From the first to the last hammer blow, the Johnny Depp trial against Amber Heard was a sad spectacle, as bewildering as it was unedifying. Now that it is finished, and that it has proven Depp right on all points except one, there is no longer any doubt: the objective was to sow confusion.
Why was the actor, who had already lost in a similar case in a British court, so keen to go back to the judges? His reputation could not come out clean from a public trial like this, during which charges of physical, sexual and psychological violence, and the consumption of toxic substances would not fail to be raised.
Amber Heard, his ex-wife, hoped for her quite the opposite: that the whole world hears, by the menu, all the torments which had led her, in the tribune which she published in the Washington Post and who was involved in this trial, to present himself as a “public embodiment of domestic violence”.
“One word against the other”
The verdict had not fallen that Johnny Depp had already won. What initially appeared to be an unambiguously abusive husband affair quickly turned into a melodrama of opposing points of view. It is exactly in this thread that Amber Heard’s small victory against remarks made not by her husband but by one of his lawyers in 2020, Adam Waldman, fits and it shows how the “question viewpoints” worked in the actor’s favor throughout.
As a user commented on the site of the New York Times, “every couple has their dark side”. It’s complicated, life. Maybe Johnny Depp and Amber Heard were both violent. Who can know what really happened? The journalist and legal columnist is supposed to make it his duty to doubt. Faced with the two parties to this trial, we therefore found ourselves on familiar ground, that of “one word against the other”.
Yet we should know: the so-called symmetry of this expression is an ideological fiction, women victims of domestic violence and sexual assault still struggle to be heard, much more than their attackers. I’m not saying that women always tell the truth, that men are always guilty, or that a proper trial is not the essential foundation of justice.
But the Depp-Heard case was not a criminal trial: it was a civil action, which aimed to measure the damage done to the reputation of each of the parties. In other words, it was less a question of examining the facts than of assessing the sympathies.
From “twink” to “old sea bass”
And Johnny Depp was leaving there with clear advantages. Not that he is a better actor than Amber Heard, but if the conduct at the helm of the latter has been under fire from critics, it is in particular because he is a better known comedian, a big star who has since more long hoarded public approval.
With him in the courtroom, he had summoned all the famous characters