Whose Side Are You On?
He accused her of maliciously severing his finger and spitefully pooping in their bed. She said he beat her up before he sodomized her with a bottle. There was more of course. And every gory detail was steeped in bitterness and hurt.
As Johnny Depp and Amber Heard shared the sordid details of their deeply dysfunctional marriage with the world, many people were taking sides, usually with the assumption that one of these two troubled celebrities was the perpetrator, while the other was an innocent victim.
How about you? Did you find yourself taking either Depp’s or Heard’s side as you listened to their testimony or scanned the headlines?
Social media coughed up a familiar phrase “THE aggressor.” Apparently, we needed to know who was “the aggressor” if we were going to determine who was at fault, and who should be blamed.
A lot of people decided that Amber Heard was “the” aggressor. After all, she DID perpetrate violence on Johnny Depp. For many, that invalidated her claims to being a domestic violence survivor. She couldn’t be both a perpetrator and a victim. Consequently, many people concluded that Depp must have just been defending himself from her attacks. If Depp was being violent with her, too, she must have started it. So it was her fault.
