hm.

ugggh.

So Johnny Depp won his defamation suit against Amber Heard.

The redpill incels are declaring that 'me too' is over, this just proves women are evil and bla bla bla.

The Guardian UK is declaring the trial as a win for misogyny.

I want to say it's like when someone criticizes Israel for genociding Palestinians and then that person gets called 'anti semitic'....

No, really, I'm not expressing misogyny when I say that Amber Heard was abusive, and did defame her ex husband.

I hate that so many really ugly and stupid people got behind Johnny. More as an excuse to hate on a pretty woman and say misogynistic bullshit out loud than for the merits of the case. Stopped clock and all of that, though. She was obviously lying. She was obviously abusive. Her 'mountain of evidence' was...not all that mountainous.

I don't think Johnny Depp is or was a good person, or a saint, or blameless. I also don't think that anyone in a relationship, man or woman, should be hitting the other person. Or that anyone who hits another person should think that they're OK to do that without getting hit back. I also can't imagine texting a friend that I want to kill my spouse and fuck their corpse. That's extremely ugly and nasty and terrible. I can't imagine saying or thinking that about a person I was in a relationship with!  And I've been in an abusive relationship. So.... yeah.

I have a lot of feelings. I don't think it's really safe to talk about them in FB or with a larger audience because DV and SA are triggering for so many people.

I have a family situation involving a male victim and female abuser. During the many years of their marriage, they have both inflicted physical injuries on one another--it took some time but eventually he started hitting back. I have not observed any verbal abuse from the male person to the female person, but I have directly observed verbal abuse, put-downs, and insults directed from the female person to the male person and I have directly observed at least one occasion of the female person physically abusing an animal. Not a human, but still pretty upsetting to see. I used to agonize and get super angry and depressed about the situation, with a lot of anger at the female person and a lot of sympathy and empathy for the male person. But eventually I burned out on it; you can't care more about a person than a person cares about themselves for decades without burning out. And various incidents and memories of the male person long before meeting the female person eventually got through to me that the male person was never any kind of angel. Turns out they are/were both really rather awful people:  liars, manipulators, unstable, drama addicts...and they found each other, cling together despite bringing out the absolute worst in each other, and keep on engaging in these endless cycles of interpersonal violence, pushing each other's buttons and using their dysfunctional relationship as a chess piece in their interactions with friends and family. They are both getting something out of it, they both feel that they 'need' or 'deserve' the situation, they stay together no matter how violent and crazy things become. They are both awful people.

And sadly I think that's where I finally am with the JD/AH situation. I hope they both get help and therapy and become better people rather than moving on to the next dysfunctional interaction.

So much about this trial was upsetting to watch and listen to.  I believe 100% Johnny Depp was verbally and emotionally abusive.  100% Amber Heard was verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive.   

I think she would have won if she had not told so many crazy lies. 

Sick people. Would not want to be in a relationship with either of them.

Nothing she said or did should invalidate the #metoo movement.

I am glad JD came forward and spoke about being physically beaten by his wife; hopefully that will remove some of the stigma from male DV victims.

But justice is for people who have the money for it, and I doubt this will change the reality of normal folks who are in DV relationships.

And....this was a huge distraction from stuff in the real world that is happening that has a more immediate and awful effect on all of us.


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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/01/amber-heard-johnny-depp-trial-metoo-backlash?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2gEsG-qFBZMmRSzHYXXFjWiIA25gHys1pcsHlu_5UGCR7-gYdLZ42kHCE

The Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial was an orgy of misogyny

Moira Donegan

The backlash to #Me Too has long been under way. But this feels like a tipping point

‘In text messages to friends, Johnny Depp fantasized about murdering his then-wife, the actress Amber Heard.’ Photograph: Reuters

Wed 1 Jun 2022 16.33 EDT

 

 

In text messages to friends, Johnny Depp fantasized about murdering his then-wife, the actress Amber Heard. “I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead,” Depp wrote. In other texts, he disparaged his wife’s body in luridly misogynist terms. “Mushy pointless dangling overused floppy fish market,” he called her.

The texts became public as part of Depp’s defamation suit against Heard, now at trial in a Virginia court. Ostensibly, Depp is suing over a 2018 article that Heard published in the Washington Post, titled “I spoke up against sexual violence – and faced our culture’s wrath.” In the piece, the actress writes, “Two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article does not mention Depp, but his lawyers say that the piece was about him – and was defamatory. For those 11 words, Depp is seeking $50m.

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A jury thought he deserved it. 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. Bizarrely, the same jury found that one of Depp’s lawyer’s defamed Heard when he said that her account of abuse was “a hoax.” 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. 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. 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. In that sense, women’s speech just became a lot less free.

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. A broad consensus has emerged online that Heard must be lying about her abuse. She has been accused of faking the photos of her injuries from Depp’s alleged beatings, painting bruises on with makeup. She’s been accused of convincing the multiple witnesses who say Depp abused her to lie – repeatedly and under oath – for years. These conspiracy theories are unsupported by the facts of the case, but that has not stopped them from spreading. Online, the case has taken on a heady mythology, and belief in Depp’s righteousness persists independent of the evidence.

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In the service of this myth, any cruelty can be justified. 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. Afterwards, ordinary people, along with a few celebrities and even brands like Duolingo and Milani, took to social media to mock or undermine Heard. They took screenshots of her weeping face and made it a meme. Many performed mocking re-enactments of her testimony, lip-syncing along as she recounted the alleged abuse. The audio of her crying became a TikTok trend. 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.

This is not the first time Depp has sued over the allegations. 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”. 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”. That same trial found that Depp physically abused Heard on at least 12 occasions. Yet the actor and his fans claim that it was Heard, not Depp, who was the abuser in their marriage.

The trial has turned into a public orgy of misogyny. 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. 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. 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. In this way, Heard is still in an abusive relationship. But now, it’s not just with Depp, but with the whole country.

 

Since she published her Post piece, Heard’s life has been consumed by the rage and retaliation of Depp and his fans. 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. 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. What happens to women who allege abuse? They get publicly pilloried, professionally blacklisted, socially ostracized, mocked endlessly on social media and sued. Wrath, indeed.

But mainstream coverage of the trial has not seemed to grasp this. Instead, there’s been tremendous focus on Heard’s mistakes and worst moments over the course of her relationship with Depp. As is typical of domestic abuse victims, Heard does seem to have done things many of us would not be proud of. She fought back. Depp’s outbursts and insults left Heard resentful and angry with him, and sometimes, she told him so. Many are quick to point out that Heard is not a perfect victim. But no woman is. We are told that the lawsuit is “complicated.” But the lawsuit is not complicated. It is abuse. Now, that abuse has been sanctioned by a jury.

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Maybe the persistence of this notion that Heard is somehow equally culpable for what happened to her is why people like the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg have characterized the trial as “the death of Me Too”: it shows how easily a victim can still be blamed and isolated, how easily what happened to her can be taken as a failure of her personal character, rather than as part of a social pattern. Not all women are alike, but feminism was supposed to let us see how we are all similarly vulnerable – both to gendered abuse and to the gendered application of double standards and unjust blame. No victim is perfect. No victim should have to be. After all, if a man cannot be considered abusive towards an imperfect woman, then just how perfect does a woman need to be before it becomes wrong to beat her?

For their part, Depp’s fans seem to not so much deny Depp’s alleged violence against Heard, but to approve of it. “He could have killed you,” says one viral Tiktok supporting Depp, the text superimposed over photos of Heard’s bruised face. “He had every right.” The post has more than 222,200 likes.

The backlash to #Me Too has long been under way. Critics of the movement painted women’s efforts to end sexual violence as excessive and intemperate from the start, claiming #MeToo had “gone too far” before it really got under way at all. And yet the Heard trial does feel like a tipping point in our culture’s response to gender violence. The forces of misogynist reaction are perhaps even stronger now for having been temporarily repressed. Where once women refused, en masse, to keep men’s secrets, or to remain silent about the truth of their own lives, now, a resurgence of sexism, virulent online harassment, and the threat of lawsuits, all aim to compel women back into silence – by force.

In some ways, one could see the defamation suit itself as an extension of Depp’s abuse of Heard, a way to prolong his humiliation and control over her. The only difference is that now, the legal system and the public have been conscripted to take part. This seems to be at least partly how Depp sees it. In 2016, as their marriage broke apart, Depp texted his friend Christian Carino, vowing revenge against Heard. “She is begging for global humiliation,” Depp wrote. “She is going to get it.”

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist