Episode 76: Depp v. Heard with Kat Tenbarge

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Dottigan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, one of my favorite podcasts, which I was actually lucky enough to go on last year, it's called You're Wrong About.

It is Sarah Marshall's series about the forgotten, the little-known, or the misapprehended artifacts of American culture.

And one of their best series, I think, is something that Sarah has called the Malign Women of the 90s.

So they did stories on the likes of like Monica Lewinsky and Tanya Harding and other women who were subjected to media attention in ways where these kind of broader cultural anxieties and resentments about gender got projected onto them.

So in the media and in sort of the popular imagination, these women's lives got factually distorted.

Their behavior was misunderstood and misrepresented.

They were lied about, or they were judged by these unreasonable and sometimes just kind of bizarre standards.

Because what was being metabolized through their stories in the media and in the public consciousness was not really about them at all, but about making them into symbols of a greater gendered conflict.

So these were women who could be collectively reviled and punished and discarded in a way that women as a whole or gender relations more broadly couldn't be, right?

So like we couldn't throw away the ambition and woundedness of working class women, even though it kind of shamed us to look at it.

So we just threw away Tanya Harding instead.

And we couldn't throw away the discomfort and hypocrisy generated by the post-sexual revolution behavior of like Boomer Street men.

So we threw away Monela Kolowinski instead.

And Sarah talks about this as a feature of the 90s, but I think it's very much still something we do now.

And it's something we did in the very recent past to the woman we're going to talk about today, an actress named Amber Heard.

Yeah.

And first off, we should probably preface this whole thing with a trigger warning.

We're going to be getting into some pretty dark territory here today.

At the same time, I think you're exactly right to bring in the wonderful Sarah Marshall and bring in the 90s.

Because in a weird way, I feel like the Amber Heard Johnny Depp defamation trial was both a flashback.

It really felt like it was a 90s repeat, but it also showed how far we'd come and not in a good way.

Not in the sense that somehow society was more enlightened or less likely to jump on a woman in order to sort of work out all the sort of internal contradictions of its sort of gendered imaginaries, but rather in the sense that we've developed a whole bunch of new media to do it in.

So we've moved on from the tabloid press to YouTube.

And it turns out

we've replaced one toilet with another or we've added a second toilet, I guess is the way you put it.

Right.

And I think the case that we're going to be talking about today, which is when actor Johnny Depp sued his ex-wife Amber Heard for defamation after she published an op-ed in the Washington Post that, well, how do you even put this?

That

sort of implied that he had abused her, right?

She identified as an abuse survivor, but did not say the words Johnny Depp.

No, in fact, Adrienne, she identified as a representation of domestic abuse.

Yeah, a figure representing abuse.

The faintest teal of a bell sounding out Johnny Depp's name could be heard within driving distance of that op-ed,

which then led into a very contentious trial that the internet seized upon as basically a means of venting its misogynist ire and frankly its desire to have a rematch of Me Too or to kind of come after Me Too as such.

And that's what we're going to be talking about today.

So today we are happy to be joined for this exploration by one of the most astute, principled, and prolific chroniclers of gender politics in the digital age, the wonderful Kat Tenbarge of Spitfire News.

Kat, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to be here.

I am really excited to have you.

I think you've been one of the smartest commentators on the way that misogyny operates online and the way online communities can reinforce our vision of gender.

And I really found your coverage of this trial and of its aftermath to just be absolutely essential.

So I'm really, really grateful that we got you.

I feel like it's a big coup for us.

Like finally, we got Cat 10 bar.

We have actually been talking about this for a long time.

Every now and then, Adrian would be like, when are we gonna have Cat 10 barge on?

I'm like, when are we gonna have Cat 10 barge on?

I'm so glad it finally happened.

I love to hear it.

And I feel like this is the case that really changed a lot of my worldview.

Like it opened my eyes to just the incredible pervasiveness of everything that we're going to talk about and how it had remained so pervasive after the height of Me Too.

Yeah, and I think that's a really great way to frame this because what I would really love for you to do, just to start us off, is to give us an overview of just who are these fucking people?

If any of our listeners were like under a rock in the spring of 2022,

what was the depth v Herd trial?

I do not care for either, you know, pirates or mermaids, so I completely missed them.

So, the Depp Heard trial in 2022 was the culmination of years and years of a legal battle and a public back and forth that had incurred this massive movement around Johnny Depp.

But before we get into that, just to take it back to how these two people met each other and what this relationship was like, in 2009, Amber Heard was 23 years old and barely anyone knew who she was.

She was like a D-list actress.

Johnny Depp was 46 years old and he was one of the most famous, popular, and globally acclaimed actors of all time.

This was post-Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

He was multiple sequels in at this point.

And before that, he obviously had a long and very well-renowned and extremely iconic career playing all of these different sort of figures that created fandoms around them.

Like Johnny Depp had this massive fan base, and I think it really drew sort of a diverse group of people to him, including a lot of women.

He had a really women-dominated fan base, playing characters like Edward Scissorhands and being in these Disney movies.

And so at the time that they met in 2009, Johnny Depp was working on a passion project called The Rum Diary,

was about

Hunter S.

Thompson, who was a real personal friend of Depp toward the end of Hunter S.

Thompson's life, and someone who Johnny Depp really admired.

And so he's searching for a female lead to compliment him in this film.

And a lot of more well-established actresses don't want to do it in part because the role requires so much nudity.

So Amber Heard, she's young, she's hungry, she agrees to do it, and Johnny Depp casts her.

At the time, Johnny Depp is married and Amber Heard is in a relationship with a woman.

So they're both in separate relationships and over the course of the movie and then when they reunite for the promotional cycle, they leave their relationships and they begin dating each other.

So they're in a relationship.

There's a huge sort of not only age gap, but also massive power imbalance in terms of Johnny Depp's wealth, his fame, his power within this industry.

And in 2015, they get married.

So shortly after they get married, this is when things start to become public about the nature of their relationship.

In May 2016, about a year later, there's a very public moment where not only does Amber Heard seek to divorce Johnny Depp, she files for divorce, but she also files for a temporary restraining order.

And she alleges that Depp had assaulted her by throwing his phone at her face and leaving a bruise.

When Amber files for this temporary restraining order, there's immediately this massive storm of media.

And it begins, it's the inception of sort of this public campaign that a lot of people sort of rewrite history and say that from the very beginning, like people were pro Amber Heard, they were on her side, they were anti-Johnny Depp, they believed her.

But that wasn't always the case.

And in fact, I've done some of like digital historian work trying to piece together together when did the tide turn.

And what I found is that people actually didn't believe her from the beginning.

She definitely had some supporters, but from the very moment she stepped out of that courthouse, there were people on the sidewalk screaming at her that she was a liar.

So from immediately as soon as she made these allegations public against Johnny Depp, there were a lot of people seeking to undermine those allegations and to protect Johnny Depp's reputation and to throw Amber Heard under the bus.

Now, as they're finalizing their divorce a year later after the temporary restraining order, Amber agrees as part of that settlement that she is not going to maintain any sort of domestic violence protection order against Johnny Depp, but the two parties release a joint statement saying that neither of them have made any false allegations for monetary gain.

And that's very important because later that would become the facts of the case that most of us were unfortunately privy to.

But in the years following their divorce, Johnny Depp is, you know, his reputation does take a hit from the allegations that Amber Heard had made.

Most importantly, he was supposed to play a character in the Fantastic Beasts Harry Potter spin-off movie series.

And the son in the UK runs an article calling him a wife beater and saying, how can J.K.

Rowling be happy to cast Johnny Depp in the Grindelwald movies?

And that is the first sort of thing that incurs what becomes this massive legal battle because Johnny Depp sues the son for libel in the UK, claiming that it was libelous, it was defamatory, that they had accused him of being a wife beater.

In the UK case, which happens before the US trial, it ends in 2020.

It's determined by a judge who looks at a list of 14 alleged assaults that Amber Heard alleges Johnny Depp had assaulted her on these 14 different times.

And the judge agrees that 12 out of those 14 times she has evidence for.

So the judge rules that Johnny Depp had abused Amber Heard on a number of occasions and therefore it was not libelous for the son to call him a wife beater.

But what Johnny Depp does next is he venue shops and he takes this matter to the U.S.

where over that innocuous op-ed that doesn't even name him, he's now suing Amber Heard for defamation in Virginia.

And that is the moment where where this case goes from something that I would say most people were not really following too closely.

I was certainly not following this closely.

But in the summer and in the early, sort of late spring of 2022, what I think really changed this case is that it became an inescapable internet phenomenon.

You could not get on any social media platform during the six weeks of that trial without being bombarded with a stream of content that was so biased, it was so inflammatory, and it was so violently misogynistic toward Amber Heard.

Yeah, and maybe you should clarify also, not just why the U.S., but why Virginia?

Why did they venue shop for Virginia when it was the Washington Post?

I mean, I hear they have courts in D.C.

Yes.

So the reason why this case took place, the trial was held in Virginia.

Even though Johnny Depp and Amber Heard had never lived there, the Washington Post does not run out of Virginia, and the facts of the case have nothing to do with Virginia.

They were able to get that jurisdiction because of, I believe, like process servers or some sort of printing facility that the Washington Post owns that runs out of Virginia.

So it was like an extremely loose technicality.

But the reason why is because had they done this case in New York, had they done it in LA, had they done it in Washington, D.C.

itself, there would have been stronger protections around this question of whether Johnny Depp was defamed in this article.

So Virginia had sort of weaker protections and they saw an opportunity there.

And in addition to that, they were able to get a judge who really sort of played this trial up for the cameras.

She allowed cameras in the courtroom.

The jury was not sequestered.

And it was able to become a circus, which fed into the exact legal strategy and media strategy that Johnny Depp's team had been hoping would swing this trial in their favor.

And that's exactly what happened.

And that's what we saw online.

Because for me, I did not go into this trial even necessarily really knowing that it was happening or that it would become such an important beat for me.

What clued me in that there was a really big important thing happening here was that as a social media reporter who reported on online culture and discourse, and I had also covered a number of cases involving sexual assault allegations and gender violence allegations, I was really shocked by sort of the unanimous public opinion that Johnny Depp was a victim and that Amber Heard was a perpetrator and therefore there needed to be justice.

And before I knew the facts of the case or about the UK trial or really anything that was going on here, it just struck me as so odd that people would be in such unanimous support of any victim.

and it also struck me as very odd that johnny depp would be able to be victimized by someone who was so much less powerful than he was but as soon as i was sort of trying to sink my teeth into this and figure out what was going on the first thing i read was the judge's decision in the uk trial and the minute i finished reading that piece of paper i was like the entire world is gaslighting me right now like this is i've never seen anything like this in my life and i haven't seen anything like it since yeah it's one of the weird things about the trial is that it made very manifest the way that perceptions and moral judgment around gender violence in particular can be very easily and very completely divorced from the facts, right?

The facts of the Johnny Depp case,

and I think we can lay our cards on the table here.

Like, this is a quite straightforward case of domestic violence by a man against a less powerful woman he was in a romantic relationship with, that really like checks a lot of the boxes that make this very typical, right?

It's incredibly recognizable dynamic to those who are familiar with gender violence as a phenomenon.

The public perception of the trial and of this relationship and of the culpability and like relative moral standing of the parties was completely the opposite, right?

Yes.

And this is something that shows a lot of how these like mechanisms of backlash are at play.

I think this is what makes the case really kind of like sticky and interesting, and what's made it stick out in my mind for so long.

All these like three years later, now I'm still thinking about it because it made all of this so clear.

And one of the things I want to do before we really dig into how this backlash formed, like almost like these like clouds gathering and then it rained,

is like try and put the trial and this moment when it happened in a little bit of historical context, right?

Because like 2022 was not that long ago, but in some ways it was a very long time ago.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

It's a very different set of social and cultural factors at play that I think were influencing the way people were approaching this specific case of like a domestic violence or gender violence claim.

So, okay, the trial happened.

It was six weeks.

It's kind of long for the quality of the claim, right?

Defamation claims very rarely make it to trial.

and they very rarely have trials that are so long.

And that's partly because Depp's lawyers dumped in just copious amounts of material about Heard.

Much of it was like kind of non-sequiturs, right?

It's like, how did you get your role in Aquaman?

Like, that was like hours of her deposition on cross.

But in 2022, this is mid-Biden administration, right?

So you have some of the like resistance-era liberal urgency and sense of like civic responsibility that was sort of

a heady mix of the first Trump administration, that's all gone, right?

Now we are five years out, like a little less than five years out from the heyday of Me Too in late 2017, right?

So that sense of righteous feminist consciousness raising taking place in the media, that has also receded.

Oh, and we might quickly add, of course, that the 2018 op-ed, November 2018 comes out of exactly that heyday, right?

So like we're now, you're right, we're in a different place, but we're litigating something that happened during that period that the media had at this point left behind.

That's the other thing that this case really illustrates is that civil litigation moves at a snail's pace compared to like cultural conversations, maybe especially in the Me Too era, right?

This moment when it felt morally urgent.

and like kind of politically safe for survivors to speak about sexual and gender violence, you know, at least in such oblique terms as this very imprecisely phrased op-ed that Amber Heard's byline was attached to on the Washington Post has moved on, right?

The social conditions that created that op-ed are no longer in effect, but the civil legal system can still respond to them.

So like sort of reach back into the past and drag this up forward into the new social conditions of the present.

And we're in this moment where like backlash is sort of accumulating, right?

I think there's a tendency to historicize the depp heard trial as like, and that's when we knew me too was dead.

And like as somebody who was there, sorry, it was dead before.

The backlash to me too began contemporaneous with me too.

The first mainstream press articles asking if the movement had gone too far were published in October 2017, right?

Just a week or so, or a couple weeks after the two Harvey Weinstein stories, particularly the New Yorker one that came second, I believe believe it was October 10th, that one was published.

These were immediately there, right?

So there was already opposition to Me Too, both in the political right and the political center.

There were a lot of skeptics of Me Too on the political left.

And you see a sort of broader cultural realignment against feminism and against the cause of like sort of politicizing women's rights.

This is, you know, the trial wraps just a couple of weeks before Dobbs, the Dobbs decision is released, right?

So this is a moment when sexual misconduct stories of the type that were really, really prominent and visible at the end of 2017, at the beginning of 2018, they have ceased to be able to remove men from power or to stop them from attaining the heights of power.

That's, I think, something you can date to at the latest, like Brett Tavanaugh's confirmation trial, which is the fall of 2018, right?

Yep.

And maybe we, we, because you mentioned that there had been claims that Me Too had, quote, gone too far.

I thought I might briefly mention, because you won't, that's the title of your book.

Yeah.

Gone too far, Mewtwo Backlash and the Future of Feminist Politics.

Maura, you got to plug this up.

No, I got to plug it up.

But then this is also a moment.

where like a few of the accused men who have suffered career setbacks at the height of me too have begun already launching their comebacks right they're like sort of back at the edges of public visibility they're sort of sliding back into something like their former careers, right?

I think what happened with Depth Be Heard marks a change in the character of the anti-MeToo backlash.

When it went from being, you know, backlash as a matter of moral indifference towards women's claims of abuse to backlash as a kind of like punitive and angry response towards women's claims of abuse.

It wasn't just like, we're kind of done with this, we're bored of it.

It was, no, no, no, now you have to shut the fuck up.

Yeah, it was a punishment.

And I think it's very clear when you look at some of the different demographics that contributed online to sort of the reigning discourse during this trial.

Because you had a couple of corners of the internet that are very familiar and very well-trodden territory to people who study anti-feminism online and movements like Gamergate and movements like ComicsGate and sort of these reactionary, very YouTube-driven spaces where misogyny had thrived.

And what was interesting about Debbie Heard is that you have this almost insular community with very specific people.

These are commentary channels.

For those who aren't familiar, what these YouTube channels function as are almost like independent journalists, except the only topics that they cover are like Star Wars, and the only stories that they cover are like, we hate women in Star Wars.

But what they do, that's almost like news gathering and it's not news at all.

It's just commentary.

But they, every single day, they find these little incremental storylines that they can harp on over and over and over again.

So a few years before Depp Heard in 2022, these same people who made this content were talking about Disney's Star Wars being too woke.

And they were targeting women like Kathleen Kennedy, who was a female executive within the Disney Corporation, who had attempted to make Star Wars a little bit more diverse.

And day in and day out, they would hammer away at these specific women.

These women were targets.

They were characters in this broader narrative of victimization.

And it crossed territory frequently with men's rights activism, which had this very specific narrative around Me Too.

And even before Me Too, it was this narrative that had been existing for a very long time around women's allegations of violence against their husbands and against their male partners.

And it was that these women are lying.

And it's actually the men who are the victim.

You see this a lot of times in like family court settings when a mother says that the father of the children cannot be trusted around the children because he's violent.

The narrative often becomes that the mother is lying and getting the children to lie to try to attack the father.

And so you see this narrative that is kind of held within to some degree these specific environments and these specific political movements.

What happened during Deppy Heard is that it all of a sudden became the narrative that all kinds of people were relying on.

And there was actually a meme during the trial that I come back to because the meme was intended to be spread among supporters of Johnny Depp as like a victory cry or like a rallying cry.

And it was like a bunch of knights at a round table, and each of their swords represented a different sliver of the population.

And it was like, look at all the people we have believing Johnny Depp and supporting Johnny Depp and hating Amber Heard.

And it was like, Manosphere, Gamergate, liberals, feminists.

Like you had all of these different spheres.

And it was true because you saw tons of women who considered themselves liberal, who voted for Joe Biden, who considered themselves supporters of the Me Too movement, grabbing onto this narrative and perpetuating it and believing in it wholeheartedly that some women were victims.

And we don't know who those women are.

We're not naming any specific women who we believe to be victims, but we know that this woman, Amber Heard, is not a victim.

She's a liar.

She used Me Too to to curry favor and to get movie roles and to make money.

And Johnny Depp is actually the victim.

And so we need to rally behind Johnny Depp as a victim.

And so this was kind of like a twisted, inverse, hellish version of Me Too, where the very clear abuser was treated with the support that a very clear victim ideally would have received.

Yeah, it's almost like it's the gendered version of the race hustler charge, right?

Like the person who dares speak out about an injustice is actually profiting from that.

And it's like, well, currently she's getting the pants chewed off.

So like, probably not, you know, but no, it's this weird kind of economy of like attention and exposure where it's like, well, but I have heard of her.

And it's like, well, I know I'm not sure if Amber Heard's ambition was limited to, you know, having gotten the attention of Cretans on YouTube, basically.

Exactly.

I'm really interested in this point you made, Kat, about like how

the false allegation sort of story around Johnny Depp and this painting him as a victim became like a photo negative of me to itself, right?

Adrian, you talked a little bit about this discursive mirroring and some of your work on Deppy Herd.

Do you want to like chime in?

Sure.

So I should say that I'm drawing here on a research project that I'm undertaking with a couple of researchers at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Our research director, Bethany Nichols, our executive director, Alison Dal Crossley, and with two students, Joshua Lee Kim and Olivia Phom.

And it's not quite ready yet.

So I'm talking sort of out of school.

This is the sort of early parts of our research.

But you're right.

A big part of what's interesting about YouTube's response is, one, as Kat is saying, the people who do it.

There's even some people who themselves got me too, right?

There's that guy, Andy Signore, who used to be with, was it Screen Junkies, and who like re-emerges, he re-establishes himself as an anti-Mewtoo crusader through the Depp Heard trial.

And I think like ends up making a video with Johnny Depp.

Yep.

What we did in the project was to basically transcribe a bunch of videos about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, about the trial, about Johnny Depp's lawyer, who like the Manosphere was like super smitten with.

And then we downloaded 1.3 million comments that were under these videos and sort of tried to sort of understand basically how people argued about this trial.

And of course, the video content on YouTube was overwhelmingly anti-Amber Heard.

There are pro-Hurd videos, of course, but like it's pretty grim and the click numbers are really pretty lopsided.

But it turns out in the comments, that's not necessarily the case.

There's a little bit more of a debate, quote unquote, going on.

Not everyone's just going crazy, falling all over themselves, like how much they hate Amber Heard.

But what's interesting is that they're not ultimately having the same argument, right?

Partly, as far as I can tell, and I'm sorry, there I'm sort of like taking off my researcher hat and putting back on my pundit hat.

Part of it is that they never had a theory of the case.

It's just she's a liar.

They didn't say, like, affirmatively, here's what probably happened.

That's sort of left to Amber Heard's few supporters to do.

What they sort of would say is, like, well, you can tell she's lying because, right?

And a couple of things are really, really noticeable that we find.

One is it's very clear that Heard

is being scrutinized in this very particular way, where it's basically abstracted from what she's actually saying.

It's like you can tell by the way she speaks that she is lying.

Whereas with Johnny Depp, it's all about action, right?

It's all about how he's charming, what he says, what he does, about his reactions.

And Amber Heard sort of gets frozen as this image of the cheating, lying woman.

The other thing that we found, this is not not wholly substantiated yet.

We have to run another couple of tests to make sure with 1.3 million comments, you are at the mercy of the algorithm.

But it's very noticeable that a lot of people don't refer to her by name at all, but say that woman, all right, or the woman, right?

And so it doesn't take a huge leap to think that a lot of them are not necessarily just talking about Amber Heard, but about their own, I don't know, their own ex-wife or something like that.

It's an expansive form of argumentation.

They're teaching each other how to doubt women as a group.

One thing we did was in comments that appear to be pro-dep or pro-Hurd, how likely are people to use different words?

And one of the things that we find is that with Heard, a lot of it is about belief, about lying, about psychopathology, right?

Like there's a lot of diagnoses.

They also diagnose Johnny Depp, but very differently.

It's all about the things he's overcome, right?

Addiction, difficult childhood, et cetera, et cetera.

And the other thing that they do is they engage in, and I think Kat already alluded to this with the Star Wars stuff, fan discourses.

A lot of them don't even say, I believe Johnny Depp.

They're like, I like Johnny Depp.

I like Captain Jack Sparrow.

That lady lying, right?

And you're like, okay, like that's a weird style of argumentation, but there's a weird fusion of the kind of Me Too backlash anti-feminism and what is clearly some kind of stand culture, right?

Yeah.

There's a kind of over-investment into the quote-unquote canceled person.

There's a kind of over-investment in their charmingness.

And and frankly, also just like a fear of loss of like the next pirate of the Caribbean movie that apparently like these people would badly like to see.

And you're like, okay, that's just you guys, honestly.

Like, let these things die.

Anyway, that's a different story.

But there is this kind of merging of anti-feminism with the kind of fandom where the appeal is no longer, hey, don't you believe this man?

Mostly they're not saying, I believe him.

They just say, I like him.

Well, I mean, part of that merger of fandom and sort of belief or like sympathy, right, is encouraged by the structure of the legal claim, right?

Because in order to claim damages, Johnny Depp had to assert not only that herd statements were false, which he did assert, I think, technically legally in court, right?

His theory of the case presented by his lawyers was that she had elaborately conspired to create all these witnesses to his abuse and all this.

She started documenting his abuse in 2013

in text and phone calls and diary entries and emails and photographs and audio recordings.

And I think at least one video recording.

And his theory of the case, with that, that was all false, right?

Yeah.

I mean, we should make that very clear for people who are like, well, they're being very, very glib about Depp's side of the case.

The theory of the case, again, was that over a course of five years, during a large part of which she stayed with Johnny Depp, Amber Heard covertly and carefully constructed a fake case for a future trial that would take place 10 years later.

I mean, it's just.

With the cooperation of like many witnesses.

But he didn't just have to claim, this is back to my point about fandom.

He didn't just have to claim that it was untrue.

He had to claim that he had materially

suffered.

Yeah.

Right.

He had to claim that he lost roles, that he lost his career, right?

And this is a recurring thing you see in a lot of these like anti-MeToo anti-MeToo claims.

And frankly, in a lot of like these defamation suits about Me Too, which sort of popped up a lot.

His was not the first, but it has spawned many others.

Is this idea that careers were ruined by the abuse claims, which in fact were kind of doing badly before,

right?

So this notion that like Johnny Depp got kicked out of the Pirates of the Caribbean reboot because Amber Heard had said that he abused her was contradicted on the stand by a Disney executive who said, no, actually, we are kind of trying to get rid of him before because he's old.

He's aging.

And this is a children's film and we wanted somebody younger and we were trying to get Margot Robbie, et cetera.

And so this like notion that all of the career and like life disappointments of the man are also sort of laid at the feet.

I think this speaks to your point to Adrian about like clinical terminology and like attempts to diagnose, right?

Yeah.

Johnny Depp supposedly had, I don't know anything about Johnny Depp's childhood, supposedly had a bad childhood.

That was one of the claims of his fans, right?

That is

something that entitles him in their thinking to like deference and compassion and like indulgence for all of his subsequent conduct, right?

Like a trauma diagnosis, which is very different than the much less sympathetic diagnoses that they were applying to Amber Heard, which were like sociopathy or like borderline personality disorder, right?

There was a difference in the use of clinical language as well between like the clinical language that evokes sympathy and like care and the clinical language that evokes disgust, which is also like about an epistemic claim, right?

It's like, do we interpret this person not just as honest, but do we interpret them as like potentially malicious?

Yes.

And so much of the extremely popular online discussion around this trial, like narratives that were incredibly viral and carried a lot of weight in how the public viewed the trial.

It's hard to overemphasize how little these narratives were rooted in reality.

So like, for example, one of the things that was really popular to do during Depp Heard, while the trial was ongoing, you had all these different types of viral content coming out of it.

So you had different genres.

You had people who were getting millions of views on YouTube just live streaming the trial and providing commentary over it.

There were people whose careers were made doing this, who still have very profitable careers today because they were doing this.

You also had people clipping moments from the trial to have them go viral.

And this was done with a really specific pro-Johnny Depp, anti-Amber Heard slant.

So it would be like compilations that went viral on TikTok that were like, Johnny Depp owns the core or like, Amber Heard like fucks up in court.

Like, oh, she's so hideous and ugly.

20 minutes of Amber Heard being caught lying.

I mean, God, I can't tell you how many of these I've watched.

It's horrible.

Always the lying.

And the other thing that I found really disturbing that has also persisted and been applied to numerous other cases since then is the body language discourse that came out of this.

This was a huge thing.

And body language is pseudoscientific, particularly in this context, because even to the degree that body language is real, it's legitimate, it's researched, it was not in the way that it was being performed on YouTube in front of millions of people.

This was just like random YouTube accounts who build themselves as body language analysts and experts taking clips of Amber Heard and being like, her eyebrow twitched, so you can prove she's lying.

And it's so frustrating because the idea from this and from a lot of the anti-Mewtwo reactionary discourse is like, oh, well, you can't prove that someone is abusive.

You can't prove because we weren't there that Johnny Depp abused Amber Heard, even though you actually can prove that.

But instead, it was like, but we can prove that she's lying, which is, I would say, you can't really necessarily prove that someone is lying, specifically in this context and in this way that they're saying they can.

So it's like the burden of proof completely distorted and shifts.

And then the other thing around like the fandom of it all and the lying of it all is they would draw these really fantastical comparisons to popular media.

So one that I like to bring up a lot is that there was a real theory that Amber Heard was taking moments from the script of the incredibly talented Mr.

Ripley or whatever that movie is called, where it's like a man who like is a master liar.

And they were claiming that Amber Heard was quoting him on the stand.

So this was like a really popular conspiracy theory and it's ludicrous, but it goes along with some of the other really viral and popular conspiracy theories, which were like Amber Heard is doing cocaine on the stand or Amber Heard lied about using a specific makeup product on the stand because the makeup product didn't come out until years later.

Like people were pulling from pop culture and sort of imbuing a lot of how they talked about the case with references to pop culture and fandom.

Whereas on the other hand, it was really hard, almost impossible to just like, even by googling or seeking it out, to find neutral language about the facts of the case, it was so hard.

The only resources around the actual facts of the case were often compiled by this tiny movement of Amber Heard supporters.

I wanted to flag two things.

Kat is talking about like rejection of sublimation, right?

And then like discursive over production on the pro-Donnie depth side.

And Adrian, I wanted you to talk about both of those basically from your excellent paper.

Like that's what I wanted.

That's what I'm asking you to do.

Yeah, just right to give you a sense of what this looks like.

Because, I mean, I think, Kat, you're interested in social media creators.

And, like, what one could say, like, well, okay, so the social media creation is what we watch, and then that's what we do with it.

But the comments suggest that this is exactly what they were putting out, people were picking up on in a major way, right?

So, um, one thing we did was we kind of pulled from these comments terms that have to do with appearance, right?

So, that'd be ugly, photo, face, camera, nose, facial, smile, hair.

And of all of these, obviously, like, they all become applied to Amber Heard except for one, which is far more likely to be applied to Johnny Depp, which is smile, right?

The one thing that you can do with your face, the one thing that's active is applied to him.

And all the stuff that's about contemplating, and I think, I mean, I love the way you're bringing that up, this evidentiary status, like the idea that you can diagnose from someone's face, whether they're lying, whether they're criminal, whether they have a mental disorder.

This is a really, really old idea.

This is from like criminal anthropology in the 19th century.

Someone like Cesarea Lombroso in Italy, Sir Francis Galton in the United Kingdom.

Or like phrenology, you know, she has the skull of a manipulator.

Exactly.

Yeah, and it's interesting, right?

Like historians of phrenological or physiognomic discourses will tell you, it's noticeable that they all contemplate faces in abstraction from what those faces do and say.

And of course, they transport this secondary kind of lesson, which is to say, with these people, because it's usually applied to like lessers, it's usually applied to women, it's usually applied to hysterics, it's applied to, you you know, homosexuals, black people, you know, immigrants, et cetera, et cetera.

Right?

With these people, it doesn't matter what they say and do.

Look at what they look like when they say it or do it.

Like, you don't have to listen to them.

That's just bollocks.

What you need is to freeze frame and just kind of look at like, where do their eyeballs move right now?

Or like, what does their nose do?

Or like, how's their brow?

You know?

And I agree with you, Kat, that it's, it's shocking to what extent these people kind of ass backwards work their way into late 19th century.

Like people watching, you know, the Dreyfus trial or like, you know, like in a Zola novel, they're like, oh, got Zeux, look at her eyebrows, or something like that.

Oh my God, like we're doing naturalism.

We're doing, you know, degeneration discourses again, but we're doing it with like poop emojis on fucking YouTube.

It's, it's wild.

So clearly, Depp and Heard became symbols, right?

Depp was the archetype of boyishness in a lot of ways, like wounded masculine prerogative and status.

And Heard was the archetype of like feminine cunning, malice, scheming, nefariousness.

But what about these like specific people, right?

Because they stood in for a lot symbolically, but they were also like able to stand in for a lot symbolically because of who they were and because of specific features of them that helped shape and inform the backlash, right?

Like, I'm not sure

that Dep V Heard becomes the mega cultural sensation that it became if its two principles were not white people, right?

Yes.

I think there was a kind of repetition about this when Megan the Stallion got shot by that lesser rapper who sucks so much.

I don't even remember his fucking name.

He's Canadian.

Troy Lane.

Yeah, he sucks.

And she didn't even bring those charges herself.

You know, she was called to testify in a criminal prosecution.

And something similar happened, but it was, it was more confined to like black audiences and black social media discourses.

Whereas these two white people belonged to the, you know, a white man belonged to the category of man that we mistake for all men, and a white woman who belongs to the category of women that we mistake for all women.

And then I think they had other aspects too, other features of themselves too, that made them particularly like potent screens for all these projections.

Yes.

I think that their personal histories and who they are really played into the way that this trial became this narrative that could be applied to so many other people.

Because I even did a piece after the trial had a rapped about how it had become a big thing on social media to refer to women as an Amber Heard, which I think is really interesting.

And you saw that happen with women like Angelina Jolie because her allegations against Brad Pitt had become publicized to to a greater degree in the months after Depp Heard.

So you saw Angelina Jolie being referred to as Amber Heard 2.0, and you saw women who testified against Donald Trump be referred to as Amber Heard 2.0.

And this idea of Amber Heard 2.0, this idea of like who Amber Heard, what her name represents, who she evokes, I think was partially possible because Amber Heard was a figure in popular culture who was just not that popular.

So she became a blank slate.

And I think, you know, I've, before this trial, I had really never seen an Amber Heard movie except for Maybe Aquaman, which I thought was the worst movie I had ever seen in my life.

Like, so I was not paying attention to it.

And Amber Heard, she is a fine actress.

I think she has a decent reel, but she was never popular enough to have any sort of characterization that a lot of other famous actresses have associated with them.

She had no baggage because she wasn't very known in the public perception.

Someone like Angelina Jolie has been so known for so many years.

There are so many stories about her.

She almost takes on like a mythological quality in the way that a lot of celebrities do.

But Amber Heard didn't have any of that.

She presented as more of a blank slate and she was incredibly beautiful.

And I think that played into sort of the response to her as well, because you have this woman who's kind of at like the height of privilege.

She doesn't have any controversies in her past.

So there's nothing to complicate her.

The only thing that we really know about her is her life with Johnny Depp and her allegations against Johnny Depp.

But she's incredibly beautiful.

She is wealthy.

She is privileged.

She was in, at the time, I think Aquaman was like the highest-grossing movie of all time.

So she is a really interesting celebrity figure, the type who doesn't come around that often.

Someone who's achieved these heights, but we don't know that much about her.

And so it's easy for her to become a stand-in for every woman.

Whereas Johnny Depp is like the opposite.

There's a folklore around him.

He has such a strong history.

Everyone knows who he is.

And people have impressed upon him these ideas sort of in the same way that Donald Trump supporters will like project whatever they want onto Trump and he just becomes that person.

So Johnny Depp, people just projected everything onto him.

They saw him as the everyman.

They saw him as a representation of themselves.

And you saw this a lot with men in particular who defended defended Johnny Depp really vociferously.

Like Andy Signor, the YouTuber who had his own Me Too reckoning moment, who came back into the public spotlight by defending Johnny Depp.

He literally has a video on his channel where he's like, I'm Johnny Depp and the woman who accused me of sexual misconduct is Amber Heard.

And so that was the formula that all of these different people were using.

And I think for a lot of women, because the movement against Amber Heard was in a lot of ways very female driven.

You have the photos outside the courthouse of all the people standing there who were Johnny Depp supporters and it was overwhelmingly women.

And you had a ton of content creators who were overwhelmingly women and commentators who were overwhelmingly women.

And I think there was such a desire to not be seen as Amber Heard.

Like you had to distinguish and differentiate yourself from Amber Heard and not be her.

Whereas men just wanted to be Johnny Depp.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about the kind of proliferation of content on YouTube you mentioned had already kind of a counter-heard, right, in Camille Vasquez, right?

Depp's lawyer.

The same people who would make these like reels of Amber Heard lying or being the worst for 22 minutes straight or whatever, would make these videos about Camille Vasquez and like clearly kind of had the hots for her.

It's very, very strange.

Yeah, like cuts of her flipping her hair while some like really cheesy like pop song played.

Yeah, like they're called fan cams.

Yep.

These like compilations that are meant to romanticize, right?

That's an interesting point that like she not only had a foil in Johnny Depp, the like supposedly wounded man who I think the infantilization of Johnny Depp in the trial was actually another thing that we really need to talk about.

He was portrayed as a child.

Oh, yeah.

But she also had this other counter in like the good woman, the woman who was on the man's side and was in fact using the credibility of her gender to like stand up for and stop the sexual violence accusation.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Wait, you're saying that someone used infantilization of a man to ward off a charge of sexual violence and you're sitting on Stanford's campus while you're saying this?

Hora, we invented this.

Technically that judge was employed by Santa Clara County.

But you know, there's something about Kat's point that a lot of the depth fandom around the trial was female driven, right?

Like there's this kind of cleavage in like the manosphere treatment of Johnny Depp, where feminism is full of these crazy, deranged bitches who have gone too far.

It was much more about like demonizing a movement as a whole and much more explicit about making the case a referendum on Me Too.

But then there was this other like sort of female-oriented world of content in which Johnny Depp was the heartthrob from the early 90s, right?

And there was a ton of appropriation of images of Johnny Depp and I'm gonna be like really honest with you here he does not fucking look like that anymore you know

he had this like feline quality when he was very young there's something about that kind of male star where they are supposed to look very young they're supposed to look like almost kind of girlish and there is something about that legacy he had when there were a ton of pictures of him, you know, with Winona Ryder in 1991.

And we actually know if you look into Johnny Depp's Depp's history, he was already drinking and using drugs to excess.

He was already being accused of violence and like outbursts of rage and paranoia, but he looks like a statue, you know?

And there was this weird displacement where he was sort of out of time and out of age and he was like suspended like over history.

Whereas Amber Heard, she didn't get like the afterglow of Me Too.

She got dragged very much into the moment of the backlash.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that goes to Kat's point, right?

Like the Trump Trump connection as well.

So much of the meme game around Trump is about kind of contradicting the obvious physical decay of this man.

And I have to say that I didn't follow the trial as carefully as I should have when it first happened.

But what I did metabolize, like, oh shit, Johnny Depp got old.

Because I was around for those movies where I was like, man, that is a good-looking man.

And I was like, no, wow.

Like, I guess time stops for no one.

Well, he's also been living very hard in the age of Trump.

You know, he's not somebody who's like eating vegan vegan and jogging a lot.

One of the exhibits that Heard's team submitted was a picture of Johnny Depp's lunch, which was a water glass full of whiskey and three lines of cocaine.

You know, it's he's living hard.

Yeah.

Right.

But this kind of overinvestment.

And as you say, this kind of transhistoric idea of this guy was so striking to me that because I just saw like, oh shit, like this guy that I thought was kind of interesting and charming in the early 90s, like is just as washed up as they all end up being.

Right.

And it was very evident to me, like looking through our data for this project.

I was like, that's not what people saw.

In a way, that really reminds me of the way people can look at Donald Trump.

Like, I have to recognize that you see a vastly different thing than I see.

I guess we're just going to have to sit with that difference because, like, I cannot do something to my eyes or to my brain to like see what you're seeing right now.

Because every cue gives me evidence of the opposite of what you appear to be seeing right now.

Yes.

And I think you see this so clearly in fan art around these people.

And fan art traditionally like refers to artistic creations within fandom, which was absolutely what we saw happening with Depp and Heard.

And it's also what you see happening with Trump because Trump supporters love to make fan art of him too.

And today, a lot of times you see that with generative AI, where they're literally creating fake images of Trump, where you can only see the resemblance in like his face and his hair, but they've drawn him as like a muscular superhero man.

Exactly.

With Johnny Depp, it's really interesting.

And I saw this a lot, and I still see this.

Women in particular will do something with Johnny Depp that's referred to with a lot of different terms colloquially.

Like he's a soft boy is a big term that you see within like internet culture that's around women.

He's a soft boy and then he's also chibified.

And what that refers to is a very particular style of drawing that's derived from I think a lot of like Southeast Asian style of illustration, like Japanese anime styles.

So they would oftentimes draw Johnny Depp as like a little cartoon character where he was drawn as looking much younger, but he was mainly just drawn as much softer.

So decades-old photos of him were often trotted out as like a real-time representation of him.

But when they couldn't do that, they would literally like draw on like pink cheeks and little emojis to like signify that he's like a girlish heartthrob-esque character.

And they would make him smaller and they would make him into like this just cute little guy.

And that was how the female-driven portrait of Johnny Depp was created and drawn up during this trial.

And in comparison to that, the images of Amber Heard

were like most strikingly, because one of the big narratives around this trial and something that Johnny Depp alleged that Amber Heard contested and the evidence really contests this narrative, but something that took on a huge cultural hold and that really, I think, defined Amber Heard's image.

Like I said earlier, she's a very beautiful woman.

So how do you turn a really beautiful woman into something really ugly and really detestable?

And what they did was Johnny Depp accused Amber Heard of shitting in his bed.

And Amber Heard contested this, and there's a lot of evidence that suggests it was actually their dog.

But this image of Amber Heard surrounded by human fecal matter became a really defining aesthetic imprint.

And so the way that Amber Heard was often drawn in fan art, which was incredibly vulgar and crude and abusive, was she was drawn as literally like the embodiment of the poop emoji.

And that's how they kind of pictured her versus him.

They turn him into this like, he's a teenager again, or he's just like this non-human, soft, cuddly creature.

Again, talking about like the inversion of facts and perception, like the inversion of just like the way that they look.

Because the truth is that this is a very young woman who is almost comically beautiful, you know, just like a perfect face.

And then this guy who looks like a leather glove that used to be in much better shape, you know?

Yeah, I mean, if you showed me them and said, like, you can know nothing more about these people, but one of them pooped to bed, I'm like, it's a guy.

It's got to be the guy.

Like, I mean, like, unless there's a dog involved, that could, I mean, I would obviously then go with the dog, but if it's just between the two of them, it's the guy.

he definitely looks like someone who has who's pooped in inappropriate places before

yeah it's a production yeah something i don't really know because we've been doing sort of a very sort of high-level analysis on this stuff and we don't know much about our commenters one thing that's really interesting to me is that like my guess is that the average youtube commenter unlike the average youtube uploader or youtube viewer is fairly young so it's also that like these people are kind of drawing on a past they didn't even really experience right they're drawing on 21 jump street which is like like probably pretty hard to find now.

I mean, like, it's got to be the recesses of like Paramount Plus or something.

Like, what do we make of that?

The fact that, like, for them, it's also kind of a history lesson.

Yes.

And I think that you saw a certain subset of Johnny Depp fans.

And I have obviously encountered so many of these people because for years and still even to this day, although it has died down significantly, but for years, Johnny Depp supporters were, you know, haranguing me online for defending Amber Heard.

Me too.

Like every now and then I'll still get an at that's like, you defended, they all call her Amber Turd.

Yes.

And they'll be like, you're evil because you defended Amber Turd.

You supported the abuser.

And I was like, first of all, no, secondly, like, that was literally three years ago.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

You're like, I've done horrible things after since.

You don't even think about any of the guys I've killed.

Anyway, sorry, go on.

No, no, it's so true.

And I think for a lot of these Johnny Dupp supporters, it really is a lifetime commitment.

And I think that these people are going to be on this train until they die.

But I noticed that there were certain demographics who would come after me.

One demographic was an older woman.

So literally, I would have grandmothers.

And I knew they were grandmothers because they would, in their social media profiles, have pictures of their grandchildren.

And they are clearly drawing on their lived experience of witnessing Johnny Depp at his peak.

But for the younger people, I think it was so overwhelmingly driven by Jack Sparrow, by Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean.

And I encountered this so frequently.

We've talked about this a little bit.

Johnny Depp and his role as Jack Sparrow is so pervasive, even to this day.

And it's interesting because I have been to Disney parks around the world.

I'm a big fan, a little bit of a Disney adult, which is embarrassing to admit.

But I have gone to Disney parks multiple times since this trial.

And it's always like a jump scare because even to this day, even though this franchise is not that popular anymore, the box office numbers for the last sequel that they released were quite low.

But he as a character is still very, very popular.

So they have their Johnny Depp character running around all the parks.

He's in the ride is still very popular.

He's in all the fireworks shows.

It's like the figure of Captain Jack Sparrow as a character is so enduring.

And so I do think that a lot of Gen Z millennials feel like an extremely strong parasocial attachment to this guy through the character of Jack Sparrow, which is still extremely profitable to this day.

And you saw that a lot too in like the fan cams, the TikToks.

I remember I interviewed this one young woman who was like 19 years old, who was making these viral Johnny Depp in the courtroom TikToks.

And she was a really big fan of Disney's The Avengers.

Like she was a big Marvel fan.

And I was like, okay, this does make sense to me because if you're a big fan of anything Disney, then you're just constantly reminded of Captain Jack Sparrow's existence.

No, there's something here just about like the

persistence of fantasy, man.

Like

there is a way in which these fantasies, these pre-existing commitments, these emotional investments, these desires to not know or countenance things that might disturb those fantasies can drive people to like crazy delusions.

I might like ask you guys to weigh in just as we wrap up on like three years on, what is the legacy of this?

But I think it like one of the big ones is now I see the way fantasy can invert reality in people's perceptions.

Yes.

Maybe particularly around gender, but I don't think exclusively in some like really clear ways.

Yeah.

I think for me, the biggest sort of aftershock that you keep seeing over and over again.

post-depp heard in 2022 is that that trial created a very persistent narrative script for any time you have a male and female celebrity warring in any way.

So you brought up Megan Lee Stallion.

That was a great example of this.

There have been other celebrity disputes.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt was a big one.

You saw the usage of the word amber 2.0, but I think even more importantly, you just saw the exact same argument framing.

It goes back to that manosphere idea that women who accuse men of any sort of sexual misconduct or any sort of violence toward them, harassment, workplace harassment, anything, they're lying.

They're doing it for some sort of perceived gain.

And this is a crisis that is facing men.

And that framing has really, really stuck.

And right now, I think one of the biggest ways that we're seeing this happen again in the world of celebrity media is the Blake Lively Justin Baldoni case,

which is even more shocking to me than Johnny Depp because in this case, you have a woman who is much, much more famous than the man.

Justin Baldoni, no one had even heard of him unless you watched a random CW show in which he was not even the main character.

And

regardless of that, he's still the Johnny Depp in this scenario.

And that really showed me, while I do believe that Johnny Depp's fame played a big factor in this case, it all comes down to gender.

Because the only thing Justin Baldoni has going for him is that he's a man and that Blake Lively is a woman.

And so he can rely on this rhetoric that it was an offense for Blake Lively to do anything to have any sort of leadership or authority on the movie set that they were on together.

And that has been a very persistent framing that is really unfortunate.

Yeah.

I mean, may I just add to that?

I think my read on this case three years on, and maybe that's part of because for two years of those three years, I've been doing a podcast with Moira, I think I've become fully Morified on this.

Because there's a way you can tell the story of like, well, Depp's team very cleverly realized a lot of people still really like Jack Sparrow and they used that to sort of get people to move away from how they actually feel about gender relations, et cetera.

And that in some way, the fact that like they still had to use the language of abuse just imputed to him was a sign that like maybe Me Too had changed something.

I've started to really doubt that version.

I think it is much more that there was an offer, and Moira already mentioned this, made by the backlash against Me Too sometime in October or November of 2017 to say, hey, aren't you all fans of people who might get canceled for having, you know, committed sexual assault?

Wouldn't it suck to not have another thing from these people?

Think of all the art you're going to be losing.

And basically enough people responded with like, oh yeah, no, I care for justice a whole lot less than I do for...

And then like, the fact that these things are such garbage, right?

Like, obviously, like, no art justifies turning a blind eye to something like this.

But...

But Pirates of the Caribbean?

I'm sorry.

Like, I mean, I remember someone asking me during the height of me too.

He's like, well, what about another Woody Allen movie?

I'm like, who watches another Woody Allen movie?

It's the same movie.

It's the same movie.

For the last 30 years.

Let's presume you like it, which is fine.

Like, you have 30 to choose from.

Like, you don't know, the world does not need another Woody Allen movie.

Your investment in this movie is, and this is, I guess, my point, is a proxy for something else, right?

It's a

technical language for these ladies who need to shut the fuck up, right?

You're becoming a fan in order to tell women to shut the fuck up, right?

Like no one's gonna watch that shit.

They're doing it because they don't wanna believe Dylan Farrell.

I also think kind of along with that mindset, which is very pervasive, there's also this really compelling phenomenon that you see coming from a lot of women who support Johnny Depp, which is like, we can solve, like we can, the Me Too movement can continue and women can get justice as long as we root out and identify the bad women who are taking advantage of our movement for personal gain.

Like it's this desire to find and punish specific women who are ruining it for the rest of us.

And that has been a really strong sort of rhetorical and cultural strain of discourse that has persisted.

This hurts real victims is what they always say.

Yeah.

Like the ability to isolate the abused woman from the phenomenon of abuse and just transform her, right?

Yes.

The other thing about Amber Heard is she does not exist in context.

Like, again, as we said earlier, if you know anything about the way gender violence happens, if you know anything about, you know, what alcoholics look like and do and how they think when they're in the middle of active addiction, none of this is surprising, right?

None of the way she behaved is surprising.

None of what he did was surprising.

None of how their relationship escalated and ended is atypical.

It's aggressively typical.

But we're not allowed to see her in context.

We're not allowed to see him as part of a pattern, right?

The man is always a unique snowflake whose past history and suffering needs to be taken into account, whose talents need to be prioritized.

And the woman has always collapsed into an archetype of evil.

You know, we can analyze this at a very high abstract level, right?

But at the center of the story is a woman who was abused so horribly.

for many years in her marriage and then whose abuse was furthered both by the justice system and by the media and by social media in this like ongoing retaliatory abuse abuse, what people call litigation abuse, but also sort of just like public harassment.

Yes.

In a way that has to have been so horrific, right?

Like she didn't choose to be in this lawsuit.

He sued her.

When you're being sued, you don't get to say that I'm done now.

You know, that was a means by which he prolonged a relationship that she wanted to get out of.

It was a means by which he prolonged the control that she had been trying to escape from.

And it was a project of his continued abuse that both the state and the public took part in, right?

Yeah.

This woman, like, I don't particularly give a shit what she did.

She didn't deserve that.

And she deserves an apology.

And I hope that one day she gets like the Jennifer Coolidge style

career reboot where she gets to be on something like the white lotus and yell these gays are trying to kill me and like just gets appreciated.

Or I just hope that one day she gets to be something else than Johnny Depp's ex, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because like you said, Kat, you were mentioning like she was kind of a blank slate.

All people knew her for was that she dated Johnny Depp.

And that's still all they know her for.

Yeah.

Is that Johnny Depp dated her and married her and abused her and drove her through this humiliation ritual and ruined her life.

Yeah.

And I hope she gets to be

something else for herself and for us, because that's really what I want for all survivors is that they get to then be something else.

Yeah, I think it's really striking that after this trial concluded, she had to leave the country.

Like she does not live or set foot from what we can see in the United States anymore.

She lives in Europe.

She lives in Spain.

And she really had to flee this country.

which I just find to be like so striking because it would legitimately be dangerous for her to walk down the street.

Like if Amber Her were to walk down like a particularly crowded street, I would believe that someone would attack her because she was vilified and objectified to such an insane degree.

And I hope that someday someday she's able to get like a little slice of this cycle of reputational recovery that men tend to get to experience.

Yeah, within like 12 months.

Well, this was great.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Kat.

You're so good at this.

I hope we get to have you on again soon.

You're perfect.

I would love to.

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Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

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