Depp-Heard trial set a precedent

This is the third, and I promise you, last time that I will be writing about the saga of Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard. There is only so much that you can say when a volcano erupts, an earthquake hits, mountains crumble to the seas and the photographers are there to capture the aftermath. The pictures speak for themselves, as does the fractured landscape.

For years, the social interactions between men and women have been just as fractured, one in which the wrong word or glance could end your life as you know it. Whether we admit it or not, Johnny Depp benefitted from the backlash against this toxic movement of gender grievance. As I’ve written before, men who’ve been unfairly accused of criminal behavior that was once considered “boorish” have started to push back against the narrative that they were born with the nascent abuser gene. Depp was one of the first men who didn’t slither away in shame and panic at the first pointed finger, the first misplaced accusation. The fact that he had an incredibly high profile was an added bonus. There is comfort in familiarity, and in fame.

But it wasn’t just men who rallied to Depp’s defense. Women, who had seen our sisters become drunk on the social power of the witch hunters took comfort in this pseudo-victim and his willingness to say “I’m not a witch, and I won’t drown myself to prove it to you.”

While Amber Heard did manage a small victory with the jury award of $2 million, no sane person could deny that the victory was an almost total one for her ex-husband. Johnny Depp will likely never receive any of the $8.5 million verdict announced Wednesday afternoon, unless

Heard finds a way to “donate” or “pledge” it to him on an installment plan. But it’s fairly clear that he did not sue his ex for the money. He sued her for a chance to tell his story, in all of its gore and glory. And that was priceless.

Some of my friends observed that there were no winners in this case. I beg to differ. If you are content to have a person you once loved lie about you in the most extreme and damaging way, I suppose winning a verdict that exposes her as a liar isn’t worth much. But if your reputation is, as Shakespeare wrote, that immortal part of yourself, the fact that a jury of your peers rescued it from a premature and unwarranted execution is worth something.

Some of my friends also said that Depp and Heard were equally vile and deserved each other, which is interesting because he never wrote a column attacking her. He, in fact, asked for a clause in their divorce settlement seeking reciprocal silence. He didn’t want her to speak about him, and he was prepared not to speak about her as their paths diverged. She broke that mutual covenant, and so she is the reason we are now saddled with a public image of two broken people.

In the end, this trial was a social cleansing, a moral enema if you will. That might seem ironic and counter-intuitive, given the disgusting facts that were elicited at trial, including images of excrement, broken bottles, severed fingers, blackened eyes, vomit and all the other attributes of base humanity. But it set a precedent that I hope the rest of us will follow the next time we find ourselves at the other end of a pointed finger. Whether we deserve the accusations is, of course, subjective. Each case rises and falls on its own facts.

But the facts in this case were that Johnny Depp decided he wasn’t going to be shamed into silence, even if that meant that the stories which would inevitably follow would embarrass him at least as much as they embarrassed his antagonist.

This trial gave other people permission to say “enough is enough.” It might be too late for the bodies that were crushed under the weight of the #MeToo movement, bdies and personalities

But the facts in this case were that Johnny Depp decided he wasn’t going to be shamed into silence, even if that meant that the stories which would inevitably follow would embarrass him at least as much as they embarrassed his antagonist.

that were erased and consigned to oblivion. It might be too late for Al Franken, who never should have resigned. It might be too late for Aziz Ansari, who never should have apologized for having consensual sex with a confused fan. It might be too late for Garrison Keillar (for Lord’s sake, the Prairie Home Companion guy?) who was somehow portrayed as a sexual predator by one co-worker.

But maybe the next time someone, man or woman, thinks about sending a lie around the world, they’ll check and see if they have a spare $8.5 million in their bank accounts.