Opinion editors are not responsible for agreeing or disagreeing with their writers but rather elevate each individual’s specific voice.

Imagine a powerful man as a ship, like the Titanic. That ship is a huge enterprise. When it strikes an iceberg, there are a lot of people on board desperate to patch up holes — not because they believe in or even care about the ship, but because their own fates depend on the enterprise.

– Amber Heard, Washington Post

Amber Heard was undoubtedly abused, as shown empirically and undoubtedly by the 14 pieces of evidence she had on her side.

The box office numbers for “Aquaman 2” were predictably low. But why? Was it the bad CGI? The dwindling fanbase of people who like DC more than Marvel?

Or was it collateral damage from the scathing defamation case that Amber Heard lost against her ex-husband?

Petitions to add her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, back into the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise after their legal battle have received thousands of signatures—whereas petitions to remove Heard from the “Aquaman” franchise have received millions. 

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp began dating after meeting on set for their movie “The Rum Diary.” She was a bright-eyed ingénue, a rising star at 23 years of age. Depp was a veteran in the industry, one of the largest movie stars in the world. He was 46.

In 2015, after a few years of rocky marriage, Heard filed for divorce and a restraining order, all within the same week. Later, she published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post where she wrote about surviving domestic violence, never naming her former spouse. What followed was years of grueling legal battles and a tarnished reputation that would haunt her indefinitely. 

Firstly, Depp sued The Sun for libel after they released a headline calling him a “wife beater.” A U.K. judge found substantial evidence of at least 12 of the 14 counts of abuse Heard made, rendering his claims baseless and losing him the trial. 

Initially, he sued in the U.K. because the courts are more favorable for celebrities in libel cases. However, because his case was determined by a judge trained to look at evidence and not by a jury, he fired blanks over the pond.

Why did Depp agree to pay £5 million as a settlement in The Sun trial, including a confidentiality agreement, if there was no truth to the allegations?

After this loss, he pursued the defamation case in the U.S.—but this time, against Heard, who authored the alleged “defamatory” article in The Washington Post. 

Amber Heard had more evidence than most abuse victims do. Even so, the verdict fell into the hands of the court of public opinion, who weaponized one-dimensional tropes of female victims to frame her as the abuser.

In journalist Michael Hobbes’ personal essay “The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial,” he lays out in the shortest, most consumable way just some of the evidence against Johnny Depp—that of which resulted in him losing his trial in the U.K.

“Numerous people saw Heard with bruises, cuts and missing chunks of hair. Depp’s staffers testify to the damage he caused to their homes and hotel rooms,” Hobbes writes. “Heard’s acting coach says she had to schedule a longer session with Heard to help her work through the trauma of the relationship; a makeup artist says she helped cover bruises.” 

He goes on to say:

“Numerous audio recordings include tacit or explicit acknowledgments by Depp that he exploded in anger at Heard—as well as some of those explosions themselves. In one she says, ‘I cry in my bedroom after I dumped you a week prior after you beat the shit out of me,’ and Depp replies, ‘I made a huge mistake. I won’t do it again.’ In another Heard says, ‘put your cigarettes out on someone else’ and Depp replies, ‘Shut up, fat ass.’”

If this isn’t incriminating enough, the last alleged abuse incident, wherein Depp threw his phone at Heard, was witnessed entirely by her friend via phone call. Two more testified that they’d seen him act aggressively towards her, and her sister testified that Depp once held her dog out of the window of a moving car when he was drinking.

This is all in addition to pictures of contemporaneous communication between Heard and counterparts, as well as Depp and counterparts, to which he admitted his abuse. 

There is documentation of his texts from early in his relationship with Heard, calling her an “idiot cow,” “filthy whore,” and “worthless hooker.” One particularly unsettling text says, “I’ll smack the ugly cunt around before I let her in, don’t worry.”

Heard isn’t the only person to accuse Depp of violence. A 2018 lawsuit filed by a crew member claimed Depp verbally accosted and punched him on the set of “City of Lies.” 

Even the argument that Depp’s whole U.S. case rests on, which is that she accused him for the sake of gaining clout, is a complete moot point to any woman who has ever stepped forward. 

Speaking from personal experience, coming forward about abuse and assault does nothing good for your reputation. At its very best, it consists of hours worth of headache-inducing meetings, documentation, and holding a magnifying glass up to traumatic events that you must relive and relive again to prove your account is true.

At worst, it destroys your life and mental health until you have nothing left to give, except for giving up. 

According to the APA, 20 percent of survivors develop mental health conditions after abuse, such as PTSD and substance abuse disorders. Intimate partner violence is a precursor to 6 percent of all suicides.

Survivors do not benefit from speaking out against powerful men, as evident in pop culture history, from Anita Hill to Christine Blasey Ford. E. Jean Carroll is the exception—she is one of the “lucky ones,” having an $83 million settlement to show for her trauma. 

This is a sad irony: you can’t put a price tag on trauma. 

Like leeches, the public latched onto the few bits of discrepancy in Heard’s case, undeservingly sucking all probability from her story. A prime example: Heard’s divorce settlement that she planned to donate half to the ACLU, and the other half to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Come to find out—via Depp’s lawyers, nonetheless—she didn’t follow through. 

So, we have options. We can take this at face value, which we would presumably do if we had zero media literacy or critical thinking skills, or we could take a closer look, like Hobbes did:

“While it’s true that Heard hasn’t donated the full amount, all evidence indicates that she intends to,” he wrote. “Large charity donations are routinely spread out over longer periods and representatives from the ACLU testified that Heard was transparent with them about her financial circumstances and remains committed to completing her payments. The ‘proven lie’ here amounts to an imprecise choice of words: She said ‘I donated’ when she should have said ‘I pledged.’”

If misspeaking is a crime, lock me up. In fact, lock Johnny Depp up too—unless he wants to rescind his statements of support for Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein, and Marilyn Manson. 

And this is who y’all want representing #MeToo victims? 

Just because a woman does not present herself as the picturesque “perfect victim,” with no wrinkles or shrapnel of anger or vengeance in her case—which would be well warranted—does not mean we should dismiss her story or allegations. It’s common for victims of a traumatic event to mix up their details, change their story, or not recount it entirely. 

Is this at all surprising when the system we’ve curated for them to come forward in is one that was never built for them to succeed in the first place?

In the Virginia case, a Disney executive testified that no one at the studio was even aware of Heard’s op-ed when they decided not to ask Depp back for the next “Pirates” movie.

Looks like this might have been a Hail Mary for Depp’s dying career, rather than what it was percieved as—cash grab on the part of Heard, at the expense of her life as she knew it.

Heard was doomed to lose from the beginning for two reasons. This trial wasn’t about who abused who; it was about defamation—and it was preceded by another defamation trial that went way differently for Depp. 

“Because the U.S. trial was before a jury, it allowed Depp’s lawyers to focus on Heard, a well-worn tactic of defendants in domestic abuse cases but one that was dismissed by the judge in the UK,” an article in the Guardian wrote.

As many of us know, the entire trial was live-streamed on YouTube—the equivalent of throwing bait into waters infested with woman-hungry, Twitch-streaming sharks. As  media coverage about the trial climbed in numbers, like TikTok parodies, Twitter memes, and body-language-bullshit-analysts, the jury trying Heard was able to consume all this content practically in real-time. On TikTok, the hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp received 19 billion views. Jurors were instructed not to read about the case online but they were not isolated from social interactions and were allowed to keep their phones.

To put it in legal terms, the jury was not sequestered. 

Jurors get sequestered in traffic cases for Christ’s sake—you mean to tell me they could go home and watch the news or scroll Facebook to hear the populus’ opinions on this trial as they were weighing in on it? 

In an article for Vanity Fair, the People’s Princess of White House interns and my fondest muse, Monica Lewinsky, wrote:

“We experience only apprehension, knee-jerk outrage, and titillation. It’s like going to the opera and reading a couple of translated supertitles but not understanding Italian. And despite whatever else this is, it is a soap opera.”

The next vital legal strategy weaponized by Depp’s team was requesting this trial take place in Virginia. So why is that?

First, we must answer the question of why he was able to sue in Virginia—that being because it was a defamation case. The defamation in question concerning Heard’s Washington Post Op-Ed, which would fall under the jurisdiction of the Fairfax Circuit Court. 

But he resides nowhere near Virginia. Not one of his five homes is relatively close to Virginia—hell, half aren’t even in the States. Depp and Heard both would have lived in Los Angeles at the time the abuse was taking place.

So again, why Virginia?

According to The Independent, Virginia has notoriously lax—nay, nonexistent—Anti-SLAPP laws. 

“Anti-SLAPP laws are intended to prevent people from using courts, and potential threats of a lawsuit, to intimidate people who are exercising their First Amendment rights,” according to the Reporters Committee.

SLAPP laws typically protect an individual’s right to free speech and free press; like, for example, if you wanted to publish an article about your (allegedly) abusive husband, without ever mentioning his name. Virginia also does not possess any shield laws that protect anyone participating in the publication of news through somewhere like WaPo from being sued for libel, defamation, or non-disclosure of source identities. 

This is a terrifying breach of protection for anyone practicing journalism in Virginia. It is far worse for someone like Amber Heard who has lost her reputation and livelihood because of this oversight in the state’s protection of writers, reporters, or anyone looking to publish a personal story about their own life. 

Moreover, this oversight was admitted by Depp’s team to be the precise reason why the trial didn’t take place in their residential state of California, which is noted in the same article by The Independent. 

The twisted legal strategies did not work alone. They were compounded with a culture insatiable for female suffering, which we will now turn to and ask: How? Why?

This was a trial full of faults and loopholes that Heard would have never been able to win, no matter how innocent she was. The Take, a YouTube channel that does video essays, called this a trial by social media.

The area in which this took place is a product of our desensitization to violence due to True Crime culture, combined with dormant feelings of vitriol towards imperfect women, waiting for an impetus. 

Camille Vasquez, Depp’s lawyer, recently admitted that she played up the theatrics of the case, knowing the trial was televised and it would benefit Depp. If we carefully examine the legal strategies at work in this trial, we see that no decision made by Depp’s team was accidental. Each move was calculated to make Heard look worse.

Amber Heard was positioned to be an evil, scheming woman. The conniving vixen—a trope born from Genesis and seen forced upon women from the White House to Hollywood, was the weapon of choice for the angry anti-Heard mob. This was a meticulously crafted machine built on hate and misogyny—one that grasped onto empty “proof,” including but not limited to: suspected fake crying, mutual abuse, and conspiracies about her doing coke on the stand. 

This was mixed in a chemistry lab with the parasocial relationship the public has with beloved actor Depp and the ensuing wrath that came from someone threatening that.

As The Take said in their “Manipulative Victim Trope” video essay:

“The media is deeply invested in these fictions because they obscure the structural forces that are at play.”

To flip the coin, let’s say Heard was the perfect, innocent victim. One familiar to us from history and pop culture—younger, sweeter, quieter. 

It wouldn’t have mattered.

Gabby Petito, a 22 year old from New York on a road trip with her boyfriend, fit the stereotypical “perfect” narrative of the innocent, often white, female victim. Despite this, she was initially labeled the aggressor by police. They dismissed it as a “domestic scuffle” and sent the couple on their merry way.

After the exchange with police, Petito went missing, prompting the police to turn their heads to her then-boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. Later, she was found dead—murdered by Laundrie.

So even if Heard engaged in toxic, horrid, nasty behavior towards Depp, it would not make her the abuser. Besides the fact she has mountains of evidence on her side, and she is attempting to work in a system built against her, domestic violence experts say “mutual abuse” is a myth. 

“Mutual abuse” places more blame on the primary victim, and less accountability on the primary abuser. Bad behavior does not equate abuse. Neither does toxic, wretched behavior—on its own, that is.

One example: the famed defecation on Depp’s bed that earned Heard the nickname “Amber Turd.” You can read about the story above—it’s not something to be proud of. However, after deeply reviewing each piece of evidence, Depp’s violent history outside of his relationship with Heard, and the public feedback to the trial, Heard’s actions were not proof of her wickedness, only her weakness. 

Abuse occurs when one party has power over another. So to say, if one party is decades older and has tangible star power over the other—in the form of movies under his belt, net worth ($150 million vs. $9 million), and legacy. It’s clear who had more power in this situation, and thus who was the abuser.

Heard’s toxic behavior does not negate the existence of Depp’s abuse.

So what’s the point? Why write about this now, after so much time?

At the beginning of my freshman year of college, I discovered Rayne Fisher-Quann’s essay “Who’s Afraid of Amber Heard?” through her Substack, @internetprincess. This led me to Hobbes’ essay, which led me to Lewinsky’s. I fell down a rabbit hole of video essays, analyses of the portrayal of female victims in pop culture, and the hundreds of pages of legal documentation behind Depp v. Heard. Then came the eponymous Netflix “docuseries,” if you could even call it that. It’s a joke, and yet it reignited the flames of the case against Amber Heard.

Time and time again, the media has regurgitated the same tired narrative that Amber Heard is a monster. A mutual abuser. 

When we associate neatness with victimhood, we lose a collection of survivors’ stories and generations of survivors. Heard’s story matters to us because all survivor’s stories matter—imperfect or otherwise. If an affluent white woman isn’t protected from the wrath for survivors, it can happen to any one of us. 

We owe Amber Heard a collective apology. On behalf of my Tumblr-scrolling 12-year-old self who didn’t initially believe her, on behalf of the sad excuse for “journalism” that’s been written about her, and on behalf of the world.  

What I hope we can take away from this is a little more grace and compassion for victims. I hope we can stop defending men who exhibit the worst behavior imaginable on a regular basis, and start defending victims who only display it in their darkest hour. 

Victims don’t have to be perfect to deserve a fair trial. They don’t have to be perfect to deserve empathy. And they don’t have to be perfect to deserve a fresh start. 

It sets back the clock to a time when a woman who spoke up and spoke out could be publicly shamed and humiliated … It sets back the idea that violence against women should be taken seriously.

-Amber Heard, Instagram