It has been interesting to observe how public perception of celebrities has shifted in the social media age, as the line between these figures being private individuals and cultural commodities grows increasingly thin. Whilst a famed actor or musician may previously have been allowed to live quietly while the world laps up their creative offerings, this anonymity no longer seems an option. But has new accessibility made celebrity figures seem any less inhuman to us? The media coverage and public reactions to the recent Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial exemplify how it has not.
In case you have somehow dodged the abounding discourse of the trial proceedings, here’s the gist: Depp is suing Heard over an Op-Ed that she penned in 2018, in which she calls herself a victim of domestic abuse. The jury verdict found that Heard had indeed “defamed” Depp by claiming to have been abused. And in a strange turn of events, they also ruled in Heard’s favour on one count–that Depp’s lawyer defamed her when he described her account of a police-attended scene of abuse as a “hoax”. If this seems a contradiction in terms, it’s not the only thing that makes this verdict far from clear-cut.
In 2020, Depp took the UK newspaper The Sun to court, also for libel reasons, and lost. They published an article calling him a “wife-beater”, and a presiding judge ruled that the paper’s characterisation of Depp was not only just but “substantially true”. Similarly to the recent US trial, Heard and Depp, alongside many others, testified. In contrast to the US case, this trial was not televised, and an un-sequestered jury who were exposed to the rampant anti-Heard social media campaigns launched by Depp’s fans did not decide its verdict.
Perhaps the televised nature of the US court case—something that is far from the norm for domestic abuse proceedings—is what distanced it from the complex echelons of reality. Rather than two complicated human beings, Depp and Heard have been represented on social media as, respectively, paragons of innocence and evil. Depp’s lawyers cleverly played into this angle, and the legal campaign on his side largely relied upon Heard as a vicious life-destroyer who calculated her allegations of abuse years in advance. Indeed, she did not make a sympathetic witness on the stand, often dramatising her accounts, and several of Depp’s witnesses attested to her unamiable personality. But being unlikeable as an individual does not correlate with being a remorseless abuser. Not by any means.
What is important to note is that based on the jury’s verdict in the US case, Heard is guilty of defamation because she was lying both in her original Op-Ed and in court. (Which makes their ruling in her favour on one count even more bizarre). You cannot help but wonder if all the videos and TikTok edits of Heard on the stand in which social media users accuse her of falsity, psychopathy, and even drug-taking, played a part in this conclusion. Especially when her accounts, and those of the witnesses called from Heard’s side, are entirely plausible. Depp was well-known to be abusing drugs and alcohol during the pair’s marriage. And there is photographic and video evidence of the actor seeming highly inebriated and aggressive while under the influence. There is even digital evidence of Depp admitting as such—”I of course pounded and displayed ugly colours to Amber on a recent journey,” he wrote in one text message in 2013.
However, it is entirely within human psychology to interpret new information within the context of our preconceptions. So Depp fans might process the above evidence through the lens of either defensive retaliation or unserious joking. Meanwhile, when tapes emerged of Heard acting verbally aggressive towards Depp, they stood as irrefutable proof of her abuse and of his innocence. When, during the US trial, she described how, in defence, “I would try to stand up for myself. I would push back, I would push him off me… I would yell and scream at him, I would call him ugly names..” it immediately decried her as a malicious liar.
Ultimately, whether or not Heard was abusive, the black-and-white perception of her as an abuser and Depp as a victim is dangerous and unhelpful. There is sufficient evidence of Depp engaging in abusive behaviour to show that this situation and these individuals are far from straightforward or simple. That the recent court ruling and the court of social media seem to base justice on their perceptions of Heard’s personality rather than the facts is unsettling, to say the least.