maaarine: What Really Happened at the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp Trial (Michael Hobbes, Slate, Ju
maaarine: What Really Happened at the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp Trial (Michael Hobbes, Slate, June 03 2022)“So far we’ve covered Heard’s evidence of individual incidents. There’s also the big picture. Context matters in domestic abuse cases, and the context of this one is Depp’s well-documented history of misogyny, drug abuse, and violent outbursts.This has never been a secret: As early as 1989, he was responding to rumors of “on-set tantrums, misbehavior and egotism” while filming 21 Jump Street. A 1998 article referred to the “legendary Depp temper.” In 2000, both Terry Gilliam (director of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and Mike Newell (who directed him Donnie Brasco) told Esquire that he had blown up on their sets.“He is so sweet the rest of the time,” Newell said, “and just of couple of times he comes on like the bloodbeast terror.”Depp’s temper and drug use have long been cast as symbols of his rock-star persona. His penchant for attacking paparazzi and trashing hotel rooms has been a mainstay of magazine profiles and late-night show appearances for years. Now that he’s done with the Heard allegations, he will defend himself against a 2018 lawsuit filed by a crew member who claims Depp berated and punched him on the set of City of Lies. Other aspects of Heard’s testimony also align with well-documented patterns of abusive behavior. Ellen Barkin, who was a friend and lover of Depp’s in the late ’90s, said he was controlling, jealous, and once threw a wine bottle across the room in one of his rages. Another of his exes, Jennifer Grey, described him as “crazy jealous and paranoid.” There are anonymously sourced reports that he paid his first ex-wife an extra $1.25 million not to disclose a phone message in which he repeatedly used the N-word.“I have a lot of love inside me,” Depp said in 2000, “but I also have a tremendous amount of anger.” He added: “Which I think is normal.”And let’s not forget Depp’s well-established misogyny. He has defended Roman Polanski and said the accusations against Harvey Weinstein were implausible because his wife wasn’t “some hairy-backed bitch.” His texts from early in his relationship refer to Heard as an “idiot cow,” “filthy whore,” and “worthless hooker.” One says, “I’ll smack the ugly cunt around before I let her in, don’t worry.”These may be “jokes” to Depp. But other correspondence has a sharper tone. In an email to Elton John, Depp described the mother of his children as “the French extortionist (ex-cunt).” Later texts refer to Heard as “flappy fish market,” “cum guzzling whore,” and “scumbag gold-digging cunt.”Call it bias if you want, but I simply don’t find it difficult to believe that a troubled man with a history of drug problems and violent outbursts—not to mention all the entitlement that comes with being a beloved and wealthy movie star—brought that pattern into his marriage.One of the reasons I have gotten so obsessed with this case is the sheer unreality of watching large swaths of the internet and progressive media act as if this narrative is some implausible fairy tale rather than a story we have seen a million times. Even if Heard didn’t have an Everest of supporting evidence, even if this was a he-said-she-said case, her account should be treated as plausible on its face.This is all beside the fact that Heard’s account of the facts makes sense, and Depp’s doesn’t. (…)All of this—the bad-faith scrutiny, the obsession with minor discrepancies, the confidence that vast conspiracies can be discovered on Google—is instantly recognizable from previous explosions of internet-enabled misogynistic bullying. The “body language experts” that swarmed around Heard spent years applying the same junk science to Amanda Knox, Meghan Markle, and Carole Baskin. The people who targeted Anita Sarkeesian during Gamergate pretended to be offended by the (extremely minor) technical errors in her videos rather than her presence in their boy’s-only treehouse.The best tell of the motivations behind the anti-Heard smear campaign is that while her every slip-up has been dissected ad nauseum, Depp’s far more numerous and consequential discrepancies have been ignored.” -- source link