Joyce Fegan: MeToo isn't over — it's just time to regroup

With sex crimes, the focus is often on the accuser rather than the accused as we turn victim into villain

Amber Heard waits before the verdict was read at the Fairfax County Circuit Courthouse. Picture: Evelyn Hockstein/Pool via AP

IN crimes of sexual nature it is so often the accuser, not the accused, who goes on trial.

And that’s not just if the matter makes it to court, because so few do. It’s in cases where the teenage girl who has consumed alcohol is assaulted at a party. The assault is videoed and that footage is then shared in school WhatsApp groups or on TikTok.

Someone else’s pain becomes someone else’s content.

The narrative is: “He’s a stud, she’s a slut,” as the feminist writer Jessica Valenti argues. Other narratives include: “She was drunk, she shouldn’t have been drinking”. It’s rarely that the rapist shouldn’t have been raping.

Why did so many identify with Johnny Depp?

When we left girls and women on the doorsteps of Magdalene Laundries, how many of them were pregnant against their will, at the hands of a relative, or a man known to them in their community?

Hide the evidence. Hide her.

In 1953, or 1978, how many of those women and girls could have stood in their town square, hand on their swollen belly, pointed at their accuser and said: “There, he did this to me.”

Few, none, and not through lack of courage, but because of us, how we respond to those who accuse others of a domestic or sexual crime.

Our entire culture, from the movies we watch to the casual conversations we have, primes us to dismiss allegations of sexual or domestic abuse. We’re in it together.

Our attention laser-focuses on the accuser, they become a vessel for our venom and we seek to discredit them.

We turn them from victim to villain.

The public filleting of Amber Heard is just our cultural treatment of women, and all victims, writ large.

This week, when the actress was found to have defamed her ex-partner Johnny Depp over 11 words in an article that never named him, many people salivated at this as success.

“Truth wins,” wrote one Irish woman.

“Justice for Johnny,” proclaimed many, many others.

Whatever about Heard and her behaviour, her lies, many in our society gladly, willingly, desperately wanted to hand Depp a carte blanche, an amnesty for his words and actions. It was all about how awful Heard was, while we underwent group amnesia when it came to Johnny’s moral constitution.

In 2016, as the couple’s marriage was ending, Depp texted a friend, Christian Carino, swearing revenge against Heard.

“She is begging for global humiliation,” Depp wrote. “She is going to get it.”

This statement of malice is neither relevant nor malicious, we’ve decided, certainly not when compared to Heard’s words or deeds.

“I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead,” he wrote in another text. Again, the tribe has decided, and this is again neither malicious, nor relevant.

Participants march against sexual assault and harassment at the #MeToo March in the Hollywood section of LA in 2017. Picture: AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

Depp roped in our culture’s systems of misogyny, from the courtroom which has so often retraumatised victims, to the media which commodifies women’s trauma and tragedies, in order to achieve the global humiliation of Heard.

Hashtag, teamwork.

The question is not whether Amber was really a victim, or if Johnny was really a perpetrator, the question is: why were you so invested in this trial’s outcome?

For all the people to whom this trial’s outcome felt like a victory, ask yourself why.

For all those who relished in Heard’s takedown, her global humiliation, ask yourself why.

If it’s revenge for MeToo, or payback for false accusations, then the statistics don’t have your back.

The incidence of innocent men having their reputations destroyed, in their communities, in their countries, or globally, is pretty low. Not non-existent, but rare.

The incidence of boys, girls and adults being abused is pretty high, their not reporting pretty high too.

Reporting sex crimes

In Ireland, 65% of survivors do not report crimes of a sexual nature to a formal authority — that’s from the 2020 statistics from the Rape Crisis Network Ireland. And under the age of 13, 70% of survivors do not report. Just 14% of the small number reported go to trial here. That’s according to the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.

When you scroll headlines on your commute home from work or while sitting in your car at a red light, how many reports do you see of men having been falsely accused of rape or domestic violence, and how often? And how often do you see reports of rape, sexual assault, and femicide?

On Thursday, five men who took part in the gang rape of a 17-year-old girl in a car in the midlands in 2016 were jailed for a total of 66 years. Six years ago that girl, now a woman, has lived with the horrors of the ordeal, justice took the better part of a decade.

The case, and its verdict, was reported in the media, but where were your hashtags, your memes, your chiming WhatsApp group proclaiming justice?

It’s not that there aren’t incidences of false accusations, it’s that the incidences of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence are far more common, but we are far more concerned with and consumed in our mission to mind the accused.

Why is that?

We don’t see the mob hanging around the Four Courts with their placards and their hashtags calling for justice for those accused of burglary, murder or embezzlement. We don’t seem too concerned with challenging or interrogating their victims. We seem to be OK with trusting the word of their victims.

But maybe we are still at a point, as a culture, where we see some people’s bodies as objects, consent to do as we please is not necessary, therefore our actions are not criminal. “It was just a bit of touchy feely”. “It was merely flirting”. “It was OK”.

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp in 2015. Picture: PA

Perhaps those who identified so much with Depp felt the cases that did make it to court, and where the accused was found to be a perpetrator, were in fact miscarriages of justice.

And so the finding against Heard of defamation, for the act of 11 fudged words, felt like justice, redemption or vindication.

To those who followed the trial with such intent, who sided with Depp, what was in it for them? What was their skin in this American game? A way to vicariously live out a fantasy of humiliating someone who spoke out or who may have felt emboldened to speak out against you, or a friend, or a colleague?

People have described the Amber/Heard case, and our culture’s obsession with and reaction to it, as the death of MeToo. It’s not that MeToo is dead, it’s just a reminder that our systems of misogyny remain alive and well.

In no other crime do we accuse accusers of ruining reputations as we await the trial for murder, manslaughter, fraud or forgery. But when it comes to crimes of a sexual and domestic nature, where the victims are disproportionately women and children, we so often place our pity with the perpetrator.

MeToo isn’t over. MeToo just needs to move from movement to system change. Time to regroup.