Why has Johnny Depp been rehabilitated, but Amber Heard annihilated?

Depp emerged from the wreckage with nothing more than superficial bruising, while Heard — whom the UK legal system originally believed — was crushed and mangled

Johnny Depp poses for photographers upon arrival at the opening ceremony and the premiere of the film 'Jeanne du Barry' at the 76th international film festival, Cannes. Picture:  Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP

As an adult of sound mind, and with stuff like climate catastrophe and interest rates occupying significant chunks of it (your mind, that is) you might not have a great deal of thinking space left over for celebrity carry on. Focusing on the minutiae of overpaid randoms is best left to TMZ and E! Online — you’ve got more important things to think about, right?

And then something lands that despite your best efforts to direct your attention elsewhere (Will Cyril Ramaphosa really broker a deal between Putin and Zelensky? Is it going to rain later? What’s for lunch?) your focus is yanked like a frock caught in a door.

Depp Vs Heard: The Unreal Story, from investigative journalist and broadcaster Nick Wallis, is a compilation of everything gleaned from every court date he attended as the former couple tore into each other in front of a global audience. Transcripts, testimonies, witness statements, photos, texts, all crammed into a publication so toxic it’s almost glowing green. Careers, reputations, and fortunes swirl in a writhing tangle of contradictions, accusations, and histrionics — plus unhinged fans. The case made rubberneckers of us all.

For anyone who may have been on retreat at a wifi-less Himalayan monastery reachable only by three days on a yak, let’s quickly recap.

Between April 11 and June 1 last year, there was a courtroom drama. A Hollywood couple split up, badly. She then wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post about being a domestic abuse survivor, and told The Sun her ex was a “wife beater”. He sued in London, and lost — a British judge believed her. So he sued in the US, and won — an American jury awarded him $15m for defamation.

Actress Amber Heard gives a statement outside the High Court in London on the final day of hearings in Johnny Depp's libel case against the publishers of The Sun and its executive editor, Dan Wootton.

Details of the trial were lurid, hideous, eye-watering. Google if you want to revisit; dog poo featured, as did Depp’s lawyer calling the defendant “Amber Turd”. Hackers changed her name to this on the IMDb site, as social media became a wildfire of hate, almost exclusively directed at her. Depp — forever in our consciousness as lovable rogue Captain Jack Sparrow from The Pirates of the Caribbean — could do little wrong.

Her career — and her bank balance — were annihilated (when the couple first met, she said he made her feel like a million dollars; he ended up taking 15 times that).

He went quiet for a while, but while she was later spotted bargain-hunting in TJ Maxx in New York, he was recently reinstated as adored movie star on the Cannes red carpet. He has been rehabilitated, she has not.

This is the interesting bit — the fact that while both Depp and Heard present as genuinely messed up individuals whose relationship was not so much a car crash as a motorway pile up, it was he who emerged from the wreckage with nothing more than superficial bruising, while she — whom the UK legal system originally believed — was crushed and mangled.

Which says a lot more about gender politics and cultural misogyny than two mad actors slinging mud — or worse — at each other.