Sick little opinion piece in Vogue (and a response):
BY RAVEN SMITH
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Where to begin with the online cesspit that is Depp v. Heard? Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ll know that the ex-spouses are back in court. Johnny Depp is seeking damages of $50 million after Amber Heard wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in 2018 in which she spoke of being a victim of domestic abuse (without ever explicitly naming Depp). The minutiae being combed through at the trial has come to feel less like a lawsuit and more like a torturous exorcism of the past, a thorough and painful raking over the coals of their four-year entanglement.
The details of both Depp and Heard’s testimonies are harrowing all by themselves—gruesome, violent, and containing deeply intimate anecdotes about their relationship. Broadly speaking, witness testimonies can be persuasive, and with two actors in the dock, we can never be sure of the absolute truth. Still, despite the fact that London’s High Court previously found allegations that Depp was a “wife beater”to be “substantially true,” the internet appears to have overwhelmingly picked Depp’s side. Last week #JusticeForJohnnyDepp was trending on Twitter; yesterday, it was #AmberTurd.
Go on social media, and the anti-Heard sentiment is palpable. The memes have been ferocious, sometimes consisting of a spot-the-difference comparison with domestic-abuse victims; at other times, televised courtroom footage has been appropriated to openly mock her appearance. It is plain misogyny. The company behind the makeup compact Heard used to hide her bruises even made a TikTok disputing her claims. Heard is being systematically jeered at and ridiculed like a medieval criminal in the stocks as she catalogs historic abuse, as she alleges rape. Have we completely lost track of the severity of these allegations?
We all understand that Depp fans will side with Depp. But even the less aggressively Depp-pilled of us want to believe that the Caribbean pirate is blameless—if not squeaky clean then at least under the duress of drug addiction or acting out of character; that his violence can be somewhat explained away by a lapse of judgment or circumstance or both. We certainly don’t want to believe that this entire court case is a precise and conniving operation in discrediting Heard, regardless of what she has to say, regardless of her truth.
I don’t want to think about what this is saying to victims of abuse who are considering coming forward. And regardless of what Heard did or didn’t suffer at the hands of Depp, isn’t the relentless memeing of her a form of violence in itself? Is the pummeling by social media not a type of psychological assault? Are we not witnessing a modern-day witch trial?
Some weeks the internet is buoyant, all of us kept afloat by daft dresses and Kardashian weddings and Marvel actors saying they’ve never been in the same room. Other weeks it just feels too heavy. We’re watching people actively seek out humor in domestic abuse as Roe v. Wade is terrorized by pro-lifers and as we see yet more episodes of racially aggravated violence. We’ll rally, we always rally, but right here, right now, it feels shit.
I spend a lot of time wondering if everyone’s lost the plot—if the erosion of empathy we see online has rendered us so inherently unkind as a species that there’s no return. I don’t want to despair for humanity. I want to believe that some of us are offline and mildly compassionate or compassionate in a way that doesn’t get tweeted about—that you’re all out there being nice to each other and I’m reporting on a tiny cluster of internet users with pitchforks.
Though I’ve felt myself veering toward it, I can no longer “both sides” this. It’s time to draw a line. It’s time to believe women—all women. It’s time to believe Heard. The British courts believed Depp beat his ex-wife. What’s stopping the rest of us?
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Why Vogue is out-of-touch and dead-wrong on Depp v. Heard | by Jean-Marie Valheur | May, 2022 | Medium
Why Vogue is out-of-touch and dead-wrong on Depp v. Heard
Jean-Marie Valheur
A few days ago,
Vogue dropped an opinion piece entitled “Why It’s Time To Believe Amber Heard”. It did not help make her case. In fact it only helped make another case altogether — the case that
Vogue is awfully out of touch with the times we live in.
We are witnessing what is by far the greatest backlash against gendered double standards
ever in recent recorded history. You think #MeToo was big? Well it was, but this is every bit as monumental. On TikTok alone, videos tagged #JusticeForAmberHeard have over 21 million combined views. Videos tagged #JusticeForJohnnyDepp have over 5 billion(!) combined views as of April 29. And April 29 was almost a month ago…
Supporters of Heard will say “but… but… it’s all bots! it’s not organic!” and that’s just nonsense — research has shown that only 10% of Depp’s Twitter following consists of bots. Heard’s Twitter following, in contrast, consists of about 20% bots. Both are within the ‘normal range’ for celebrity accounts online, as bots are rampant and often follow popular accounts completely out of the blue and randomly. All statistics, globally, point towards ENORMOUS support for Johnny Depp in this court case. “But, they’re all deranged fans!” the Heard
stans will say. Not at all, in fact quite a few people who support the troubled actor have hardly ever seen a film of the man.
The case has touched a nerve with a huge number of people. It has brought all sorts of people together. From female abuse victims, to male victims of abuse. From dedicated feminists to MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists). From American pop culture watchers to random folks in India, Nigeria, the Philippines… Vogue is an out of touch piece of popular culture. A remnant of the days in which the best course of action was — misguidedly! — considered to believe any female victim, because to not believe her right off the bat would be to “hurt other victims and prevent them from coming forward”. I
do see the appeal of such reasoning, in a sense, but it’s simply too risky when things are taken at face value. And for every female victim to be insta-believed, there has to be man accused to be insta-disbelieved.
I’ve been following this case for quite a while now because the dynamics between men and women interest me. And sometimes, they scare me. See my former wife, who I loved dearly, would sometimes “fly off the handle” too. She’d even slap me. And once, I slapped back. Hard. On the back of her head, the way an unruly soldier may be slapped on the back of the head in a war movie. She was hurt, and it was awful. I never wanted to allow myself to be slapped by
anyone, out of principle. At the same time, the act of “hitting a woman” is
incredibly loaded. Is it okay, ever? Had she written an op-ed about ‘abuse’ or shared the story to other people, it may have changed people’s perceptions of me. For better or worse. She didn’t, however. She kept it to herself. Because she knows people are nuanced and complex, as are situations, and “the public” has no patience or talent for nuance.
Amber Heard never gave Johnny Depp the consideration my former wife gave me. She never sat down and discussed things, gracefully, and in private. Instead she tried to goad him into responding with violence. She recorded him, for hours upon hours. Trying to get “material”, to gather ‘evidence that could later get sliced up to give an impression of violence. She failed, quite miserably. Because there wasn’t any evidence in any of her recordings. In fact it only made
her look bad, moreso than Depp. She tried to turn the public against her former husband. She tried to ruin his reputation. Destroy him, with malicious intent. When other women in failing marriages have showed their husbands grace, and their husbands managed to show them grace in return. Not everyone, mind you, but it
does happen.
Vogue is out of touch. Incredibly, shockingly and appallingly out of touch. It is still trying to “go easy” on Heard and support her, when she never went easy on Johnny Depp and gave him no grace, no kindness or consideration. The best marriages are friendships… and friendship remains. This one is a shitshow of epic proportions and in many ways, a reckoning with the times.
Vogue cannot handle this. Neither can r/Deuxmoi or
Jezebel. But we, the people, face the uncomfortable truths because we must.
We must face the music. We must come to terms with the uncomfortable truth. And that uncomfortable truth is this — we, as a society, have protected powerful male abusers for far, far too long. A healthy and important backlash took place when #MeToo came around. I welcomed it. Most of us did. But things went too far, critical thinking was all but thrown out the window and replaced by a mentality akin to a witch hunt. Now a day of reckoning has come, and with Amber Heard at the center of it, she faces the world’s ire. This is unfortunate. But I would argue we must not “protect” her.
Yes, she may seem pitiful, and sad, but we have to remind ourselves of how she put
herself in that position. She did that. Amber Heard, all by herself. She unleashed forces bigger, more powerful than she could have ever predicted. More powerful, too, than Johnny Depp could have foreseen. You can blame “Russian bots” all you want, but the truth is, the genie is out the bottle, dark forces are out in the open, and rather than blaming misogyny we ought to blame the one person who could have stopped this ‘day of reckoning’. And that person’s name is Amber Heard.
Once upon a time, I studied journalism. And I was taught that for any story that you wish to release, you
must reach out to both parties. You absolutely have to ask the accused for his or her take on things before you hit ‘send’ on an online publication, or print out a physical copy with all sorts of heinous accusations inside. Johnny Depp wasn’t given the chance to say his piece, to defend himself. Out of nowhere, he was accused, and from that moment onwards, he was labeled “guilty”.
The Sun even went as far as to gleefully call him a ‘wife beater’ and cruelly repeat, over and over again, how he was an abuser. No one bothered to hear his side. No one gave a damn.
So he needed this trial. And he needed this chance, to finally get
his side out. After Heard has released hers and gotten endless praise for it, even being made a spokeswoman for the United Nations for the cause of victims of domestic abuse in what is, in hindsight, a
sickeningly inappropriate and misguided move.
If
Vogue had any integrity whatsoever, they’d do the right — and in today’s media landscape, brave — thing of giving Johnny Depp a cover story instead. They won’t, however, as
Vogue has neither integrity, nor bravery.
