What life inside the “cult” of Depp support has shown a feminist about male survivorship
Fan girl… what a very misogynistic and reductionist phrase. It’s a phrase used like a slur against men and women of all ages—some of us domestic and sexual violence survivors ourselves—who support Johnny Depp in his trials against tabloid rags as well as his ex, Amber Heard, a purported feminist and spokesperson for women’s rights, who claimed to be a domestic violence and sexual assault “survivor.” In the wake of Depp’s defamation trial and the apparent upset of feminism, the fight for equality, and All That is Good in The World, I think it’s time to yank the rug out from under the false piety of people who believe this is somehow a setback for humanity and feminism, because ultimately it mirrors back to us our own biases, and it’s time for some self-reflection.
Three years ago, well before the rise of Depp’s TikTok support community and the livestreamed defamation trial, I could not have cared one way or the other about Johnny Depp and had no idea about Amber Heard, as I suspect many people still don’t. When Amber Heard first lodged her allegations against her ex-husband, at the height of the Me Too movement, when Hollywood bigwigs seemed to be falling left, right, and center, my first thought was, “wow, him too,” and I went on about my day. By the time the now infamous TMZ video aired, I could not watch it completely, as I found it too triggering. What never sat right with me though was that she kept piping up, talking at him. It did not feel right. She was drawing fire, calling attention to herself instead of fading into the proverbial hedge. What was she doing? Maybe, I thought, they just bring it out of each other. Mutual toxicity.
Then in late 2019 I saw a headline that he was suing her for defamation, and it gave me pause. I thought he was either crazy, stupid, or just maybe…innocent? I was not quite ready to entertain that thought yet, but I thought it was a bold move, and I was intrigued at the least. So I started the age-old keyboard warrior tactic of digging through the internet and scouring interviews, plus commentary from both fan bases. However, by this point I had a few years under my belt as an interrogator in the Army, and I knew that the difference between RUMINT (rumored intelligence) and actionable intelligence even via an open source like the internet is being able to get an appropriate, accurate, and trustworthy source. I wanted their own statements, their own verbiage, and even better if I could view their body language in an interview-style approach to see where the truth lie and who was being the most deceptive. I lucked up in finding their depositions from the divorce, which was as close a proximity as I could get to an interrogation format. That cracked the door wide for me into understanding just why Johnny Depp decided to fight his corner. In short, I discovered this: Amber Heard’s entire game was projection.
Throughout her deposition, she reversed the roles. More to the point, the keystone of understanding her stories and even her testimony while deposed and on the stand is to see that point by point by point, she turned each of the events 180 degrees. In the initial deposition, she was asked to authenticate an audio recording of the two of them arguing and then introduce what is happening in the clip. She stated that they were discussing a fight where she was trying to get away and he was in a room, she was trying to get through the door, and when she got in he hit her. It raises several questions, not the least of which is why she was trying to get into a room with him instead of getting away, but when they played the audio, I also realized that she was trying to get into a bathroom. One way in, one way out. A locked door. So ultimately, he was trying to avoid her, and she was giving chase. In this particular scenario, she was the aggressor and pursuer. She admitted that she hit him, and then minimized his complaint by telling him he’s not punched, he’s only “hit.” That type of minimization is an abuser tactic, typical of gaslighting narcissists. Going back to her preface though, she said that she was trying to get away initially and that she got hit. Listening to the audio however showed that she turned everything around. In subsequent stories, understanding that she reversed everything is what makes her allegations suddenly make sense, because in the way she tells every tale of alleged abuse, even in the recent defamation case, it makes no sense. Projection is why.
For example, on the stand she and her sister both told a story about Depp trying to throw Heard down a staircase. Except in the story the placement does not jibe logistically; she has always maintained that she was higher up on the stairs, and so has her sister Whitney Henriquez’s version on the stand. But the leverage for pushing someone downstairs actually lies with the person who is higher up. To be lower on a staircase and try to push someone down makes no sense. Linguistically, you would say that someone tried to “pull” you down if you are higher than they. When you apply the principle of projection though the story becomes crystal clear. Ms. Heard was higher than Depp on the staircase and tried to push him down. Occam’s razor wins. It fit not only with his testimony, and his security officer’s, but also with the full deposition of a former friend of both Heard sisters, Jennifer Howell. Howell is the founder of Art of Elysium, a non-profit bringing art to underprivileged children; she came forward after the UK trial which Johnny Depp lost against The Sun tabloid. After hearing Heard’s testimony, as well as that of Heard’s sister, Howell felt compelled to speak up, as she claimed she had received a different telling of events.
Howell’s deposition, although too late for The Sun trial and disallowed as hearsay in the defamation case, fleshed the story out further. She stated that Henriquez came to stay with her following an altercation where Heard hit her after nearly pushing Depp down the stairs. She claimed that when Henriquez lived with her, it was because she wanted Heard to have time to calm down after she intervened on the stairs. Henriquez told Howell that she was afraid Heard would kill Depp, and also related another occasion where Henriquez told Howell and the rest of the Art of Elysium staff that Heard had cut off Depp’s finger.
Without the benefit of Howell’s later testimony, it was still simple enough at the time to realize that the story had to happen the other way around because it did not make sense the way she told it. Suffice to say, from watching the divorce depositions I decided to do a bit more digging because ultimately, it’s not just the insult of false allegations while Heard held positions of esteem within the feminist and domestic violence awareness communities, it’s the notion that she was coming off as the wolf in sheep’s clothing while simultaneously being the girl who cried wolf. It’s head scratching, mystifying, but she inadvertently managed not only to shine a light on the fact that male victims exist, but also to prove that false allegations have a wide range of fallout. It’s not simply that she lied about being hit or about being pushed down the stairs, it’s that she was the one doing it. Not only fraud, but abuse. She is, in a word, both the injury and insult to domestic violence survivors—the Jussie Smollett of domestic violence and survivorship.
The more I dug, the more I kept coming up with gold: text messages from her parents submitted for the UK trial against The Sun in which David Heard and Paige Parsons Heard called Depp their son and apologized to him, saying that he “has every right to be angry” and that Heard only “did it because the lawyers told her she could stay in the penthouses longer; otherwise she would have to leave within 30 days.” Other gems such as an interview with W magazine where Heard says she could get “trailer park, real fast.”
Yet it was the letter from Vanessa Paradis that cinched it for me in my initial deep dive into the depths of Depp and Heard drama; that is what took me from the mutuality angle to solidly believing that Depp alone was the wronged party. Most people are aware at least peripherally of how domestic violence typically works, and that offenders will reel in an unsuspecting victim only to trap them, abuse them, and gaslight them into staying, thinking they will never escape or be believed. The reason we call them domestic abusers is simply because it’s a cycle of violence repeated on their domestic partners and people in their close circle. For Vanessa Paradis, and then even other former partners of Depp’s such as Winona Ryder to speak up, spoke volumes. These were women who had time, distance, and safety apart from him—independent careers and no reason to rely on him. That was not the norm. If Me Too taught us anything, in fact, it was that the moment one woman stepped into the survivor’s circle, many more were soon to follow…except in this case, the opposite happened. Reports resurfaced about Heard’s former partner instead, as she was arrested in 2009 for assaulting her then wife in public at the Seattle airport.
Bias seemed to work in reverse with the Depp-Heard scenario, in this Bizarro world of abuse. Instead of isolating his victim, I learned that Depp lived on a penthouse floor surrounded by his wife, her best friend and her then fiancé, as well as Henriquez. In three out of the five apartments he owned on the floor, Heard’s family and friends isolated him instead of the other way around. Hence text messages to his security to extract him so he could get safely away. In fact, it was Depp who made the perfect patsy for a fake allegations set up. The world has known of his substance abuse problems and his propensity to smash things in an apparent rage. In Heard’s reports and even in her purported evidence, the only solid thing Heard can give is evidence of vandalism and audios of drunken insults. Everything in fact, aside from the problematic photographs is circumstantial. No metadata, no medical records, and in spite of practically recording their entire marriage, no actionable evidence of abuse. The emperor is naked.
And then the finger incident entered the picture. After encountering the gruesome, albeit censored photos online of Depp’s severed fingertip, it was again a “he said, she said” account of who abused who and again logistics left me scratching my head. A guitar player, even one drugged or drunk out of his mind, would be hard pressed to sever a finger on his own dominant hand. His story shifted, and that part is natural for an abuse victim trying to cover for their partner. The fact that her story shifted frankly rankled. At this point, I was already aware that she struck him via the bathroom audio and divorce depo, and that she had likely tried to push him downstairs in their apartment, so the third strike of a finger incident had me believing his story over hers, in addition to the fact that their body language told the real story. Again, returning to the divorce deposition nothing is clearer than their mimicry of the event—her hand miming the throwing of a bottle versus his hand miming one sailing past his head. His hand placement and telling of the story mirrors what he said on the stand in Virginia: his hand rested over the edge of the bar where he sat, he dodged a first bottle that flew by, and the second bottle smashed against his hand on the bar, severing it from the fingertip that folded over the edge of the counter. It fit, it made sense logistically, and it jibed with later surfacing audio of the aftermath wherein Heard says in the background, “I didn’t mean to! Does it hurt?” and the voice of Depp’s now deceased security lead, Jerry Judge, says that she told him she threw a bottle. Occam’s razor again.
It clears through the murky depths of four different versions of her testimony where Heard says anything from: he smashed it punching a hole in the wall (not possible); to he smashed a cream Bakelite phone (still intact in a court photograph); to smashing a green plastic phone (not present in Australia, but actually their apartment in LA); to him smashing her own phone (from which the Australian audio was taken). In fact, it’s the shifting sands of her own testimony that make her unbelievable, most especially her version of him smashing her phone because in later testimony she admits to using her phone.
In large part, Heard’s own undoing by this point is not only the projection, but her many versions of testimony—none of which make sense—but which she uses to explain the same incident.
As a lifelong feminist, this left me in a complete quandary. The more I dug, and the more blowback I got from other purported feminists and progressives about these inconsistencies, the more it shook my worldview. As “progressives” are we not supposed to be the more open-minded, objective, educated? More empathetic to an underdog and minority? Is that not what we silently congratulate ourselves on, when not vocally virtue signaling? I can’t be the only one willing to admit guilt on that front.
But further, would Depp even be considered a minority somehow?
Intellectually, we know that domestic violence affects women more, and that non-conforming gender expressions barely rate in the conversation. No one has truly explored those stats, and how would they? Nonetheless, there are statistics for male survivors of violence. In fact, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1 in 9 men survive intimate partner violence. Out of roughly 162 million men in the United States, that means approximately 18 million men. Sit with that number for a moment, because although it is typically a “women’s issue” since the number of male victims is substantially less, it still begs the question: does that mean they get no support or room at the table for discussion? 18 million men is a substantial number, but we never hear anything about them.
By and large, this is a breast cancer problem. Meaning, it still is predominantly women affected. But when it comes to men, we should not and shall not shout them down and say it is a “women’s issue” and move them to the back of the bus. They aren’t supposed to sit silent in a corner. We still treat breast cancer, no matter who has it. So it should be with male victims of violence. Both should be heard, with an open mind and heart. We still treat them, support them, and cut the cancer out like the malignancy that it is. And who cares if they are wealthy and famous? When isolation and shame perpetuates their silence, they still need to be heard, supported and treated. If anything, Depp’s case proves that domestic violence is insidious and equal opportunity.
Yet in Depp’s case, the underlying sentiment seems to be that he is a rich, white man who can stick up for himself and could have left at any time…until you hear Heard on audio taunting him with the exact reason why he did not come forward sooner. She had the power of the narrative behind her, and as such he had an uphill battle to be believed, which is why she had the nerve to spell it out in audio: “tell them Johnny—tell them ‘I, Johnny Depp, a man, am a victim of violence,’ and see how many people believe you!” That chilling audio alone is answered with silence from his end, and in the auditorium of media outlets everywhere a barrage of headlines ran, proving her point. At no juncture was he given a chance to speak his truth. He was vilified by The Sun as a wife beater, a decision upheld by Justice Andrew Nichol after declaring that he likely was, based on his wife’s testimony and the notion that she donated her entire divorce settlement to charity, because as the judge reasoned, “why would she lie?” Why indeed. Other than sponsorships, spokesperson positions, ambassadorships, added publicity, and support, why would she?
And as someone who has come full circle to being a staunch supporter of a rich, white, male celebrity, it’s a confounding position to be in because of the vitriol it gets me. “He’s not going to fuck you,” is a typical slur in the online community against women supporting him. Men and women alike get called misogynists regularly for speaking out. Strange, for an opposing group who is supposedly in the feminist camp, or who are at least followers of a feminist “icon.” Yet their projection game is as strong as their idol’s, for the constant ridicule and even threats against some of us find us ironically being accused of the same in headlines. Despite Heard being found to have roughly thirty percent of her following as bots, she even filed a motion in the defamation case stating that many of Depp’s supporters are “Russian bots,” which is frankly, an insult to this combat veteran. She hawked about receiving threats despite her comments sections being closed on her social media accounts, and yet Lily-Rose Depp received threats as a teenager after Heard filed the TRO. Lily-Rose was forced to remove an Instagram post in support of her father for all the backlash she received. Once again, in the media fallout from the TRO, to The Sun trial, to the defamation case, it is again reduced down to one explanation: they turn the tables every time.
In short, what I’ve seen in the past three years since coming into the ranks of his supporters is not the feminist movement I thought I was part of, but a misandrist spin that makes me nauseated. “We want equality, not revenge” used to be the war cry, and yet, we can’t even count what’s been done to Depp as revenge when there is no solid, credible evidence that he ever raised a hand to his ex-wife. Her bruises washed off the next day, her photo files were corrupted and inadmissible, or copies of the same shot used for different alleged abuse incidents. In which case, the scorn and scorched earth headlines against him make no sense. Why in the world, still, is she given the benefit of every doubt and he has the curse of cancellation via mainstream media outlets? For every Daily Mirror article in his defense, there are roughly ten in favor of Heard from the old left leaning standbys—and of course, the Washington Post.
In short, the emperor has been naked this entire time, but the outcry of Me Too and Domestic Violence awareness advocates still congratulate her on her purported wardrobe, the shroud of survivorship; the people whose myopic view tells them that she, and only she, is the victim because he is a Male with Power has drowned out common sense and objectivity. I’ve even seen Heard supporters state without irony that it’s okay that she hit him when he insulted her, because he has all the power in the relationship. In short, the gender bias in this case has flipped in her favor and the true power lay with the narrative and the media spin. In fact, in Depp’s case, the true victim was silenced by a tidal wave of subjective support and hand patting for his abuser. We’ve come so far, that in this particular case and in the case of male victims, we have actually overshot equality and become the problem. We missed the fact that we have to somehow hold support for victims, but reserve judgment at the same time.
In the aftermath of Ms. Heard’s allegations what happened was as Johnny Depp said on the stand, he was never really afforded the chance to give his side of things. Support swarmed her, and he was cancelled. He lost his role in Pirates of the Caribbean, she retained her role in Aquaman. She spoke out time and again at conferences, women’s marches, was paraded as a survivor, while he retreated to continental Europe as a pariah in American and even British press. And in the midst of all this, a war waged on social media where his fans, supporters, and followers took an onslaught of abuse and derision. I personally have had people call me misogynistic—me, a former member of the National Organization for Women, an Army veteran, a proponent of pro-choice, who walked in the March for Women’s Lives. It’s amazing and eye opening being on this side of the fence. And it’s incredibly disheartening too.
If nothing else, it should stand to show that everyone has inherent biases, and everyone has something to learn from this case. It should also show that we cannot be too quick to condemn, nor too quick to congratulate ourselves on being so cosmopolitan as to speak for the underdog and to know exactly who that is. If nothing else too, it should show how power dynamics are not always what they seem and that playing into stereotypes harms us all, especially in using them against someone, knowing very little of the story. It’s time to start taking a deeper look and start realizing that statistics have faces and to realize that listening without judgement is vital.
Divisiveness and disenfranchisement have been the story for decades, and more than anything at this time, given the polarization of the Depp-Heard case, what should come out of it is a call to action for equanimity and comparing stories and wounds, in order to come together in solidarity, and to do that, we need to talk and we need to allow everyone a voice. United we stand, after all.
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