve had to sit on the stand in front of all of you and prove,” she said. “I was begging not to do this, not to sit where I’m sitting today. I didn’t want this. I don’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be there then.”

Still, naively, I had hope. Of what, I’m not sure. I know. What a dope.

I mean, Depp had already lost the libel suit he’d brought against The Sun in 2020 for calling him a “wife beater”. In the UK, where the burden of proof lies with the defendant in libel cases, the judge found 12 out of 14 alleged incidents to be true and described Heard’s testimony of abuse, coercive control and violence to be “substantially true”.

Me too had happened! Harvey Weinstein was in jail! We believe women! Even women we don’t like! Don’t we? Don’t we?

Then a post on Twitter by writer Erin Kelly brought me up short. “My daughters were looking at shitty memes of Amber Heard last night,” she wrote. "I gave them A Talk. Hope it went in. Depressing.”

Depressing indeed. When even young women are getting in on the act – mocking Heard. Tormenting her. Humiliating her. Laughing at a woman as she describes her abuse – Me Too is screwed.

Christine Blasey Ford, whose 2018 testimony that now-Supreme Court judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her 36 years ago was said to have changed America (Si apre in una nuova finestra) (and also resulted in her having to go into hiding), must be wondering WTF it was all for.

On Tuesday, the New Yorker (Si apre in una nuova finestra)ran a piece – a sound, well-argued piece – that reached this conclusion: it is not inconceivable that Depp could win. Then, too lazy to find something to watch on Netflix, I idly watched a programme on old-school TV about the 16th century North Berwick witch hunts and subsequent trials. It was a well-trodden narrative in which women who didn’t fit the mould, who weren’t quiet and pretty and well-behaved, were hunted down, pilloried, tortured and ultimately executed.

Sound familiar?

Yesterday, Heard was booed by Depp’s fans who waited for him outside court and greeted him like a conquering hero, one who gave them his best Captain Jack Sparrow in return. Like it was a movie, of which Depp was the star, the Prince Charming, the quirky-but-hot indie lead, and Heard was the baddie, the evil queen, the wicked witch. Off with her head! She deserved to die. (And she has countless death threats to prove it.)

At the very least, she deserved, in their eyes, to lose everything. Because Amber Heard had lost in the court of popularity before she even started.

On a surface level, I get it. I’m not proud to say that I, too, in the not so distant past, adored Johnny Depp. He was, after all, the internet’s favourite boyfriend before Keanu stole his crown. By the time Depp was being bankrolled by the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise and people had long since ceased to be able to tell the difference between him and Captain Jack Sparrow, it was possible to find entire families where he was the permissible shag of every single family member regardless of gender (OK, that would be my family). When did we forget that hot, charismatic men can be abusive too? A fact that in the wake of Me Too I thought we’d never have to spell out again.

But here we are in 2022, nearly five years after Me Too made it feel safer for survivors to speak out and, lo, we discover, it’s not. Whatever the verdict, Amber Heard’s pillorying at the hands of Depp, his counsel, his fans, the internet and large elements of the media, have set attitudes to domestic violence (relationship abuse, whatever you want to call it) back a decade, if not two.

The hashtag #JusticeForJohnnyDepp has surpassed 10 billion views on tiktok. There are plenty of hashtags for Amber Heard, but I’m yet to find one of them in her favour.

“I want to move on with my life,” she said in court. “I want to move on, I want to move on, I want Johnny to move on, too. I want him to leave me alone.”

But she’s never going to be able to move on, is she? Because the internet has already found her guilty. Guilty of not being a perfect victim. Guilty of being in – and staying in, for longer than society deems “understandable” – a toxic relationship. Guilty of, as Depp himself has said, not leaving if she really was “scared to death”. And Johnny Depp – regardless of whether the court finds in his favour – has done a service for coercive and controlling exes everywhere: turns out it IS possible to continue to make your ex suffer, long after she or he thinks they have escaped your grasp. Depp has taken his power and used it to ruin Amber Heard’s life. Win or lose, she’s screwed.

Why didn’t you say something? Why did you stay? How many times have abuse survivors heard that? How many exhausted times have they tried to explain that their abuser told them they asked for it, that it was all their fault, that no-one would believe them, that it was all in their mind…? Whatever the jury decides, after watching Heard’s global pillorying do you really have to ask...?

• Refuge's National Domestic Abuse Helpline is available free, 24 hours a day, on 0808 2000 247

End note: *Depp is suing Heard for $50m for defaming him in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed where she wrote “two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse…” She didn’t name him or say she had been abused. She in her turn is countersuing for $100m claiming that he smeared her. Under local law, the burden of proof is on Depp to prove that Heard not only defamed him but did so with malice.

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