Suzanne Harrington: How did Amber Heard and Johnny Depp case become entertainment?

Actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. Picture: Brendan Smialowski/Pool photo via AP

There are eye-level signs inside the Tube in London, amid the ads for fast food delivery and erectile dysfunction, which read, ‘Intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and will not be tolerated’. Which sounds about right; anyone – that is, any woman - who has ever had the eyes of some random drilling into her in an enclosed public space knows how uncomfortable this feels. How intrusive and unnerving. How disrespectful. How potentially threatening.

But this seems not to apply if the enclosed space is a courtroom, and the woman involved is being grilled not about sexual harassment, but about something considerably worse - intimate partner violence - while her every word and gesture is being livestreamed to our phones and laptops. Even if you have personally made a conscious decision to avert your eyes - and feeds – it’s been difficult not to stare. Even if you’d never heard of Amber Heard, you have now.

According to Reuters, the defamation case between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp is being livestreamed because it’s happening in Virginia, where livestreaming from courtrooms is permitted – even when the case involves a woman detailing trauma and abuse, and the person she is accusing of abuse is sitting very close to her indeed. However, when you google why this is being livestreamed, the search results instead tell you how and where to watch it. Pull up a chair, crack open the popcorn, and settle in.

Is this where we are now, watching a woman give traumatic courtroom evidence for the entertainment of the rest of us? Even if you could not give less of a fuck about either Heard or Depp personally – and this would probably include quite a few of us – what seems so unforgivably uncivilised is the public nature of it all. How desensitised we’ve become, to quite literally allow details of abuse (I better stick the words ‘alleged’ in here somewhere, in case Johnny reads the Examiner) to be reissued as entertainment.

And if you have been doing any intrusive staring yourself, compelled to peek into the compulsive vileness trending across all platforms, then you’re just doing what the digital era has programmed us all to do. Twenty years of reality TV has left us confusing the reality of an abuse trial with a soap opera set in a court room; fifteen years of social media has rendered us so anti-social that recreating snippets of Heard’s evidence via TikTok clips for comic effect is being regarded as just that - comical. Uploadable. Shareable.

It’s like porn – the more you consume, the more you consume; and the more extreme your consumption becomes. We used to read stupid gossip mags about how much women paid for their handbags; these days, in the era of live feeds, mere handbaggery no longer satisfies. We want blood, we want tears. We want intrusion, humiliation, pain. Female, obviously. We have become so adept at intrusive staring that we are now laughing at (alleged, Johnny, alleged) domestic abuse cases. Hilarious.