By Ric d'Stard Lee
Finally, it's over. The verdict is in, and Hollywood megastar Johnny Depp has won all three counts of his thundercrack defamation lawsuit against Aquaman starlet Amber Heard.
Over the past few weeks, six or seven or eight to be roughly exact, we've surely spent an inordinate amount of time with these two celebrity assholes. So strange, too curious. Other things. Hearsay. But now it's over, and we're all puffing on that cigarette after sex, wondering if what just happened, happened.
In some ways, it feels like the tragic end of a school play where the shared experience suddenly bursts into a puff of blue smoke nothingness. And we like the hyper meerkats we are turned and stood to attention, searing this circus of celeb vulgar onto our brains forever.
But what a trip this defamation trial has been. Courtroom pornography. Watching someone getting caught lying is super underrated.
After deliberating for thirteen hours, the jury in Virginia awarded Depp $15 million in damages and Heard $2 million — for defamatory comments made by Depp's lawyer Adam Waldman in a Daily Mail article. Without a doubt, the televised trial resonated with many people for many reasons. A unique legal spectacle that not only opened the wounds of two human beings, impacting their personal lives and the lives of their loved ones but, more alarmingly, opened the septic wounds of a cultural void, a mirror of ugliness staring back at us on social media.
In some ways, it's no surprise that memes of Heard outweighed those of Depp. At times the whole legal process felt like a trial by social media on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook; through mean memes, funny memes, dastardly memes, and TikTok clips. Our junk food consumption of these tattered wealthy lives leaned on the biases of content creators who saw fit to judge a woman before a verdict. A verdict that arguably impacts domestic violence survivors and those who have sought strength in the #MeToo movement.
Or has it?
The most significant wave of outcry in the aftermath of the Depp verdict is whether it truly signals the death of #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen. But here's the thing: Amber Heard is not believable, not because she's a woman but because she's not believable. Nor credible. Nor likable.
We picked up on this through Court TV's website and YouTube live streams, and the jurors picked up on this in person in court. Most damning was that the whole world watched Heard initially deny that her controversial Washington Post op-ed was about Depp and then freely admit that she wrote it about him in her final testimony. She was pulling stories from her hair throughout, and we saw what Depp wanted the world to see.
After this week's verdict, Heard came out with a statement on Instagram: "I'm even more disappointed with what this verdict means for other women. It is a setback. 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 is to be taken seriously."
Seriously? But your allegations were taken very seriously, Amber, moving through two different countries' courtrooms for weeks and months at a time. This was taken extremely seriously, first by media and then society and then by a Virginia court, where you had four whole days to tell your story to a jury.
Does that mean Heard didn't suffer abuse? No. Some of what she said felt true, but the bottom line was that the jury and public felt she took advantage of the #MeToo movement to make false claims that Johnny abused her way more than their toxic relationship could poison.
She lost because of herself and her exposed performance in front of cameras. Not because of a power imbalance, as she also indicated in the same Instagram post: "I'm heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence, and sway of my ex-husband."
There was no mountain of evidence, and she repeatedly lied on the stand. So, where does all this leave us, and what does it mean exactly? The good news is that it is not hurting feminism as much as some quarters of outcry might suggest. In some ways, Depp's colossal win redresses the balance of a society traveling towards objective truth regardless of sex. When women's rights groups see a woman that lies as Heard did, it hurts their position more because there are women out there in relationships that Heard claimed she was in when she wasn't.
But will those who believed all the allegations without proof apologize to a powerful man for being wrong? For now, the pendulum still swings the same way it did.
As he would refer himself, Ric d'Stard Lee is a rogue-ish journo working from Hong Kong, China. Semi-prolific on US Empire, media, culture, and humans of late capitalism. Inquisitive. Tell it like it is. Sarky. Zen.
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