Johnny Depp won. The jury found the actor right in his defamation lawsuit and ordered Amber Heard to pay $15 million in damages. The fact that Depp was also found partially guilty and sentenced to a fine of 2 million dollars does not change his triumph. He won his lawsuit on all counts. The internet rejoices. More than six weeks and a few million TikTok videos after the trial began, the drama is over.
Following the trial through social media, the verdict is the long-awaited happy ending. The hero’s journey is over, the betrayed man has his honor back and the witch is dead. At least her career and for the time being probably also her ghost. Because how does a person feel who has been receiving death threats for weeks and is publicly humiliated? New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg fears the death of #MeToo with the trial. Because similar complaints from men could follow.
But court cases are not evil in themselves. They serve to find the truth, if they are not overshadowed by their own TVization of reality. The live transmission would even have been an opportunity for a social search for truth, not just a legal one. Everyone could watch the trial days and the pleadings of both sides in full. In the end, however, only those fragments that the Deppfans carefully curated and put on the Internet were of interest. Who has time in everyday life to follow the entire process?
Nor will the verdict discredit all of the women who have spoken out against sexual assault. Those who previously thought women were evil and devious will continue to do so after the verdict. If you didn’t do it, Amber Heard won’t convince you of the woman as an inherent liar. In a way, the process has even helped the women’s movement. Because if the past few weeks have shown one thing, it’s that misogyny is still very much alive. In men and in women. And to an extent that no one would have believed before.
In 2018, US comedian Bill Burr made fun of the MeToo movement’s motto “Believe Women” on a talk show. “About everyone? I give you 87 percent. But what about the remaining 13 scratching your car and setting fire to your clothes? What I miss today are evidence and trials. On social media, only the justice of the citizens counts.” Four years later, it shows how right he was. And how wrong.
On social media, the lynching has decided Amber Heard’s career. As an actress, she died for Hollywood. This is shown not least by the petition on change.org that wants to remove it from the second part of “Aquaman”. 4.4 million people have signed so far. Burr was also right that the call to “believe women” falls short. But only bad protest signs deal with relativization. In addition, Heard, who was diagnosed as bipolar by Depp’s lawyers, fits perfectly into the picture of the crazy 13 percent.
But Burr suggests in the interview that a politically correct mob would always side with women on social media. He had overestimated the willingness to believe women.
What does the process say about us?
The process has ignited a ferocity in people reminiscent of sharks in a frenzy. For weeks, a woman who was an alleged victim of sexual violence was humiliated, insulted and parodied. The trial also revealed text messages from Depp, in which he spoke of burning and then raping Heard’s body. That didn’t change anything at the reception on TikTok and Instagram. Maybe deep inside we are even more medieval than MeToo. In the intoxication of blind greed for entertainment, a woman was publicly shredded. Will the hangover and shame follow after the party when the video snippets slowly settle down? Maybe we can also forgive our inner predator, because the show was simply good. Everything fitted so nicely.
In fact, Heard didn’t seem credible on the witness stand. Your comments seemed exaggerated. She noticeably paused for the cameras as her tears dried. She didn’t seem authentic, or as one TikToker put it, she seemed like a bad actress. And that’s what it was all about in the end: the effect. It mattered who came across better on the screen. And Johnny Depp performed terrific. Where Heard’s tone sounded wrong, Depp put the right breaks. His struggle for composure did not seem exaggerated, but touching. The words of his last appearance on the witness stand were simple and powerful, like something out of a script: “No matter what happens. I came here and I told the truth”.
And we viewers hung on his every word and looked forward to more raw material from this reality fight for justice with this cliffhanger. The will to not believe women has managed to turn megastar Johnny Depp into an underdog. Maybe also because it’s the more exciting plot.
After two years of the pandemic, we are still hungry for entertainment and threw ourselves into this major event. This is also shown by the secondary strands, which were further written on YouTube. The story has long been expanded to include a love affair between Johnny Depp and his lawyer Camille Vasquez. Video clips of the actor adjusting the chair for the defense attorney, hugging her and smiling at her during her pleadings serve as evidence.
Amber Heard’s defenders, on the other hand, looked almost clownish. For example, when the main defender repeatedly forgot to turn on her microphone before speaking or was convicted of false statements by the TikTok community. Those who were not sufficiently entertained by this could look forward to guest appearances by other superstars. Former model Kate Moss, the ex, took the witness stand live.
The jury is one of the few people who didn’t notice the media noise. The seven Americans who finally pronounced the verdict were not allowed to watch any media during the trial. You didn’t see Depp and Heard on the phone screen, you saw them in the courtroom in Fairfax, Virginia. And they democratically ruled Heard guilty of defamation. This is not the death of MeToo. Women lie too, we knew that beforehand. But it’s the end of believing in social media as a space for contradiction. And the end of the myth of a politically correct network culture. Our animal lust actually won.