I first met Johnny Depp and Amber Heard at Karan Johar’s garden party in Sainik Farms. It was the summer of 2016. Okay, I’m making this up, but the lie has a point. Just about every fan, incel, men’s rights activist and feminist with an emotional investment, in this case, behave like they knew both of them so intimately well, inside out and outside in. The Depp case has also divided feminists. The hardcore Johnny loyalists have made an exception here in favour of their darling Depp.
One of the stupidest questions I’ve heard about this trial is: Why are people interested? People have been interested in the lives of celebrities ever since the birth of celebrities. The media follows. As Vinod Mehta used to say bluntly about salaciously controversial stories: Of course, I would have run it; it’s a damn good story.
Besides, the real-life trial was the coming together of two movie genres: The courtroom drama and the bedroom drama, a compelling blend of non-fiction and fiction. Elon Musk, who also briefly dated Heard, refused to testify, although he had this to say on Twitter, “I hope they move on. At their best, they are each incredible.” He went on to add that they should spend at least twelve hours a day in the Tesla office and less time in the bedroom.
The art of crying can be a useful tool in courtroom trials, especially televised ones. In November last year, Kyle Rittenhouse shed bucket-loads of tears and was acquitted on all counts. Rittenhouse was 17 when he shot dead two men and injured another (all White; the killing wasn’t racially motivated) during the Black Lives Matter protests and opportunistic rioting in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Depp, Rittenhouse now says, is “fuelling” his drive to file defamation cases of his own.) At the time, liberal commentators dismissed Rittenhouse’s crying as “resorting to a tried-and-true strategy for White men in trouble.” (Vox)
When Depp’s fans accused Amber Heard of shedding crocodile tears, the liberals said that this was prime evidence of misogynist scepticism and typecasting. In 2016, in another case that was broadcast live on news channels across the world, double amputee and paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius sobbed uncontrollably (for days on end) in a Pretoria courthouse, before the Bladerunner was sentenced to six years in prison for killing his girlfriend.
As witnessed in the Depp-Heard trial, super celebrities have legions of super fans that do their own thing, often overshadowing what’s happening inside the courtroom. In Britney Spears' conservatorship case involving her father, her acolytes, many from the LGBTQ community, gathered outside the courts for every hearing. They were loud, festive and media-friendly. Fans work with a simple dichotomy of good and evil. They drum up social media support; in Depp’s case TikTok was the medium of choice, exploding in a fireball of toeing-the-party-line creativity. These fans are the ones who really create the story and direct it in a specific direction—it’s not just about being a “follower”.
Michael Jackson’s fans bathed London buses with posters and banners defending him from child abuse allegations. These were later removed after a backlash by what the Economist called, in another context, “liberal mullahs”. When I made a passing mention of the child abuse allegations in an almost-fan piece published on Jackson’s 10th death anniversary, I was trolled by Jackson fans for a month.
I am not a super fan of anyone. That kind of blind religiosity doesn’t come easy to me, even though I understand it. I will listen to someone’s music even if she is a serial killer. I am a simple consumer of art, not a cultural bureaucrat obsessed with scrubbing clean lit-fest stages and music streaming sites of an artist’s legacy. Let the courts decide if the individuals concerned and affected decide to fight it out, as in the Depp and Heard case. This is an important point because as I will argue, it was extra-judicial cancel culture and its consequences that led to Depp filing the defamation case in the first place.
Depp, Hollywood’s Salman Khan, is the last of the bad boys in a sanitised era when bad boys are frowned upon. There are those who believe they should be exorcised from life and art, that the ideal couple dressed in kurta-pyjama should, before having sex, exchange consent forms, bow and say, “Pehle aap”. Depp is bad in an outsized kind of way: He spent millions blasting Hunter S Thomson’s ashes out of a cannon, owns a few islands and at least one village, plays guitar with Jeff Beck and is prone to passing out with ice cream on his crotch and potty in his jeans. When Heard and Depp divorced, the joint statement read thus: “Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love.” As the trial showed, both parties were equally culpable of emotional and physical violence, as well as drug use.
The live proceedings swung between judicial tedium and moments that were prime time gold, principally because of Depp’s brilliant lawyer, the 37-year-old Camille Vasquez. During one round of questioning, she pretty much nails Heard’s lie about imagined cocaine breakfasts. The photograph in question, one Heard sent her “best friend”, is shown to be staged and manufactured, perfectly arranged to perpetuate a myth. Heard admits to snorting herself. The punkiest detail that the layman got out of this was the presence of something called a tampon applicator in the frame. As Heard explains, it was her sister who taught Depp to use it to snort coke.
Let’s now get down to the brass tacks of the case, which was not a criminal but a civil one, principally to do with defamation. For this, we need to go back and read the original Washington Post op-ed in question, ostensibly written by Heard and which did not mention Depp by name.
The op-ed was not authored by Heard, but by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-profit, to which Heard has pledged $3.5 million, half her divorce settlement amount. The two are in a mutually beneficial relationship. In the ghost-written piece, Heard seems to be formulating a parallel career, as a “public figure representing domestic abuse”. In two vague sentences, she says “I was exposed to abuse at a very young age”, and “I knew certain things early on, without ever having to be told.” The not so oblique reference to Depp comes in the line where she says she “had the rare vantage point of seeing in real-time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.”
As the Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple points out in a recent column, “Heard’s celebrity conferred standing at the ACLU, which then leveraged her name into a Post op-ed. The byline was accurate only to the extent that the ACLU tried to craft a piece consistent with Heard’s spoken views.” Wemple further goes on to argue that the op-ed was “an assault against journalism. It embraced a clichéd op-ed design, that of deploying public figures to braid their personal experiences with policy prescriptions.”
While Heard and ACLU thought they could get away by not naming Depp, the reference to him, even though anonymous, had a fallout. Cancel culture, which works independent of legal conviction, meant that Depp lost out on work worth millions; the money-spinning franchises that he was earlier part of refused to renew his contracts. He filed for defamation and won.
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Another interesting facet of this case has to do with Internet lynch mobs that targeted Heard unfairly. Writing in the NYT, Jessica Bennett argues that “this is a good old-fashioned public pillorying — only memes have replaced the stones.” This is very true but the MeToo movement too can be accused of this. An allegation on the Internet, a recounting of a spurious anecdote, sometimes unsigned, was enough to wreck careers and lives. At its peak, the MeToo movement in India became a free-for-all, which was only tempered by a crude, organically-evolving jungle law. When everyone’s friend, colleague, boyfriend, husband and father stood accused of a sexual misdemeanour of varying degrees of seriousness, the movement began to fragment, each fragment attacking the other vociferously while protecting their own.
Which brings us to the question: Should we believe all women? As Chris Rock joked, “Believe all women, except Amber Heard.” Writing about the Depp-Heard saga for Vogue, Raven Smith argues, “It’s time to believe women — all women. It’s time to believe Heard.”
Taking a more nuanced view, Jessica Bennett argues, “The trial seems to have exposed some of the rhetorical weaknesses of #MeToo. ‘Believe women’ for example — a phrase that was meant to underscore how rare it is for a woman to lie about her own abuse — had somehow morphed into ‘believe all women’, which left no room for the outlier.”
In a well-known case from 2014, Rolling Stone had to retract a story headlined “A Rape on Campus”, in which a woman who identified herself as Jackie had claimed that she was gang-raped during a fraternity initiation ritual. Like with the present case, there is a Virginia connection. The police failed to find any evidence, while the University of Virginia fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, brought a defamation lawsuit, which Rolling Stone settled for $1.65 million. The Columbia Journalism Review called the story “a mess — thinly sourced, full of erroneous assumptions, and plagued by gaping holes in the reporting.”
When a student in England in 1999, I once saw a programme called Battered Men on the respectable terrestrial channel, Channel 4. A beefy man employed as a security guard talked about domestic abuse at the hands of his partner, “I’ve had broken ribs, lots of cuts, bruises, black eye. Clumps of hair would be missing where she’d pulled it out. She’s done damage to the other parts of my body with the saucepans. Kidneys have been damaged, passed blood through the urine. When you love someone...you’d die for them.” Domestic violence is horrific and affects both genders. Believe both.
Finally, a word about the jury system. Critics of the US judgement have pointed to the fact that in the UK Depp had lost a similar libel suit against the Sun. Across the pond, the ruling was made by an individual judge, with a supposedly distanced and legally sound approach, while it’s been argued that a jury — especially in this instance — could be more impressionable to and influenced by social media trends. But a system is a system; it’s an old debate in jurisprudence, which is why there are two traditional systems — respect them.
I’ve always felt that the jury system is more susceptible to natural prejudices because it makes judges of ordinary people who carry their innate prejudices into the courthouse. We have seen this in countless cases where innocent Black men have been falsely convicted by all White juries, and all-White juries have allowed White perpetrators to go scot free, like in the Rodney King case. And yet, to blame the jury system for Depp’s ‘victory’ is a bit like Hillary Clinton asking for the electoral college system to be abolished after she lost, or Trump being in denial blaming legal postal ballots for his loss.
What I disagree with is the kind of apocalyptic despair expressed by Raven Smith, although she says she doesn’t want to despair, “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.” The MeToo movement was a necessary corrective and will continue to be a powerful force for change. Mobs on both sides need to reign in their animal instincts. Shrink the gap between the poles, and you will see the seeds of empathy take root.
The writer is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation’ and the editor of ‘House Spirit: Drinking in India’. Views expressed are personal.
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