Edel Coffey: Hard to know who to feel more sorry for in Johnny Depp and Amber Heard case
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard
It’s hard to know who to feel more sorry for in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation case, which came to an end on Wednesday night when the US jury presiding over the trial found in favour of Depp. Depp said the jury had given him his life back, while Heard said she was "heartbroken that the mountain of evidence still was not enough to stand up to the disproportionate power, influence and sway of my ex-husband" and that the verdict had set back the clock on violence against women.
The official starting point of this public battle between Depp and Heard was December 2018, when Heard wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post referring to herself as a "public figure representing domestic abuse". This is the defamation for which Depp was suing Heard for $50m. Heard was counter-suing him for $100m, claiming his lawyer had smeared her by referring to her accusations as a ‘hoax’. The Virginia jury decided Depp had been defamed and awarded him $15m, while Heard got $2m in damages for her counter-claim.
Before the American defamation case, Depp had also taken a libel case against The Sun in the UK two years ago for branding him a ‘wife-beater’. He lost that case when the judge ruled that Depp had assaulted Heard.
During this latest six-week defamation trial, the jury were shown graphic footage and pictures of fights, injuries, including Depp’s fingertip which he claimed was severed after Heard threw a vodka bottle at him. Heard gave harrowing testimony of a violent sexual assault with a bottle. We heard of texts from Depp to friends saying ‘Let’s burn Amber’ and another saying he wanted to see Heard’s ‘rotting corpse decomposing in the trunk of a Honda Civic.’
We heard of the ‘horrible prank that went wrong’, the excrement found in Johnny Depp’s bed after a fight in 2016. Depp claims it was human and Heard had put it there, Heard insists it was their Yorkshire terrier’s, who had bowel issues for life having ‘eaten Johnny’s weed as a puppy’. The details were both sordid and titillating and we gobbled them up as quickly as they could be served.
This case was a battle for reputations, and a battle to rehabilitate the reputations that were so badly damaged by the London libel case, which revealed so much wincing detail about Depp and Heard’s life. That exposure was further compounded by this second court case, which has revealed yet more unseemly details. And yet our appetite was not satisfied.
The two points that are thought to have damaged Heard’s case were, first, the arrival of Kate Moss as a witness. Moss who dated Depp in the nineties categorically dismissed an old rumour that Depp had pushed her down a flight of stairs. The second detail that is thought to have influenced the jury was the revelation that Heard had not paid $7m from her divorce settlement to charity, as she had claimed. She told the jury that she had had to pay $6m in legal fees and so was unable to donate the money to charity, as planned.
This has been one of the most public and detailed celebrity uncouplings of the 21st century and the revelations have been unseemly and sordid. But it’s not the only unseemly and sordid aspect of the case. As I’ve followed the case, and the case of Colleen Rooney and Rebecca Vardy in parallel, it’s been hard to avoid an inner feeling of sordidness. It’s becoming harder to defend our interest in these public stagings of private matters.
As I read more and more sordid details, consumed the WhatsApp messages between Rebecca Vardy and her publicist, pored over the details of Depp and Heard’s troubled marriage, I felt worse and worse about myself and our 24-hour news cycle, this live feed of other people’s private, intimate, miserable business... It reminded me of the circus trial that was at the heart of my own debut novel Breaking Point and how we love to judge people, particularly those more beautiful, more successful, more perfect than ourselves.
I wondered what is it about our human nature that these trials appeal to. While we’re busy judging these people, I thought, we might do well to extend a little of that judgment to our own behaviour.
So where do Depp and Heard go from here? How do they begin their lives again? Depp is planning a comeback, with hopes to return to acting, making arthouse cinema and release an album with the musician Jeff Beck. Heard is planning to appeal the verdict, which might mean that this six-week trial is not the last we hear of the Depp-Heard battle.
But it’s hard to see how either of them might shake off such a drawn-out and exhaustive look inside their private lives, their relationship, their behaviour towards each other, no matter who the jury has sided with. It’s hard to understand what those gigantic sums of money awarded, and the gigantic legal fees, will mean for each party. Either party may well find themselves broke with no prospect of work.
But it’s also hard to avoid looking at ourselves in all of this, our behaviour, the whirring generators of tweets and retweets and memes. It’s hard not to wonder how quickly those tweets change to #bekind if Depp or Heard buckle under the scrutiny.
