Just weeks ago the ugly legal battle between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife, Amber Heard, finally reached its bitter end. With both parties in the process of appealing the parts of the trial they lost, an unexpected settlement was reached. Heard accepted the terms offered by Johnny Depp’s team, and walked away. It’s been a journey almost unbelievable in its impact on social media, on culture, on water-cooler conversation, and most of all, on what we know — or think we know — about abusive relationships. I didn’t watch every single moment of the trial (I prefer to read), but I watched a lot of it. I read all of the transcripts. I watched Heard give her evidence and I watched Johnny Depp give his.
As someone who loved Johnny Depp for years, who knew Edward Scissorhands by heart and had a poster of him on my wall as a teen (the one of him sitting at a piano with a cigarette hanging lazily from his lips), the trial was upsetting. Even now, when I think about Johnny Depp’s account of the abuse he suffered at the hands of Heard, one scene plays over and over in my head. It’s that of a terrified Depp, dodging the glass bottles his wild wife flings at him as she screams obscenities, threatening and belittling him. She’s drunk, she’s high, and she’s blind with anger. There’s nothing he can say or do to calm her, such are the depths of her drug- and booze-fuelled rage. So he cowers, and he waits for it all to end, and he hopes she won’t do too much damage before she calms.
But she does do too much damage. She throws a bottle with such force that its ricochet is enough to cleanly slice the top of his finger off. Its velocity is so strong that it literally breaks AND crushes the bone of his middle finger. She storms out, leaving Depp alone where, distraught and in immense fear and trauma, he demands his assistants procure cocaine and ecstasy. He spends the next 12–24 hours taking copious amounts of recreational party drugs. He drinks himself into a wild state, and scrawls misogynist abuse about Heard all over the walls, fittings and furnishings of their Australian rental house. He uses the blood from his severed digit to write some of the slurs, and dips his severed finger in paint pots to write the rest, using it as a brush. Only at the end of this rampage does he seek any kind of medical attention.
And the only thing that I can think, when I imagine how that scene would have actually played out, is that it sounds… unlikely. It doesn’t sound like the truth, no matter how much you want Amber Heard to be an evil supervillain and Johnny Depp an innocent victim, or righteous hero.
Common sense says no
My rational mind says no. She didn’t throw a vodka bottle so hard and fast that when it bounced near his hand and exploded, one shard ricocheted with such speed that it sliced flesh and crushed bone, while somehow leaving his fingernail intact, and inflicting no injury anywhere else on his hand, or leaving any other evidence). And if she had somehow miraculously done it? Well, every ounce of logic and experience I have tells me that a victim of violent abuse that extreme is unlikely to deal with the aftermath the way he did: by demanding his staff procures him MDMA, cocaine and alcohol and getting off his face for hours, scrawling insults about his ‘abuser’ all over the walls. And not only that, but with his own blood, using his freshly severed finger as a paintbrush. It doesn’t jive in any way with what we know about domestic abuse. None of what Depp testified to makes a lick of sense.
So then the other thing I think about when I think of Depp’s defamation case against his ex-wife is what it’s really all about. Because this case isn’t just about Johnny Depp. It isn’t just about Amber Heard. It isn’t even about domestic violence — not really. This case is about misogyny, and how quickly we will believe even the most patently ludicrous stories once they’re uttered from a powerful man’s mouth, and how much we still so dearly love to have a witch to burn.
It’s about how easy it is for people to believe the most implausible accusations… when they’re about a woman who speaks out about a powerful man. How easy it is to accept bizarre allegations of painted-on bruises, coerced witnesses, colluding acquaintances and inconceivable finger injuries. How frighteningly effortless it was for people to believe stories that are actually quite silly: that a famously polished, glamorous and well-presented woman defecated in her own bed, for no reason. How people believed it without any pause or question.
How easy it was to get people to think that this tiny black poop, the same size as the crease in the bedsheet beside it and with what looks like a paw print right beside it, was from a wealthy and healthy human adult… and not a small dog with a well-documented habit of shitting everywhere.
How easy it is to listen to an audio tape leaked by the team of her accused abuser and accept it at face value — and to keep believing it, even after it’s proven to have been manipulated. To actually know something is a lie, and to choose to believe the lie anyway… once it protects a popular man and demonises the woman jeopardising his status.
It’s about how disappointingly easy it is for a wealthy and powerful man to plot and enact what many people, including almost all of the world’s foremost experts in Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), see as one of the most vindictive, openly premeditated, and above all ludicrous incidences of litigious post-separation abuse – using the abusers’ infamous tactic (DARVO) – that most of us have ever witnessed.
Most abusers who use the courts to further torture their victims — and they do this, all the time — do it to force contact or interaction, and reestablish a sense of control after a relationship ends. They do it to exert what power they still have left over their victim, to ruin them financially, and to traumatise and punish them for as long as they can for having the temerity to leave. Depp seems to have taken it up a notch though; none of that is quite enough. He has used all of the social and celebrity clout, and all the money and power at his disposal, to absolutely destroy, humiliate, and exile that woman on a scale that not seen before. “Global humiliation”, just like he promised her in this astonishingly malicious email.
And I can’t stop thinking about how easy it was for him to do it.
It scares me — particularly when you consider just how unlikely so many of Depp’s accusations of abuse against Heard are when taken at face value. They don’t just defy logic, they fly in the face of everything we know about abusive relationships.
What you have to believe in order to believe Johnny Depp.
To believe what Johnny Depp alleged about Amber Heard, you’d have to believe that she, at the age of 23, set her sights on one of the most powerful, wealthy, visible and best-loved men in the world… and saw an easy mark. She saw a man 25-odd years her senior (with all the life experience that entails), who has a team of round-the-clock highly-paid carers, staff and security personnel and thought — “Yes, this person will be easy for me to control, harm, and manipulate”.
Abusers are predators, and this is evidenced in their ability to choose a vulnerable target who they are likely to get away with abusing. That’s the fundamental basis of how it works. It’s why the vast majority of abusers tend to choose younger, less financially secure, less socially powerful victims. Often victims with low self-esteem, who they know will defer to them, or don’t know how to advocate for themselves. People who have been abused before. An abuser’s authority and control is paramount, and they feel entitled to it, and their choice of victim is deliberate.
You’d have to believe that 23-year-old Amber had the gall and confidence to buck that trend, and instead choose a partner who out-ranked her completely in every single power differential that exists. You’d have to believe that somehow, the fundamental dynamics of abusive relationships switched and went completely backwards, just this one time.
You’d then have to believe that by a stroke of luck, her target was absolutely infatuated with her. So much so that although in IPV situations the abuser usually grooms and lovebombs their victim at the beginning, this time the true victim actually did the love-bombing. He bought her the pony and showered her entire family with gifts and attention so that they were all completely in his thrall. Love-bombing behaviour is recognised among experts in IPV as being a major red flag for abusive relationships… but this time, you’d have to believe it was totally innocent, an anomaly, and that once again, the way we know abusers operate switched around completely.
Real life Gone Girl
You’d have to believe that Amber Heard is a criminal mastermind so skilled that Gone Girl would fan-girl over her diabolical abilities. Because as part of her abusive scheme she also somehow roped multiple healthcare professionals, friends, and at times even Depp’s own staff and friends, into participating in a massive, convoluted abuse hoax over the span of five years.
She did it by expertly faking injuries like bruises, cuts and swelling, taking photos of them, and then manipulating her friends, her staff, and his team into either believing they were real, or lying that they did. She somehow managed to coax multiple witnesses to perjure themselves on the stand for her, without leaving any evidence of this behind.
You’d have to believe that her fabricated attacks were so terrifying and authentic that her friend iO Tillet Wright genuinely feared for Heard’s life, to the point that he twice called the police during one ‘assault’. Well, that, or that Wright was somehow in on the scam too, even though he had really liked Depp, would gain nothing from it, and never discussed it at any point with Heard. You can read his account of the abuse he witnessed Heard suffer here. Read that and ask yourself: was this all part of the hoax too?
You’d have to buy that she pulled out clumps of her own hair and bit her own lip until it bled just so that she could frame him for it. She, over many years, reported various incidents of abuse and harm to doctors, therapists, acting coaches, her parents, his staff, and her friends. She did it by breaking down in therapy sessions and visits, putting on the show of a thoroughly devastated woman, pretending she was desperate to help him and desperately in love but also making sure she appeared emaciated, stressed and traumatised too. The role of a lifetime.
You’d have to believe she quietly went to Al-Anon (a service to help the loved ones of addicts cope) not because she cared, but to bolster her story. She wrote desperate emails that she never sent to him, not because she wanted to explain how destructive, hurtful, and frightening his alcohol and drug binges were, but because she thought one day, seven years down the line, he might take the notion to sue her, and she’d have that as evidence. You’d have to believe that she even somehow, by an unbelievable stroke of cunning or luck (I’m not sure which), got him to actually apologise to her after many of these apparent hoaxes. And that she’s a pioneer too, being the first abuser to ever actually even attempt such a bold and unlikely plan.
A very incompetent gold-digger
Beyond that, you would have to believe she did it all for… well, no real reason. So you’d have to believe that she is both a criminal mastermind and also a complete idiot; the world’s worst, stupidest gold digger. See, Amber Heard did not have a prenup with Johnny Depp. Under California Law she was entitled to half his earnings from the period that they were married. She would have been entitled to multitudes more in a straightforward divorce compared to what she actually settled for in the end, and then donated (PLEDGED, OK!?) to two different charities. She could have divorced him for no other reason than he got blind drunk one time too many, and if she’d done this, she’d be living peacefully and quietly somewhere today, tens of millions of dollars better off than she is right now.
But she walked away from that because she needed a restraining order, and she needed to get away from him as quickly as possible. So she went to a judge, and she got a protection order, and she asked the judge to make Depp attend anger management. And that’s all she ever actually said to anyone about his abuse until he began his litigation. You’d have to believe that she was stupid enough to walk away from a potential $35 million or more, ignoring her lawyers strongly-worded advice that she was giving up tens of millions, and instead choose a far more difficult and painful route, asking for less than half that amount while she was at it, and only so that she could donate it to two charities (both of which, for the record, testified that Heard’s payments were on track until Depp sued her).
But that’s not the only reason you’d have to believe she’s the stupidest evil mastermind on earth. You’d have to also believe that for five years, she used makeup to paint bruises and injuries on herself. She did it as part of her elaborate yet completely pointless hoax… but she executed her dastardly plan in an incredibly incompetent way. She stupidly painted bruises that were not as dramatic as she could have made them, bruises that she’d have to argue were ‘bad’ enough to constitute ‘real’ abuse. She also, even more stupidly, chose to paint them on at highly inconvenient times where they could easily be scrutinised and interrogated, for example, the day before she was due to appear on TV in front of millions of people. Oh — you’d have to believe that the makeup artist who concealed those injuries and who testified to covering bruises, swelling and a split lip is a liar, whom Heard has drawn into her web of deceit. A liar who committed perjury for her for absolutely no personal benefit. Or also so stupid that she, up close, could not tell the injuries were faked.
You’d have to believe that Amber Heard blazed a trail and decided to become the first abuser on record to ever ‘get back at’ their victim… by soiling their own bed. But once again you’d have to believe that her evil genius is matched only by her deep stupidity, given that Depp was not staying in the property at that time, and would never find the faeces. So — is she a frighteningly incompetent evil genius? Or might this be a lie Depp told as part of his plan to deliver that global humiliation he promised her… after all, what could be more humiliating to an elegant and polished woman, than to have an accusation like this believed on a global scale?
World’s worst security staff?
Beyond all of this again, you’d have to believe that Depp’s paid team of round-the-clock security, handlers, helpers and healthcare providers, who testified that they were witnesses to her abuse and manipulation, saw what he said was happening to him… and did nothing about it, over the five years they were together. You’d have to accept that they knew it was happening at the time, which is what they testified to, but never once discussed it amongst themselves or made efforts to help him… even though they DID discuss his rage, addiction, destruction and abuse with Heard on multiple occasions, since all the way back in 2013.
You have to believe that when Depp’s assistant Stephen Deuters texted Heard apologising for Depp’s violence, commiserating with her about the many abusive events that she lists, and telling her “that’s just one side of the man you love”, that he meant… well I don’t even know how you’d explain that one away. I’m not sure what other explanation there is for those texts. You’d have to believe that when he said “When I told him he kicked you, he cried”, he didn’t mean that Depp kicked her, but meant… something else entirely, somehow?
If you believe he was simply ‘placating’ Heard by talking about the kick, as was Depp’s explanation for it, you’d have to believe that that even makes sense. And if you have bought into his claim that he simply “playfully kicked” Heard while she was abusing HIM, then you’d have to believe that an abuse victim thought it wise to playfully kick their abuser while they were in a rage. And I don’t even know where to start with that one.
Since we’re on the plane incident, you’d also have to believe that Depp was telling the truth when he testified that he was relatively sober, sitting quietly in his seat and doodling in his sketchbook, when Amber went wild and started attacking him for no apparent reason. Do you believe that the below recording sounds like a man who was sitting quietly, doodling in his sketchbook when he was randomly attacked by his violent wife?
But wait, there’s more.
You’d have to also believe that in all Johnny Depp’s violent and misogynist comments about his wife — those texts about burning her alive and raping her corpse, the fantasies about her “rotting in the trunk of a Honda Civic”, calling her a cunt, a fatass, a used-up stripper, a “mushy, overused, dangling flappy fishmarket”, the promises that he’d “fix her flabby ass” and deliver her “global humiliation” once she left him — all that was just a downtrodden abuse victim, ‘venting’. You’d have to ignore the fact that in those same hate-filled and violent messages, he never once mentioned to anyone he was ‘venting’ to even one instance of her actually abusing him. Not once. Never did he refer to her violently or angrily attacking him during this venting (the way Heard repeatedly did), or ask his staff or friends for help or advice to deal with her (the way Heard repeatedly did).
You’d have to believe that Depp, an apparent victim of sustained violent abuse for years, also somehow felt emboldened and safe enough to verbally abuse Heard regularly in a very specific, authoritative, controlling, and misogynist way. That somehow, he felt he could destroy her closet, artwork, and other property (another complete reversal of how we know abuse happens), scrawl misogynist abuse and cheating accusations in blood and paint all over the walls of their home, and tell her repeatedly “she doesn’t exist”.
That he felt emboldened to deface her artwork with black paint (but leave a painting of his daughter untouched). That he was able to bellow at her for even thinking she had any authority in the relationship.
That he could swagger drunkenly around their kitchen, threatening to ‘show her crazy’ while smashing glasses and cabinets all around her. That he could admit to getting “crazy” with jealousy when she works with other men, and accept that it makes him act badly toward her. That he would ever feel like it’s safe to ‘tap her playfully on the back with his foot’ while she was in yet another of her (always unexplained and vaguely described) irrational rages.
Having been in an abusive relationship, the thought of ‘playfully’ kicking my abuser while he was in a rage is almost funny, it’s so completely ludicrous. But more than that, if Depp was a victim of sustained and violent abuse at the hands of his young girlfriend, he wouldn’t have had his staff drug Heard to “keep her under control” (his words), or dictate what kind of scenes she was allowed to do in her films. Because he wouldn’t have had the power to.
Because the person with the power to do that to the other is never the one being abused.
Colluding with your private medical team to divulge to you what your partner says, confidentially, in therapy, is abuse. Having a private medical team prescribe a cocktail of drugs for your partner to make them behave the way you want them to is a frightening, highly illegal act of coercive control. So you’d have to believe that somehow, yet again, left is right and up is down, and everything that every expert understands about abuse was flipped on its head in this one relationship. You’d have to believe that this highly illegal act of coercive control, which Depp demands of his doctors in order to “keep her under control” means nothing. Somehow.
You would further have to believe that the “monster” Depp repeatedly refers to himself as, in the various texts and emails he sends to Heard and his team apologising for his drug- and alcohol-fuelled rages, doesn’t really exist. He said it for no reason. That the recordings of him roaring incoherently in rage-filled blackouts mean nothing. The texts begging Heard for forgiveness , the apologies to her father for “going too far” after headbutting her “in the fucking forehead” (his words), the explanations to his friends that he “pounded” Heard again… that none of these mean anything. When he said he was pounding her he didn’t mean hitting her, he has to have meant something… else? He was apologising for nothing. For no reason. Just apologising. Repeatedly. After ‘invented’ incidents of fake abuse.
You’d have to believe that Amber Heard invented false sexual assault stories about Depp as part of this scheme of hers — but never told anyone about them except her therapist, privately, in therapy, at the time they happened. She never made a public accusation of rape or sexual assault at any point. She only testified about it (under the strict condition of confidentiality) in the UK because she was a witness when Depp sued The Sun, and then she only ever mentioned it again when he forced her to, publicly, on camera, in front of the world. But you’d have to believe she made these heinous allegations up for absolutely no reason at all, never told anyone about them, and tried to keep them a secret until Judge Azcarate forced them to be publicised in the Virginia trial. All just part of her evil plan.
To believe Johnny Depp, you’d have to believe that being furious about your partner having a career, and telling them to stop making movies and going to meetings, and working, is a totally normal thing rather than a recognised abusive tactic. So normal that it’s unremarkable, given that it came up in both the UK trial and the US trial and has been given no real weight of importance by anyone supporting Depp. He admitted it. It is on tape and in text. Him, angry that she was at a meeting because he’d told her not to go to them. He’s on record, scornful of her ambition. You’d have to believe that’s remotely normal. You’d have to believe that his admissions to ‘getting crazy’ when she works, that the extreme jealousy he admits causes his anger (the absolute hallmark of an abuser) is just normal behaviour, and not a clear and widely acknowledged sign of coercive control.
Let Nicol be the judge of that
You would also have to believe, and here’s where I truly believe things get extra bemusing… but you’d have to truly believe that you, after your perusal of social media, or your few hours spent on YouTube listening to edited audio tapes, know more about this case than the highly experienced, reputable UK high court judge who presided over Depp’s losing case against The Sun newspaper in 2020. The esteemed judge who spent over three months reviewing every scrap of evidence and testimony and found Depp to have been culpable for 12 of the 14 incidences of brutality that Heard accused him of, including some quite disturbing sexual violence.
Do you feel like you know more than the experienced high court judge who presided over the case? And the two appelate judges who found the verdict safe? And the hundreds of experts in the field of domestic violence too, who recently backed Heard very publicly? If so, that may be a sign to take a step back, take a deep breath, and with the greatest of respect, humble yourself somewhat.
How much power and influence do you honestly believe Amber Heard had? And considering how resoundingly negative, hate-filled, dehumanising and humiliating the global backlash against her has been, why do you think these manipulative superpowers suddenly failed her to such a dramatic extent?
Does any of this actually seem likely, when you sit back and engage with reality?
What you need to believe to believe Amber Heard
To believe Amber Heard, you have to believe that over five years, a very wealthy and powerful man with a documented history of substance abuse, jealousy, violence, property destruction and anger management problems tried to control his very young wife, and hit her sometimes when he was drunk. That’s it. That’s actually all you need to believe to believe Amber Heard. That what happened in their relationship is exactly what plays out in abusive relationships every day, all over the world.
You’d believe that her court-submitted and reviewed evidence was genuine. That the text from Depp to Heard’s father after he headbutted her where he wrote, “I f****d up and went too far in our fight… My most sincere apologies…” was exactly what it looks like.
That his text to the actor Paul Bettany, where he writes “I pounded and displayed ugly colors [sic] to Amber on a recent journey” meant exactly what it sounds like.
That on that journey, a flight during which he admitted to consuming “Powders, half a bottle of whiskey, a thousand red bull and vodkas, pills, 2 bottles of Champers” and turning into “an angry, aggro Injun in a fuckin’ blackout”, he really did kick her, just like his assistant admitted he did in a text to Heard discussing his abuse.
You’d have to believe that when Heard said to Depp “You beat the shit out me,” and he didn’t deny it but instead said “I made a huge mistake… It won’t happen again”, that he did in fact beat the shit out of her and then feel remorse afterwards. As abusers all over the world do, every day.
You’d have to believe that when Heard — who didn’t know she was being recorded — told Depp that he became so out of control she feared he might kill her, that she meant it. That when she was speaking to him in those recordings about the incident that made IO Tillet Wright call the police and said “The last time it got crazy between us I really did think I was gonna lose my life”, and he didn’t protest, that that was a thing that simply… happened. It was not some convoluted and unlikely scheme. It happened.
To believe Heard, you even believe Depp. You’d believe him when he admitted, multiple times, to severing his own finger. In the text he sent his doctor that very night, high and furious yet sheepish about the state he got himself in. In another message he sent 12 days later, this time calm and contrite. In the audio tape where he’s talking to Heard and refers to it not as “the day you chopped my finger off’ but as “the day I chopped my finger off.”
You believe that after years of abuse, as so many victims do, Amber Heard became a worse version of herself and began fighting back and lashing out, insulting him bitterly, calling him a coward and a cosseted, alcoholic baby. You’d have to believe that she’s like almost anyone else, in that being mistreated and abused for years made her very angry. You’d have to believe that she is a human being, who said some horrible things to someone who had abused and sexually assaulted her.
She knew Depp wasn’t a pure-evil beast who might randomly kill her while sober, but she also knew that his drunken benders were getting more and more dangerous and he might end up killing her. That, like victims everywhere, she loved him still, but also hated him for how he treated her. That, like so many victims of abuse all over the world, she “wanted to WANT to leave him” for what he was doing to her. Is that so hard to believe?
And you have to realise that when she finally got a restraining order so that she could leave the marriage safely, she was discredited, hounded, and vilified by her vindictive abuser, his expensive legal team, his friends, his well-paid staff, and his fans. Being vilified for speaking out is, as we know, par for the course for survivors. Almost any survivor who leaves and speaks about their abuser knows that being called a liar, a fantasist, ‘a crazy bitch’, and regularly the ‘real’ abuser is standard operating procedure. It’s not a stretch to imagine that this is also true… because you saw it happen, in real-time.
You have to believe that when an abusive ex is a globally adored superstar with unlimited means, that vilification might be far worse and far more widespread than usual, and that Amber Heard felt the full force of it.
Think about it. She was vilified until she became a caricature so exaggeratedly evil and thoroughly malevolent that she became more hated than child rapists, warmongers, serial killers, and (of course) every male abuser who’s ever been exposed. Until every single thing she did was twisted into more evidence of how unparalleled she was in her wickedness. Until we were being asked to believe that we were witnessing, in this woman who learned sign-language so that she could communicate with her deaf childhood friend, a woman who continues to advocate for and volunteer with deaf people all over the world today, in her we were witnessing a kind of narcissistic evil that’s never been seen before. Do you think this woman is a singular, supreme evil? Or is it more likely that she faced what victims everywhere face when their abusers are exposed, but on a global and amplified scale, just like how Nicole Brown Simpson was posthumously portrayed by the man who slit her throat?
Isn’t it relevant that the only people who’ve been this widely excoriated by the public are not Putin the warmonger, Epstein the child sex trafficker (or any of the still-protected men who raped the children he trafficked), Weinstein the serial rapist? Not Polanski, the man convicted in court of drugging and anally raping a child (and who was defended by Depp, who suggested that the child accused him for financial gain)?
No, they are people like Monica Lewinsky (a woman, whose crime was an affair with her much older boss, the most powerful man in the world). Or Sinead O’Connor (a woman, whose crime was to publicly denounce the child sexual abuse committed by the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful organisations in the world). Or Meghan Markle (a woman, whose crime was to be mixed-race and marry into one of the most powerful and wealthy families in the world). Or Meghan Thee Stallion (a woman, whose crime was to be shot by a famous man and actually seek justice for it). Are you seeing the pattern here?
Is it so hard to believe that an American jury might have been swayed during the trial of a very famous and beloved man, who had a courtroom filled with obsessive fans fawning over him and jeering at Heard? Who had to pass through crowds of his cheering supporters to get to the courtroom every day? Who weren’t sequestered, and almost certainly were exposed to a campaign of pure hatred that was so intense as to be inescapable, even for those of us who initially tried to ignore it? A jury who, inexplicably, weren’t given the opportunity to see evidence of Depp’s friends admitting to his abusive behaviour, or Heard’s medical and therapy records that describe and corroborate the abuse for years? A jury who — according to the court stenographer — fell asleep during Heard’s witnesses’ evidence? Is it so hard to believe that a notoriously unjust system for raped and abused women was once again unjust?
That the UK judges who have extensive experience and deep legal expertise, and little-to-no chance of being star-struck, got it right when they ruled Depp to be a wifebeater in their painstakingly thorough 129-page judgement?
If the initial verdict made you think that Heard was a manipulative and abusive liar, surely the settlement, in which Depp rolled over and gave her incredibly favourable terms, including giving her the right to speak openly about her experiences and paying only a fraction of what was ordered, would be enough to suggest that something was up. Surely the teams of IPV experts and lawyers who came together, for free, to advocate for her and speak out about what an injustice the trial was, would be another clue?
Anyone who is truly objective, who understands how abuse works and how it’s allowed to continue, who examines the evidence, and who uses their common sense, cannot honestly believe Depp’s story. It is not how abuse works.
So, given what we know about the anatomy of abusive relationships, if all that doesn’t tell you who was the real abuser in this relationship, just ask yourself a single question: which story sounds more likely, his or hers?
If you’re still struggling to reach a verdict for yourself, you can always ask Occam.
Massive gratitude to the wonderful Selene Nelson for her invaluable help with research, proofing, editing, and feedback. If you want to read the full UK judgement, which I really recommend, it's here. Another great resource is this article by the professionally correct Michael Hobbes.
If you appreciated what I wrote here and feel like buying me a coffee well, I’d be much obliged. I drank a lot of them in the research and writing of this!
