Depp v Heard: The Unreal Story by Nick Wallis review – fear and loathing in Hollywood
After ending their chaotic, punch-drunk marriage, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard generously treated us to a pair of legal epilogues. First, Depp sued theSun for calling him a wife beater, only to have the judge in London accept Heard’s account of his brutality and dismiss his case. He then sued Heard for defamation in the US, where a jury awarded him $15m in damages.
Nick Wallis, the journalist best known for exposing the shameful prosecution of postmasters who took the blame for a faulty computer system, followed Depp’s wrangling with Heard in both courts and has now written up the affair as a contemporary moral fable. Extracting grand conclusions from trivia, his book documents the clash between two “alternative universes, terraformed by subpoenas, depositions and witness statements”, in which truth has become entirely subjective and relative; Wallis defines his chronicle as an “unreal story” because its astral principals long ago lost contact with the reality that tethers the rest of us to the humdrum earth.
As in a romcom, Depp and Heard met cute. After auditioning her for a role in The Rum Diary, he so treasured the imprint left on his sofa by her rear that he wouldn’t let anyone else occupy the callipygian cavity for the rest of the day. Flattered, she declared that he made her feel “like a million dollars”: an unfortunate figure of speech, since she was later accused of being a gold digger.
Having coupled, Johnny and Amber nicknamed themselves Steve and Slim, their homage to the characters played by Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, though they couldn’t manage the wise-cracking camaraderie of their models. In Howard Hawks’s film, Bacall tells Bogart to whistle whenever he wants her, and saucily shows him how: “You just put your lips together and blow.” Heard improvised a variant during a foul-mouthed spat that she and Depp, narcissists to a fault, recorded on their phones. She told him to suck his own dick, then set a further challenge by ordering him to “Suck my dick”. He asked for clarification, as if puzzled by a line reading in a rehearsal: “Suck my dick, or yours?” Wallis spares us the extra “fellatio-ridden invitations” that ensued, but it sounds as if they had already exhausted the available options.
Heard found that the dapper Depp, so adept at impersonating a courtly southern gent, harboured inside himself an obscene thug he called “the Monster”. He travelled with an entourage of security guards whose job was to protect him from this indwelling Mr Hyde; he also employed a nurse who served, not very effectively, as his “sobriety coach”. While scoffing prescription drugs, snorting cocaine and chugalugging vodka, he allegedly kicked Heard, broke her nose, and raped her with a bottle that deputised for his deflated penis. In lieu of any other climax, he peed on the walls and carpets in whichever “luxury compound” he happened to be inhabiting. By contrast with this psychotic mayhem, his antics as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean look positively demure.
All the same, Depp smarmily charmed the American jurors, who took against Heard because she failed to cry on cue when she testified. Further evidence of inauthenticity emerged to damage her case. She purloined the traumas of a confidante and passed them off as her own; a supposedly harrowing essay on abuse was written for her by an employee of the American Civil Liberties Union and timed to coincide with the publicity campaign for her film Aquaman. Even the blood from her broken nose was touched up with nail polish, and a specimen of shit that Depp alleged she personally deposited in his bed turned out to be canine. That incident prompted Depp’s fans to call her Amber Turd, and one of them arrived at court costumed as a faecal Heard in “a revealing copperbrown top, a dark chocolate-coloured taffeta skirt, a blonde wig and a pooemoji hat”. Others anonymously reviled her on social media as a “scum whore” or hoped she would “die in overdose”. Celebrities absorb the excess emotions that we can’t expend in our actual lives, and while Depp undeservedly soaked up the love, Heard monopolised the hatred.
“The courtroom in this particular case appears to be the world,” said the flustered American judge. To prove the point, some of the world’s worst people slither through Wallis’s book. After her divorce, Heard dated Elon Musk, which left Depp frothing: he called his successor
Depp, so adept at impersonating a southern gent, harboured inside himself an obscene thug he called ‘the Monster’
Mollusk, wondered if he had “a pair”, and threatened to “slice off his dick”. Depp’s defence was planned by a lawyer who also represented Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s scowling proxy, and the flunkies who managed his PR included a woman recruited from Trump’s White House. Intriguingly, a website devoted to oozing out Trump propaganda “spent at least $35,000 promoting pro-Depp, anti-Heard content on Facebook and Instagram”. The link is logical enough: Trump and Depp are both embodiments of rampant, ruthless id.
Another walk-on happened too recently to be noticed by Wallis. In March, the morning after Boris Johnson blustered through an interrogation by the privileges committee, Sarah Vine cooed in the Daily Mail that BoJo was “a charming rogue”, the “Captain Jack Sparrow of British politics”. Yes, for a while we had a pirate as our prime minister. Helped by this supplementary cast of villains, Wallis makes the knockout bout between Depp and Heard a digest of the rancorous, profligate times we are living through.
• Depp v Heard: The Unreal Storyby Nick Wallis is published by Bath (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
lamp. Another time a bear got into his “igloo” – what he called his cooler. The bears are especially bad in the spring, before the salmon start to run, Carroll said. But that’s just the cost of being homeless in the woods, he decided.
Situated on an island some 800 miles north of Seattle, unhoused people in the vicinity of Sitka face a particular peril: the Sitka brown bear, a brown bear that shows evidence of a genetic link to the polar bear. There are about 1,050 brown bears on the island – just under one bear per square mile, said Stephen Bethune, a wildlife biologist at the Alaska department of fish and game. And there are about 20 people living in the woods, according to the Sitka Homeless Coalition.
As winter recedes and the days get longer, bears head for beaches where the greenest vegetation grows, Bethune said. The groggy creatures are “very motivated” by food, and might be attracted by any smells of more readily available meals along the way.
This is how bears and unhoused Alaskans often come into contact.
Tent cities have become common in the metropolises of the “Lower 48”. Although Sitka remains difficult to access – a town of 8,500 where more people own boats than cars, with just 14 miles of road – homelessness is on the rise here as well.
Gayle Young, who co-founded the Sitka Homeless Coalition (SHC) in 2017, estimated that 35 people go without a home in Sitka – a number that increases in the summer when the weather turns, and the fishing industry kicks into gear, attracting “slime-line” laborers at the fish processors, and baristas at the popup food and coffee stands set up for the independent and cruise ship tourists.
In 2020 Sitka was recognized as one of Alaska’s – and America’s – most picturesque towns, largely due to the historical buildings left from when it was under Russian control in the 19th century. Drawn in by the serenity of the fishing village vibe, and the seemingly endless pristine rainforest around town, visitor numbers from the continental US have snowballed. Cruise ship passengers have bounced from pre-pandemic numbers of about 158,000 in 2018 to nearly 600,000 projected for summer 2023.
Median home prices have increased by 8% in the past year. “There is a shortage of available long-term rentals and affordable housing in the community,” said the Sitka realtor Kerri O’Toole. “Listing pricing continues to trend upward.”
“Everyone wants to be on this beautiful island, but that means that only people with a lot of money can afford a roof,” said Young, who helps unhoused people do their laundry every Monday between 8am and 11am at the Sitka laundromat. “Sitka is becoming a second-home community, and people are getting priced out.
“If you’re already on the edge, you can easily get pushed off up here,” Young said. “And on top of that, to have bears in the spring – it certainly doesn’t make any of it easier.”
Adult males can weigh over 1,000lbs, standing as much as 10ft tall, and are easily recognizable due to the pronounced hump behind the head that shifts when they walk. Bear attacks are rare, though they do occur. So far unhoused people have not been the victims. A man was mauled in August 2021, and survived after his friend shot the attacker. In 2012, a bear attacked and killed a Forest Service contractor in Poison Cove, north of town, Bethune said.
“When they come out of hibernation is when a guy can get in trouble,” said Darian Bliss, 33, while sitting at a wooden picnic table in downtown Sitka eating lunch provided by the Salvation
Army. “In the fall the bears are fat and happy after all the salmon. In the spring they just want to eat – anything.”
Bliss came to Sitka for treatment for alcoholism and never left. He moves between the woods and various couches, and is in the process of trying to buy a fishing boat that will serve as shelter, a source of income, as well as a mode of transportation back to his home town of Ketchikan, south of Sitka. In the spring, he says that he tries to stay on boats and couches, to avoid the bears rather than live in the woods.
“It’s harsh,” said Dana Mitchell, 51, as she sat alongside Bliss forking egg noodles and blueberry cobbler. “This is definitely not the easiest place to be homeless.”
Mitchell drives a bus for the Westmark Hotel in the summer, sometimes making $300 a day in tips, but struggles with homelessness in the winter. “The rain and the elements in general – they just make it even harder to get back on your feet.”
Robert “Bob” Cain, 61, says he has lived in the woods for 15 years, and in Sitka for 27. While camping at the base of Gavan Hill, he woke to the pressure of a bear’s paw on his hand. “When I opened my tent I saw tracks all over.”
Another time in April he returned to his site to find the fabric of his tent slashed through. “It was violent. I mean – you could smell him. It made my hairs stand on end. The young ones are the ones to worry about.”
Fortch “Stormy” Wayne, who arrived in Sitka from Ketchikan as a child and attended high school in town, has countless stories of bears plodding through his various campsites in the woods, where he lived for eight years, scaring them off with shouting and bear spray made of red pepper oil.
As he strolled through a cemetery at the far end of Baranof Street, among lichen-coated headstones chiseled with Russian surnames, he recalled the time he encountered a bear digging out skunk cabbage root in the springtime. “When I saw him I yelled: ‘I don’t have anything for you, bear!’”
The bears, along with the harsh winters and williwaw gusts off the mountainsides, compelled Stormy to apply for state-sponsored assisted living in town.
“I just got tired of the winters, and always being afraid out there,” he said.
He’s not the only one who believes Sitka’s unhoused need a refuge.
The former magistrate judge Rachel DiNardo Jones said some of the court system’s “regulars” seem to commit petty offenses – urinating on squad cars, trespassing – in correspondence with the fall storms. “They just want to get out of the cold, and have three square hot meals. That’s what happens when there’s no shelter. Essentially Sitka’s jail is the town’s men’s shelter.”
Andrew Hinton, the executive director of SHC, said that while he was impressed by the ability of Sitka’s unhoused population to forage and subsist he hopes to break ground this summer on a facility for 13 cabins with community showers, laundry and bathrooms. The project will allow SHC to address substance abuse problems, and to provide shelter – especially in the winter and spring. “We believe that people needing help for addiction should have shelter first. And then we can address the rest,” Hinton said.
The new facility will have an electric fence around it, Hinton said, along with air horns, to keep out bears.
“These folks have to put up with so much,” Hinton said. “At the shelter they shouldn’t have to worry for their safety when they go to sleep.”
On a recent morning a man named Kyle Sullivan followed a dim path cutting through the moss along the banks of Kaasda Heen River, not far from where Carroll lived. As the trail branched away from the bubbling current, salmonberry bushes and thorned devil’s club pushed up on either side.
“For thousands of years bears on the island have been using this path to come down from the mountains after hibernation,” says Sullivan, 57, a denizen of the woods for the past couple of years. “People call it a ‘bear spirit trail’.”
Following years of itinerant work in the continental US, fishing, horseback guiding, mucking out stalls and tiling, Sullivan ended up in Alaska. Unlike his two brothers who became miners in the footsteps of their father, Sullivan said he preferred the freedom of living in the open air.
When asked about Forest Service regulations that require people to move every 14 days, he cackled. “The Alaska troopers or police come around and annoy us with their flashlights. But we pretty much get left alone. Except in the springtime, when the bears wake up.”
He added: “Bears keep you on your toes. It’s all a practice in not letting fear conquer you. It’s healthy not to be at the top of the food chain.”
Sullivan said that he recognizes the dangers of sharing the forest with bears. He keeps a close eye on his site, and uses what he calls an “early detection system” for large and furry intruders.
“It’s a bunch of strung-up trash bags. Once I heard a noise, opened my tent flap, and saw this bear staring at me from about 12ft away. I got him right in the eyes with the spray, and that sent him running right on home.”
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• This article was amended on 15 May 2023 to describe the Sitka brown bear’s link to the polar bear more accurately.
get, if the dog will bite you or the cat run away … I sat in the car for about 10 minutes, plucking up the courage to ring the doorbell.”
But the sit was fine. Although the money was tight – there is no fee for pet-sitting, only free board – she “made it work”.
“I thought: ‘I’m going all in now. I’m going all in.’ I sold the house. I got rid of everything.” She bought the loft because it was a “golden house” for listing on Airbnb when she wasn’t there.
Now, Swale doesn’t stop to think. Some people want to meet her. Some leave a key under the mat. She has cycled around Sanibel Island in Florida with a terrier in her basket and taken a miniature schnauzer out for dinner in New Zealand. “Once you get over the initial fear, the freedom as a single person is fantastic.”
In Botswana, some strange beasts came through the house, including a baby rhinoceros. On a recent petsit there, she visited the remains of her old home. Behind the house, by the river, her childhood came flooding back: “Getting stuck in the mud … tearing up the massive leaves of banana plants to make a hula skirt.”
Her next stop is Florida, where she will look after a cat and three geckos. “So long as my health holds out, so long as I get joy out of it, I will keep doing it.”
Doesn’t she miss having a fixed home? “The world is my home,” she says. “You’re living in their home, you’re walking in their neighbourhood, you have their pets, chat to their neighbours; you are living as if you live there. It’s like borrowing somebody else’s life for a minute. And I learn something from every sit I do.”
• Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60?
Once you get over the initial fear, the freedom is fantastic