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Several weeks after Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s six-week trial for mutual defamation, Heard described the first time her ex-husband allegedly beat her, a charge she denied, as she denied all other allegations of abuse. .
Heard told the jury she had noticed a tattoo on her husband’s arm. He was old and faded and he couldn’t tell, he said. He told her he was saying “Wino Forever.” She laughed, thinking he was joking, and then, according to Heard, slapped her in the face.
As I looked at this testimonial I had the most irrelevant and puzzled thought, which was: How come Amber Heard didn’t know about the “Wino Forever” tattoo? He certainly knew it, as would any self-respecting millennial in “Edward Scissorhands” and the sensationalist magazines of the 1990s. The tattoo once said “Winona Forever,” in honor of Winona Ryder, Depp’s fiancée at the time. But the ink overcame his relationship, so Depp was stripped of two letters.
How was it possible that I knew this about Johnny Depp and his own partner right?
It was ridiculous to ask in a trial that taught me how no one really knows anything about a celebrity’s private life. And no one knows about anyone else’s marriage.
Seeing this trial seemed alternately lewd and surreal, the kind of judgment in which Marilyn Manson casually appears as a guest at the Thanksgiving dinner at one of Johnny Depp’s penthouses. Day after day in the room he devoted himself to examining photos, text messages, and the recordings Depp and Heard made of each other throughout a relationship that was, if not more, a lit Potty Gate.
Johnny says he never hit Amber. That he occasionally “contained” it when he hit it. He says he threw a bottle of liquor at her and cut off her fingertip. That she made fun of him, reprimanded him, withheld her medication. That she or one of her friends pooped once in bed.
Amber says Johnny hit her many times, usually when he was drunk or drugged and thought he was cheating on her. That had nothing to do with cutting off his finger, but when he woke up the next morning he had used the bloody digit to write strange messages on the wall. That one of her dogs must have pooped in bed, because really, she said, what 30-year-old woman would do that?
This kind of summary makes it sound crazy and funny (the divorces of the rich and famous) when we see it it felt common and desperately sad. Exciting and thrilled with celebrity dirty clothes is a well-honed spectator sport, but throughout the trial, I kept reading a cover that was tonally a disaster: The Daily Beast turned the most incendiary allegations into blatant points: ” The Poop-On- The-Bed Fiasco “,” The Headbutt “, as if detailing a prominent reel of a reality show rather than the dissolution of someone’s life and marriage.
It was all the more complicated by the fact that both Johnny and Amber are actors, presumably able to fabricate emotions to play with the sympathies of the viewer, and trapped, perhaps, by the possibility that the acting skills that made them famous could to make some people doubt the sincerity of the normal human anguish of either party. Johnny is a movie star with a 40-year career in his belt; Amber is much younger and much less famous. Online, hashtags #JusticeforJohnny outperformed hashtags #IStandWithAmber. The TikToks scoffed at Amber’s tears and presented her with every gesture as proof that she was lying. Apparently, the strongest theory in public opinion court is that she was a manipulative liar and Johnny was tricked.
No one knew what to do with this essay, that’s what seemed to be the problem. If you’ve tuned in to the inside of a celebrity relationship, you’ve gotten what you want to the point where you realize you didn’t want to:
In the stands, Johnny Depp spoke softly and so slowly that when he reached the middle of a sentence he seemed to have forgotten that he had never started one. He seemed baffled by his whole relationship with Heard. “It was a quick fire, an endless parade of insults, and you know, looking at me like I was a fool,” he said, looking discouraged.
At the booth, Amber often held back tears and sometimes couldn’t hold them back.
While Depp says Heard threw him a bottle of liquor, Heard recalled a different story with a bottle of liquor. He alleged that Johnny had been in a commotion, that the fury had resulted in many broken bottles. She says that at one point he caught her and she felt a lot of pressure against her pubic bone, a square pressure; at first he thought it was Johnny punching him. He then realized that the pressure was coming from a bottle of liquor, he said.
At this point, her lawyer asked her to clarify: Was Amber saying she was being penetrated by a bottle of liquor?
Yes, Amber clarified. Johnny was pushing the bottle of liquor inside her, he testified (and again, he says all this never happened). At the time, the only thing on his mind was whether the bottle inside was one that had previously been broken into irregular glass edges.
“Please, God,” she said, thinking at that moment. “Please hope it’s not broken.”
If you were left with the trial, day in and day out, if you saw the interrogations and the endless sidebars, then you realized that what you were seeing was a bad introduction to what it meant to be a celebrity, but a deeply illogical introduction. skylight. about what it might mean to be in an abusive relationship.
Lawyers demanded answers, under oath, to the unanswerable questions we always end up asking victims of domestic violence: why didn’t everyone see you hit them? Why don’t you have any more bruises? Show us the bruises you have; we will judge them.
I saw part of the trial with my mother, who spent many years as a marriage and family therapist and whose clients had included both victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. I interpreted her segments in which Amber admitted what she saw as her role in the toxic relationship.
“I would yell at him and yell at him and say ugly names to him,” Amber said. “I’m very ashamed of the names we’ll be told. It was awful.”
He said that “I would always try to accept the maximum guilt of the fights as I can … it almost feels better to accept the guilt of something than to accept the nonsensical nature of violence that you can’t change no matter what you do. ”
I wondered if my mom would see this as evidence of “mutual abuse,” a term she was seeing very much online, a way to make sense of Amber and Johnny’s relationship while spreading the blame equally.
But my mom said no, that doesn’t usually work that way in her experience. What was most common was that a victim of domestic violence tried anything to try to stop the abuse. They would try to shout, not shout, get up, stay down. Eventually, they could also resort to hitting. They would try everything they could think of because they thought that if they tried the right thing, then their partner would stop abusing them.
That didn’t mean the abuse was mutual, though. It meant that the abuse had a cascading effect, that it poisoned an entire relationship, that the violence on both sides became normal, even if only one party was to blame.
It meant that domestic violence was disorderly and nuanced and often contradictory and confusing. That marriage is not only a mystery to everyone, but also to the two people inside, is sometimes a mystery even to the two people inside.
I am concerned about this judgment. After looking at almost every part of it, I came out feeling deeply dirty for having seen almost every part of it, wondering where the line is between looking at my mouth and witnessing. I am concerned that the horrific spectacle of this trial could lead to alleged abusers suing their accusers in court, possibly forcing them to relive the alleged abuse.
I am concerned that seeing this trial of humiliation and humiliation will be seen by non-famous victims of abuse as one more reason not to manifest, when moving forward is already so difficult to do. I’m concerned about the way the trial, as cultural critic Ella Dawson wrote on Twitter, “has taken over the Internet and altered our understanding of abuse in a way that hurts victims now. same “.
The intimacy of the relationship is nobody’s business. But the issue of domestic violence is everyone’s business, and once the public had free access to Johnny and Amber’s relationship, viewers assumed they could solve the mystery of the relationship, that they could know exactly what happened.
So here’s what we know after six weeks on the edge of a courtroom:
We know there were bruises on Amber Heard’s face. We’ve seen pictures. Her make-up artist testified that she covered them up; described the appropriate color palette used to cover bruises. We know there were broken glass and looted properties. We also saw photos of this and Johnny Depp’s cut finger and the bloody writing scribbled on the wall. We saw text messages that Johnny Depp sent to friends joking about Heard’s death, referring to his “rotting corpse … rotting [expletive] trunk of a Honda Civic “.
We know there were horrible fights that the couple recorded sometimes with each other’s knowledge and sometimes without, in which Johnny moaned incoherently and Amber told Johnny he was “washed” and ” vengut “.
We know that the relationship lasted five years. Five years of what was, according to both, an unbearable relationship. Even longer than Depp’s relationship with Winona Ryder that resulted in the “Wino Forever” tattoo.
In the segment of the trial that will mark me the most, Amber Heard …