HIJACK: How Amber Heard Co-Opted the #MeToo Movement, and How the Mainstream Media Helped Her
We as a society have committed to a new and beautiful effort to “Believe Women.” This campaign is geared at reversing the generations-long trend of questioning and intimidating women into silence whenever they come forward against the rich and powerful. What happens, then, if one of these women lies?
In March of 2019, I was sitting at my little intern desk in an American government post in France. I absolutely should not have been on Twitter, but in true college student fashion I had the computer screen split between my timeline and a cable I was preparing to send to Washington. Scrolling idly downwards, I stumbled across this viral tweet:
Johnny Depp got his name dragged and had his movies boycotted for abusing his girlfriend when SHE was abusing him.. He was the victim and stayed silent this entire time while people blamed him. Y’all owe him the biggest f***ing apology. — @raweeezy
Confused, I typed “Johnny Depp” into the search bar, and was met with a barrage of information. Pictures of bruises. A graphic and painful picture of a finger, cut off at the tip. A court document, which I would later learn to be the complaint Depp had just filed in a defamation case against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, claiming that she was not the victim of domestic abuse, but “the perpetrator.”
For perspective, I graduated high school the year Amber Heard made her domestic abuse allegations against Johnny Depp. I read about — but did not actually watch — the contentious TMZ video that the world collectively decided was sufficient evidence of abuse. I, too, figured this was sufficient, and carried on without looking deeper. When I learned that Depp would play Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them franchise, I said, “Johnny Depp? Didn’t he abuse his wife?”
Yet there I sat three years later, neglecting my cable and soaking in the knowledge that I had had a hand, however passive and unknowing, in destroying an innocent man’s career. That I, alongside millions of others, had been lied to.
THE ALLEGATION
On May 27th, 2016, Amber Heard walked into an LA court with a bruise on her cheek and filed a request for a restraining order against her now-ex-husband, Johnny Depp. In her declaration, she claimed that she suffered “excessive emotional, verbal and physical abuse from Johnny, which has included angry, hostile, humiliating and threatening assaults” whenever she “questioned his authority or disagreed with him,” and that she was “terrified” that Depp could “return at any moment.”
There were pictures, which somehow ended up on the front page of People Magazine. Then there was the video that TMZ somehow acquired, titled as evidence that Depp “threw a wine glass” at Heard.
Major media outlets picked up the story and took it for a drive. Variety. Vanity Fair. The Washington Post. Vox. The Hollywood Reporter. NBC. Refinery29. On and on down the list, it seemed everyone had something to say about Johnny Depp and the abuse allegations against him.
To put Heard’s allegations into cultural context, we should briefly revisit the timeline of the #MeToo movement. Most notably, Roger Ailes resigned from Fox News amid sexual harassment claims in July of 2016. Bill O’Reilly would be forced out a year later. Harvey Weinstein went down hard in October of 2017. Senator Al Franken went down two months later. The following year saw the fall of Larry Nassar (along with the entire Olympic gymnastics board) Bill Cosby, New York Attorney General Jeffrey Schneider, and singer R. Kelly. The hashtag #MeToo went viral on Twitter, closely followed by #TimesUp. Almost overnight, the pendulum of American culture seemed to swing to the left, and by the end of 2018 the #MeToo movement had reached what many view to be its peak.
And right at that peak, in December of 2018, Amber Heard penned the Washington Post op-ed that is now the focus of Depp’s $50M defamation suit against her: “Amber Heard: I Spoke Up Against Sexual Violence and Faced Our Culture’s Wrath. That Has to Change.”
THE REACTION
The reaction to Heard’s allegations was almost instantaneous. There were calls to boycott upcoming films which featured Depp. Multiple petitions popped up seeking to remove him from his role as Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts, one of which racked up more than 20,000 signatures. Major news outlets questioned whether keeping him onboard was a wise — or ethical — decision.
Forbes labeled Depp’s continued presence in the films an “endless PR headache,” saying:
“Yes, there is the moral factor of putting an outed (alleged) spousal abuser in a key role in a kid-friendly series. But there is also needless publicity headaches for an actor who isn’t nearly as popular as he once was and will lead plenty of older fans to, if not outright boycott the movies, not necessarily rush out and see them on opening weekend.”
The diction and syntax in the above passage are worth noting, specifically the use of the word “outed” and the following parentheses around “alleged”. With this wording, the reader is meant to mentally skip over “alleged” and read “outed spousal abuser” as a complete phrase. This article, like all others, passed through multiple levels of editing and approval so that that exact wording could reach publication.
Later, a Vox article even went so far as to imply a connection between Depp’s abuse allegations and mass shooters and political assassins:
“But studies have shown that the gunmen who commit mass shootings are likely to have a history of domestic violence — and if we as a culture took domestic violence seriously, we might have much better luck in stopping political violence before it ever happened.”
And when Warner Brothers and JK Rowling announced their intent to keep Depp on as Grindelwald, The Sun published a headline which now plays a starring role in Depp’s libel case against News Group Newspapers:
“How can JK Rowling be ‘genuinely happy’ casting wife-beater Johnny Depp in new Fantastic Beasts Film?”
The heading has since been changed online, but the original was sold in print.
Even more damaging, Disney announced that they would be removing Johnny Depp from his role as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise just four days after Heard’s Washington Post op-ed was published. Setting aside Depp’s personal fondness for the role and the monetary loss he would suffer as a result, this decision was widely viewed as the death knell of the Pirates franchise.
Meanwhile, Heard’s career rocketed to new heights. In 2017 she appeared as Mera in Justice League, and would later reprise the role in Aquaman. In May of 2018 Heard was announced to be the new Global Spokesperson for L’Oreal Cosmetics. In December of the same year, she announced her new role as an ambassador for the ACLU, and her Washington Post op-ed featured on the ACLU website.
Had Depp truly been the abusive partner in his short-lived marriage with Heard, these consequences would have been well-deserved, and indeed were initially widely accepted as such. The problem, of course, is that there is more to the story.
HOLES IN THE NARRATIVE
There have been troubling gaps in Heard’s story since the outset. For one, Depp never actually throws anything at Heard in the video TMZ released. Additionally, two Domestic Violence-trained LAPD officers who both testified under oath to seeing no sign of injury or property damage on the night of one of Depp’s alleged attacks as early as 2016.
Then there are the paparazzi shots taken the day after Heard appeared at court with a bruise on her face, in which she appears to be both makeup and injury-free. (See below, via Us Weekly:)
Equally troubling are the surveillance videos from the elevator of the Eastern Columbia Building where Heard and Depp lived, showing her apparently injury-free in the days following the alleged May 2016 attack. Depp claims to have submitted 87 such surveillance videos to court as proof of his innocence.
Then there are the inconsistencies with Heard’s declaration and those of her witnesses. For instance, iO Tillet Wright testified that, after Heard shouted “Call 911!” on the night of the alleged May 2016 incident, the phone “disconnected”, but in Heard’s first motion to dismiss the defamation case, she claims that she shouted “I’ll call the police!” and “later learned that iO had hung up the phone” and called 911. Further, when put together, the sequence of events which Heard, Raquel Pennington, and Tillet Wright describe in their respective declarations is theoretically chronologically impossible given the allotted time.
Then, with the filing of the defamation suit in 2019, came multiple eyewitness accounts of Heard allegedly throwing things at Depp, punching him “with a closed fist,” spitting on him, and verbally abusing him on several occasions.
Other eyewitnesses such as property manager Kevin Murphy and celebrity stylist Samantha McMillan testified specifically to seeing no injuries on Heard in the days following December 15, 2015, when Heard claims Depp gave her two black eyes, pulled out her hair, “busted” her lip, and “nearly broke” her nose with a full-body-weight headbutt. Further, Heard testified that her friend Raquel Pennington and her makeup artist Melanie Inglessis discovered Heard immediately following the alleged brutal attack and phoned a nurse to “conduct a concussion check.” But Melanie Inglessis’ testimony was recently made public, and in it she says Heard was “supposed to go bowling [on December 15] but told me that she could not join because she had been in a bad fight with Johnny.” Footage from the Late Late Show with James Corden less than 24 hours later shows Heard repeatedly stretching her lips and scrunching her nose with no apparent discomfort.
Yet of all the various claims and counterclaims (we haven’t even touched Australia), doubtless the most shocking was the audio of a recorded therapy session the couple had, supposedly a few months before the divorce. In the 45-minute-long taped conversation, Heard appears to admit to hitting Depp the previous night, saying:
“I didn’t punch you. I was hitting you. I’m sorry I didn’t uh, uh, hit you in the face in a proper slap, but I did not punch you. […] I did not f***ing deck you. I f****ing was hitting you. I don’t know what the motion of my actual hand was, but you’re fine. I did not hurt you. I did not punch you. I was hitting you.”
Heard also appears to admit to throwing “pots and pans” and even vases at Depp when she’s angry, but then disparages him for leaving the area or even the building whenever she shouts at him or becomes violent. This is the overarching theme of the conversation: Heard appears to be upset that Depp “splits” when fights begin, rather than staying to “fight for her.” She complains that leaving isn’t “strong” or “brave,” even calling Depp a “baby” and telling him to “grow the f**k up.”
When Depp responds, “Because you start physical fights?” Heard answers, “I did start a physical fight,” to which we hear Depp say, “Yeah, you did, so I had to get the f**k out of there.” Later in the conversation, Depp maintains that if “things get physical,” the two would “have to be apart” for a length of time, specifically saying, “There can be no physical violence.” Heard responds:
“I can’t promise that I’ll be perfect, I can’t promise I won’t get physical again. God, I f***ing get so mad sometimes I lose it.”
If verified and admitted by the court, this interaction is the antithesis of everything Heard has claimed thus far. Going back to her original declaration when filing for a restraining order, the audio blasts her portrayal of the relationship to pieces. Not only does she alternately shout at him, insult him, swear at him, and belittle him without repercussion, but her primary complaint is the precise opposite of what she would later claim ‘terrified’ her: Depp does not become verbally or physically abusive when she challenges him, he leaves.
But, even though #JusticeForJohnnyDepp trended globally following its release, this new and incredibly damning piece of evidence was met with pin-drop silence by the very outlets that had trumpeted Depp’s abuse accusation years prior. In fact, days after the audio dropped, the official MeToo Movement Twitter account openly called the turning tide a “misinformation campaign,” linking an article which characterizes the public reaction as “Depp stans” “foaming at the mouth”:
With this single tweet, the MeToo movement effectively tied its credibility to Amber Heard. This, if nothing else, could be incredibly damaging should Depp win his defamation cases against her.
THE REAL MISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN
The news industry’s decisions regarding what information to report and what to omit speaks to ongoing efforts to maintain the existing narrative that Johnny Depp is an abuser. While major outlets were overwhelmingly silent on the aforementioned audio and other audios leaked afterwards, they have been vocal on other developments in Depp’s ongoing defamation cases.
For instance, when Depp’s Virginia suit against Heard was delayed, Deadline leapt to report that the delay was due to Depp’s failure to deliver “drugs and booze” records, a report picked up and echoed by the Epoch Times. Yet during a hearing following the Deadline report, Virginia Judge White criticized Heard’s team for apparently giving false information to the press, and warned that if such misrepresentations continued, the lawyer responsible would have their pro hac vice rights revoked.
Likewise, when a series of ugly texts were read aloud during a London hearing on March 18 this year, the press were quick to publish. The Hollywood Reporter claimed that the case was “rocked” by “70,000 texts” wherein Depp allegedly outlined his disturbing ideas to “burn Amber,” “drown her before we burn her,” and so on. There was no mention in the article that, of the 70,000 texts, only approximately ten had made it to the hearing, nor was it reported that entire batch had been dismissed by Justice Nicol, who said in his ruling that he was “unimpressed” by The Sun’s “reliance” on the messages. The Independent, among other outlets, labeled the texts a “threat”.
Another outcome of the same hearing was that Depp was ordered to turn over all audio recordings in his possession of conversations or altercations between the two. Yet there is no mention of this ruling in the Vanity Fair article covering the hearing, which boasts the headline “Johnny Depp’s Disturbing Alleged Text Messages Read Aloud in Court as Libel Lawsuit Begins.” This article gives the aforementioned audio no more than a single sentence (in parentheses) and counters immediately with a statement from Heard’s lawyer. Later, when The Hollywood Reporter covered Melanie Inglessis’ second attempt to avoid live testimony, the article misquoted Justice Nicol and only corrected the error after several tweets pointed it out. (See the original line here:)
Negative coverage of Depp is not limited to his defamation case; reports that he “attacked a crew member after drinking” on the City of Lies set were picked up by CBS, also getting coverage from Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter. Of those three, only the The Hollywood Reporter mentioned Script Supervisor Emma Dannoff’s testimony that the alleged assault never happened, and that she has “40 time-stamped photos” to prove it. Most recently, Depp was connected to the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s recent tweets on the topic of Transgender women, with Forbes, Insider, and Variety all listing the allegations against Depp as an additional reason why the Fantastic Beasts franchise is in trouble, neither outlet making any mention of the significant developments since.
IN CONCLUSION
When we band together as a society to seek justice for the abused, we must apply that effort to everyone equally and acknowledge when we have done wrong. Otherwise, we risk losing all credibility. On a personal note, I am a woman who has experienced sexual assault more than once. When the #MeToo movement took its first strides, I celebrated, thinking we were moving in the right direction. Seeing that I had been lied to by someone purporting to represent me felt like betrayal. Seeing the very movement that I trusted to move us forward tie themselves to that person and dismiss my reaction as that of a “Depp stan” felt like abandonment.
There is no way of telling how this piece will age. I have laid my bets, as have many others, on one side or the other of the proverbial aisle. I speak not as a witness, nor an expert, nor even a fan, but as a member of the public who has far more questions than she has answers. For now, the only answer that to me appears true and solid is this: Amber Heard lied to the world about Johnny Depp, and the mainstream media helped (and continues to help) her do it.
