How The Media Failed Amber Heard

Summary

Summary of "On the Media" Podcast Episode: "How The Media Failed Amber Heard"

Release Date: June 2, 2022
Hosts: Brooke Gladstone and Michael Hobbs (Host of Maintenance Phase)
Podcast: On the Media by WNYC Studios

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1. Introduction to the Depp v. Heard Trial

In this episode, On the Media delves into the high-profile libel trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, examining how the media's coverage influenced public perception and the broader implications for media integrity.

Key Event:
A jury in Fairfax County Circuit Court, Virginia, awarded Johnny Depp $15 million in damages in his libel suit against Amber Heard, who received $2 million in her countersuit. The case revolved around Heard's December 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post, where she identified herself as a "public figure representing domestic abuse."

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2. Media Coverage and Perceived Bias

Michael Hobbs critiques the media's handling of the trial, particularly pointing out a perceived reluctance among progressive and liberal outlets to thoroughly engage with the facts, thereby inadvertently favoring Depp's narrative.

Notable Quote:
"The only quarter of the media that seemed reluctant to engage at least in the facts of the case was the progressive press or the liberal media." (02:17)

Hobbs observes that while right-wing media aggressively painted Heard as a liar, progressive outlets often described the situation as "complicated" without delving into the substantial evidence presented during the trial.

Example of Coverage Gap:
Hobbs notes, "We had three or four weeks when almost nobody on the liberal media side was covering this case. And the right wing media was having an absolute field day with this." (08:19)

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3. The Role of Social Media and Misinformation

The episode highlights how platforms like TikTok became breeding grounds for misinformation, amplifying misleading narratives that portrayed Amber Heard negatively without substantial evidence.

Notable Quote:
"This is just the perfect metaphor for the just sewer pipe of information that the Internet has become around this trial." (17:43)

Hobbs explains that misinformation ranged from false claims about Heard plagiarizing movie quotes in her testimony to baseless accusations linking her to specific makeup brands used to conceal alleged bruises.

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4. Specific Instances of Misinformation

a. The Makeup Palette Incident

During the trial, Heard's lawyer presented a makeup palette as an example of how minor bruises could be concealed. This detail was misrepresented online, leading to unfounded claims that Heard's lawyer endorsed specific makeup products to cover bruises.

Notable Quote:
"She didn't say she used this specific brand. They were using it as an example. Like, this is makeup. She used makeup. That's it." (12:43)

b. The "Poop on the Bed" Story

One of the most sensationalized pieces of misinformation revolved around an incident where Amber Heard allegedly pooped on Depp's bed as an act of revenge. Hobbs dismantles this narrative by providing context that questions the plausibility of Heard's actions, contrasting it with previous incidents involving their dog.

Notable Quote:
"It's like one case is plausible and then the other case is like totally deranged." (20:57)

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5. Analyzing Depp's and Heard's Narratives

Hobbs discusses the contrasting narratives presented by Depp and Heard. While Depp's account involves allegations of a long-term, organized effort by Heard to defame him, Heard's testimony aligns with common patterns observed in abusive relationships, where victims develop a cycle of abuse and reconciliation.

Notable Quote:
"When you listen to his testimony, he, in contrast to hers, he doesn't really list very many incidents of abuse." (26:00)

Hobbs emphasizes that Heard provided extensive evidence of Depp's abusive behavior, including texts, photos, and testimonies from friends and professionals, whereas Depp's claims lacked similar substantiation.

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6. Broader Implications for Media and Abuse Narratives

The episode critiques the media's tendency to follow a "fairness bias," where equal weight is given to both parties' claims regardless of the validity of the evidence. This approach, according to Hobbs, allows harmful narratives to take root, undermining the credibility of genuine abuse victims.

Notable Quote:
"We've done this so many times, and we see the same kind of weaponization of these tropes about womanhood that are applied to whatever woman will do and whatever facts will do." (37:22)

Hobbs draws parallels to past media portrayals of women like Tonya Harding and Britney Spears, highlighting a recurring pattern of media misrepresentation and victim-blaming.

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7. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Brooke Gladstone and Michael Hobbs conclude by reflecting on the importance of responsible journalism. They underscore the necessity for media outlets to engage deeply with factual evidence, especially in sensitive cases involving allegations of abuse, to prevent misinformation and uphold the integrity of public discourse.

Final Notable Quote from Hobbs:
"This is how we treat women in the media, and people learn how to treat women from these narratives." (36:41)

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Implications for Future Media Coverage

The episode serves as a critical examination of media practices, urging journalists and media consumers alike to prioritize fact-based reporting over sensationalism. It calls for a reevaluation of how abuse narratives are handled in the public sphere to ensure that genuine victims are heard and supported without the distortion of truth.

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Note: Timestamps in quotes refer to the minutes and seconds mark within the podcast transcript.

Transcript

[Brooke Gladstone]

On the Media is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

[Michael Hobbs]

And thus ends the MeToo movement, tweeted conservative mischief maker Ann Coulter This Wednesday afternoon in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia, a jury awarded Johnny Depp $15 million in damages in his libel suit against his ex wife, Amber Heard, and gave her 2 million in her countersuit against him. All this over a December 2018 op ed she wrote in the Washington Post, describing herself as, quote unquote, a public figure representing domestic abuse. Depp's lawyers said that he was defamed by the article even though it never mentioned his name. This case, argued over six weeks before a seven person jury and judge and a noisily expanding online audience, drove much of the Internet crazy with guilty pleasure. Except in precincts where the idea that women were regularly abused and had the right to say so was beyond the pale. And those places the pleasure was guiltless, enhanced by the collective hurling of feces at Amber Heard, who did not deserve it. Based on the evidence gathered meticulously in a British libel case also focused on Depp's spousal abuse, the only quarter of the media that seemed reluctant to engage at least in the facts of the case was the progressive press or the liberal media. There you could find coverage of the brouhaha but not the underlying reality. This bothered journalist Michael Hobbs, host of the podcast Maintenance Phase, who observed that the usually reliable outlets tended to steer around the facts and in so doing sold an already victimized woman down the river. At least that's how I see his argument. I'll find out if I'm right. Michael welcome back to on the Media.

Thanks for having me and apologies for the emails that will fill up your inbox after you do this.

It wouldn't be the first time. When we look at the media coverage of the Depp v. Heard trial, we see two things. You've observed people on the right saying Amber's a liar and people on the left skirting around the topic saying it's complicated. You saw a reluctance by liberal journalists to actually assess the facts of the case, a reluctance to look into something so messy. And to begin, you felt that way yourself.

I think I had the trajectory that a lot of people did. Where I had seen this pop up over the last couple years, there was a case in the uk, of course. And every once in a while you'd see something like Amber Heard is a psychopath or something trending on Twitter. And then I'd look at it and be like, ooh, man, it's dark in there. Something's going on. But I didn't really investigate. And then when this trial started in the U.S. i think a lot of us don't want to admit how much we're informed by this inchoate sense of kind of what people are saying. You know, you kind of hear on the wind that like, this new movie is good or this new movie sucks or something, but you can't really identify exactly where you heard that.

I think that's called the sleeper effect.

I like to think of myself as smarter than it, and I don't think that I actually am. And in the early days of this case, there were a couple clips going around of Amber Heard that sounded quite bad. And people were saying that she was really manipulative and lying. And it seemed like a really clear cut case of a woman going after a man. And there was a part of me that was kind of like, well, I'm just going to wait on this one. I'm going to wait till there's a verdict. I'm going to wait until there's more information available. And I don't know if that's what most of the rest of progressive journalia did, but it feels like that's what people did. I mean, the kind of major establishment progressive outlets have barely covered this trial when they've gotten interested. More recently, it's mostly been as kind of an online bullying story as a people on the Internet are being horrible to Amber Heard, which is undoubtedly true. But then I think they kind of stop short at saying they're being unjustly mean to Amber Heard. And Amber Heard is a victim and you know, kind of focusing on the injustice. It's more like, well, it's a very complicated case, but regardless of the facts, nobody deserves the kind of treatment that she's getting.

Regardless of the facts is a phrase that you've seen or words to that effect that have really gotten up your nose.

Yeah, I mean, I think journalists should never be putting facts aside as a profession. And I actually, I got radicalized on this when I went on YouTube and I have shown no interest in this trial. I have not clicked on things. I'm not Googling anything. I was planning to ignore it. And then on YouTube I start getting fed these videos that are like, Amber Heard's body language shows that she's a sociopath. Huge red flag. This is what we got with Carole Baskin. This is what we got with Amanda Knox. This is what we got with Meghan Markle. It's like when you don't have evidence against a woman, you. You start using body language, right? And these, like, little clips taken out of context. And then I started to get slightly more interested and I started looking around, and I finally went to the UK case. So this, almost the exact trial that we're having now in Virginia has already been decided in the uk. Two years ago, it was also a.

Libel case that Johnny Depp brought. And the big difference is that it's much harder for a publication to win a libel case in the UK Than it is here. There's a different standard.

Yes. I mean, it should have been very easy for Johnny Depp to win that case, and he didn't win. So that decision is available online, and it's 126 pages long. It's actually very clearly written. It's very cogent. It basically goes through 14 incidents of violence that Amber Heard alleges happened in the relationship. And it very clearly lays out, okay, here's the evidence for Johnny Depp's account. Here's the evidence for Amber Heard's account. And it says of those, one is thrown out on a technicality. Another one, the judge isn't convinced. But on 12 of those incidents, the evidence indicates that Johnny Depp was violent toward Amber Heard.

Based on what?

Based on. I mean, it's actually quite remarkable once you get into it. And this is really what radicalized me, is that very few domestic abuse victims have as much evidence as Amber Heard. So she has contemporaneous texts from very early in the relationship, two years before they even got married. She was texting her mom and saying, I think I'm in love with someone who's abusive. She was telling her friends, I'm afraid of this guy getting violent with me. Her acting coach says sessions are supposed to be an hour long, but we had to schedule them for two or three hours because she was so distraught from what Johnny Depp was doing to her. We have witnesses who say they covered up her bruises with makeup. We have. We have photos. We have texts from Johnny Depp himself, kinda sorta not admitting to the abuse, but admitting to drinking to the point of blackout, which is the heart of her accusation of abuse, that most of the incidents of violence took place when he was drinking so bad that he couldn't remember what happened the next Day we have his staff texting her the next day and saying, when I told him he hit you, he cried. And so you look at all the evidence, and I don't know of other public domestic abuse cases where there's been this much evidence. I was comfortable believing Christine Blasey Ford. I was comfortable believing the accusers of Weinstein and Cosby. And they had much less evidence than this.

If the mainstream media had wanted to engage, they could have this information was available and collated for their convenience if they were willing to read through more than 100 pages. That said, what is the consequence of the progressive media, even the mainstream media's, reluctance to engage with that evidence?

Well, I mean, I want to offer some amnesty on this because I think a lot of people did this out of a place of generosity, thinking that, hey, this is ugly in there. I don't really want to engage. I might be re traumatizing this person by adding more attention to it. But the effect of that ultimately was that we had three or four weeks when almost nobody on the liberal media side was covering this case. And the right wing media was having an absolute field day with this. And so we had rumors, I mean, just straightforward misinformation from the opening arguments. We were getting misinformation about Amber Heard's case. And we were getting all of this, especially on TikTok, these video clips where people would take Amber Heard's testimony out of context and. And they would make it seem like she was lying. They would juxtapose clips to make it seem like she was being deceitful and sort of, when did this happen? When in the day did this happen? And first she said this and then she said that it's quite easy to do this and make somebody look like a liar on the stand. And it's also. It allowed bad faith actors to plant a lot of seeds that then you have to go and sort of pull up like weeds. Like, it's much harder to deal with this stuff once it's been entrenched than it is if there's two narratives going on at the same time. So for weeks, the only narrative was Amber Heard is a manipulative psychopath and Johnny Depp is the victim of abuse. Like, that was the only thing that most Americans were hearing.

Well, you mentioned TikTok. A lot of this, as many of these kinds of narratives do, started on a whole range of social media, a popular podcast where the hosts were congratulating themselves on not weighing in. And maybe that's the least of it. What were Some of the complete misinformation. I mean, the things that were absurd.

One of the early ones was that in Amber Heard's opening statement, she said that dating Johnny Depp was like, the warm sun shines upon you, and then the sun burns out, and then it's very cold. Or something along those lines, which, it turns out is a line from the talented Mr. Ripley. And the. The idea was that she had plagiarized this line from the talented Mr. Ripley, which. First of all, people do that with movies all the time. Like, it's fairly normal to sort of quote movie lines when you're talking about your relationship. Second of all, Amber Heard didn't give an opening statement. There's no such thing as an opening statement where Amber Heard said this quote, like, the entire premise of this plagiarism is just completely made up. There's no evidence that she ever said this. But this kind of nothing burger of an accusation bounced around there. Did you hear the one about the makeup palette?

No.

So one of the arguments against Amber Heard is that if Johnny Depp was so violent, why do so many people report seeing her without bruises? This is what I consider to be a very bad faith accusation, because bruises are fairly easy to cover up with makeup, especially if they're relatively minor bruises. And that's what she says they are. So in opening arguments, her lawyer held up a makeup palette as a kind of example, like a visual aid, to say the reason why people didn't see her with bruises is this. It's a makeup palette. You can use concealer, and you can cover up your bruises. Right. So then the flying Internet monkeys that have been swarming around this case for weeks now, they zoomed in on the image. They found the brand that Amber Heard's lawyer was holding up, and they started tagging this makeup brand and saying, her lawyer says she used your product to cover up her bruises. And then this is really ugly. The actual makeup brand then put out a debunking tweet saying, we only started making this makeup palette in 2017. So Amber heard is lying. There's no way Amber Heard could have used it in her relationship to Johnny Depp between 2012 and 2016. So, of course, that leaves out the fact that in the opening arguments, they didn't say that she was using this specific brand. They were using it as an example. Like, this is makeup. She used makeup. That's it. But of course, by the time you try to debunk these things, it's gone around the world three times, and it gets Cast as this. Like, oh, she's proven to be lying on the stand when the entire premise of that makes no sense.

So who are the people who are so intent on depicting Amber Heard as a psychopath?

I think there's a very large contingent on the right that wants any excuse to say that MeToo has been a scam all along. They have been searching for a case where a woman sort of uses the MeToo movement as a horse that they can ride into infamy. Right. A woman who makes up a claim using the MeToo movement. Right. They've been desperate for this. Johnny Depp has also explicitly endorsed this view. So in the legal filings, and he says that this is a hoax that Amber Heard is using to advance her career. So this is kind of the meta myth of the backlash against MeToo, that women can use this to advance their careers.

That works out really well.

That's the thing. I was trying to think of a single example where this is true. Like Anita hill or Christine Blasey. 4. Like, you know, it hasn't really worked out well for people. So it doesn't make any sense on its face. And it's super duper. Doesn't make sense in this case because the narrative that she's a gold digger is belied by the fact that she didn't get terribly much money in their divorce. She only got $7 million. She was entitled to somewhere around 30 million. She didn't have to allege abuse to get a huge settlement in the divorce because there was no prenuptial agreement. So she could have just, hi, I want a divorce, and she would have gotten half of his earnings. Those are sort of the bad faith people that I think have latched onto this. And I also think there's, disappointingly, a very large contingent of people across the ideological spectrum who are just willing to believe that a woman made up a claim of abuse to advance her own career. This is. This is a meta myth that we've gotten a million times. It's something that appears in a lot of stories that have. That have caught on. It's something that I think a lot of people believe somewhere in their brain, and they turn off their critical faculties or when a story meets these criteria. What we've had is this phenomenon that people have been colloquially calling true crime brain, where there's a lot of these, like, small discrepancies in Amber Heard's account. So the biggest one is she says that she donated her divorce settlement to.

Charity, half to the ACLU and half.

To what was the other half, Children's Hospital of la.

Right. Mm.

And so this seems like, you know, her main claim, that she's not a gold digger. Right. I gave away all the money. And she said under oath that she donated all this money. Right. And then in the course of this trial, it comes out that the ACLU, which should have received $3.5 million, has only received about $1.7 million. And some of it was like in Johnny Depp's name, and some of it was like in Elon Musk's name. And it's all. The whole thing just starts to seem like she's been running this scam for the entire time. Right. And so this goes around and this is oftentimes cast as one of her proven lies on the stand. She said that she donated the money under oath, and now it comes out she hasn't donated the money. Looks bad, but of course, once you show any natural human interest in what actually happened. The ACLU has testified in this case that they had always planned, with Amber Heard, for her to give it away over 10 years. This is fairly normal for these large scale donations. She paid the first year, and during the second year, she started getting sued by Johnny Depp. And she now says she spent $6 million defending herself from these lawsuits. And so according to the aclu, she has been completely transparent with them. And she said, hey, all my money's tied up in this lawsuit right now. I can't pay the second year. I still intend to pay the rest. Can we put it on hold for a year? And the ACLU said, sure, that's fine. These things happen. And so the lie that she's been caught in, the proven lie that proves that she's a sociopath, whatever, is basically that she should have said the word pledged. I pledged my divorce settlement rather than donated. And it's sure, fine. Like, I think it's fair to say, okay, she could have been more precise with that language, especially if you're under oath. Fine. But it's like, it doesn't strike me as evidence of like the kind of sociopathic gone girl calculation that would be required to pull off a years long scam to fake the abuse of your husband and scam him out of millions. Right. It's like a fairly small thing.

Right. If this were true, this would indicate that she's a manipulator. I think the sociopathy argument was being made through a massive misunderstanding of a story involving poop.

Oh, gosh. Just the. Just the sigh that overtakes me when I hear about having to talk about the poop story.

Well, I only bring it up because it seems to have taken up a lot of airspace in the media ecosphere.

Oh, my God. Yeah, it's just the perfect metaphor for the just sewer pipe of information that the Internet has become around this trial. So the theory is that Amber heard as a form of revenge on Johnny Depp because she's an abusive sociopath. She pooped on his bed after they had a fight. So this is something that goes around. You can discount every single thing that she says because, look, you know, she. She pooped on a bed. It's confirmed, right? And then again, the minute you show any actual interest in this, what actually happened was they had. The previous night, they had gotten in a really big fight. He had disappeared for days, as he often did when he was drinking, according to Amber Hear. And he had shown up late and drunk to her 30th birthday party. And almost all of the abuse took place when he was drinking and blacked out. And so she was really upset by this because they had talked and he had promised to get sober. And then he shows up at her birthday party, and he's drunk. And so they get in a big fight after that, and he sort of storms off to one of their other houses, right? And then he gets a text the next day from his manager, who had gotten a text from the house cleaner, saying, I came to the house and there's this big piece of poop on the bed, right? The story, once you break it down from her perspective, it doesn't make a lot of sense as a revenge plot, because, first of all, he was not sleeping there, so he had stormed off it. Actually, it will be another month before they see each other face to face. So this often happened after their fights. There'd be long weeks, long periods where they're not speaking to each other. So he had stormed off to sleep in one of their other, like, 55 houses that these people own. And then she pooped in the bed as a form of revenge on her husband, who wasn't sleeping there, right? And made no attempt to tell him. Like, she didn't text it to him. Like, hey, buddy, this is what I think of you. Like, there was no attempt to do anything, and she had essentially just left it for the cleaning person to clean up. Like, that's the most basic expectation of what would happen in a situation like that. So if it's a revenge plot where she just did this and then didn't tell him, it's totally baffling. And then we also have text messages from her about a year before about their dog who had like some sort of allergy where he couldn't control his little poops and he had pooped on the bed before. And Amber heard in that case had actually cleaned it up so that the cleaner wouldn't have to do it because it's insulting to make the cleaner clean up their dog's poo. So what we have here is a perfectly plausible story that their dog who pooped on the bed, pooped on the bed again. And then we also have a story about a 30 year old woman pooping in her own bed and then not telling her husband about it, even though she did it as revenge on her husband. So it's like one case is plausible and then the other case is like totally deranged. And then what you've gotten is this weird circular logic where it's like, well, she kind of have to be a total weirdo to do something like that. And then people on the Internet are like, well, she is a weirdo. And it's like, well, what's the evidence that she's a weirdo? Oh, she pooped on the bed. It's like, well, wait a minute, that's what we're, that's what we're talking about. Like, you can't just assert that in.

Researching this interview there was some clearly unfounded assertion on some site that this was clearly human pooh.

Oh yeah, this is another one that the house cleaner said in her deposition that to her she was like, this has to be human poo. There's no way this is dog poo. So I don't know. Okay, is the cleaning person a forensic analysis? To me it's just everything is likelihood in these cases. You can't say 100% certainty that one thing happened or another. And again, what is more likely, a 30 year old woman who has no history of behavior like this pooped on a bed to no benefit to herself whatsoever, or a cleaning person was mistaken about the type of poop that it was.

If we take a step back and look at their stories overall, the ones that each of them maintain, Johnny Depp believes that this plot against him by Amber Heard began, I don't know, many years ago.

Yeah, I mean, if his account of events is true, essentially as soon as they moved in together, she began fabricating incidents of violence against him. That is the only way for his narrative of events to make sense. His accounting of events is essentially a conspiracy theory in which she has faked photographs, she has Doctored the metadata of evidence she has painted on bruises. He accused her of cutting herself to make it look like it was broken glass after a fight, that they had. The amount of premeditation that would go into this again. You know, her acting coach testified for her, her friends testified for her. She has somehow convinced nearly a dozen people to testify under oath in numerous cases on her behalf. And somehow she has left no trace of this. Right. No email saying, hey, remember, a lie under oath for me tomorrow. Nothing I don't know about you. I cannot organize a book club meeting without, like, 12 emails coordination. And who is where and who's going to bring this. The idea that she has done this massive conspiracy, which also aligns with quite a bit of his own evidence of the timeline without leaving any trace. It's just really implausible.

She'd have to be a mastermind. But the first incident was in March of 2013. That was two years before they were even married.

Right.

And was that part of the plot?

It would have to be, right, because she texts her mom and she texts friends and she tells her acting coach. And if she's fabricating all of this, she would have had to start fabricating this two years before they were married and three and a half years before they were getting divorced, all in an effort to get more money out of him in the divorce settlement that she was already entitled to. She also, as part of the divorce settlement, signed an NDA and withdrew the abuse allegations that she had made when she filed a restraining order. And then she didn't speak about it. So she's fabricated all of this abuse. She makes the abuse claims. She then agrees with him to withdraw the abuse claims when they settle the divorce. And then she doesn't say anything for a year and a half. Again, strange behavior for a criminal mastermind who wants to use this to get ahead in Hollywood.

To Depp's defense, you've made this observation yourself. He might sincerely believe, given that he is prone to blackouts, he may sincerely believe in what he's alleging.

It feels like every time we have one of these, everyone forgets everything we've learned before about abuse dynamics. And I think it's really important to actually hear the narrative that Amber heard is telling, because it's an extremely familiar story of abuse dynamics. So when she first met Johnny Depp, he was sober early in their relationship. Around March of 2013, he fell off the wagon. And once he started drinking again, he would disappear for days. He would return as kind of a different person. He would accuse her of like whoring herself out in Hollywood. He would speak really negatively about other actresses. He criticized her for wearing a low cut dress. She says she stopped telling him about auditions because he would start grilling her about whether or not there were love scenes with male actors. And what they really fell into was this cycle where he would get drunk or use drugs to the point of blacking out. And then he would hit her. And then the next day he would deny it. He would deny that he had a drug problem and he would deny that he ever hit her and he would deny that he was ever abusive. There's this deep denial and I think shame associated with being the kind of addict who hits a woman like this is a very stigmatized, I think rightly category in society. And I don't say this to defend the behavior at all, but this is a very familiar abuse pattern, especially when drugs and alcohol are involved. And what she describes is by late in the relationship, she's essentially the only person who is treating his drug use and his violent outbursts as a problem. Because of course, we have to reckon with the fact that this guy's a movie star, he's extremely wealthy, he has people handlers around him, he has full time doctors, he has lawyers and her talks about, you know, people prescribing him things to get him through shoots because the studios need him to finish the shoot and then he'll get into detox after the shoot is done. Right. There's this whole kind of machine around him to make sure that he never has to reckon with what he did last night. Nobody ever reminds him, oh, you trashed that hotel room. He just has this bottomless checkbook and these people that will kind of make these problems go away. And so when you listen to his testimony, he, in contrast to hers, he doesn't really list very many incidents of abuse. He says that she was irritating, he says that she was abusive, but he doesn't say, okay on this date. These text messages indicate that there's nothing specific in his account, but he does describe her as sort of nagging him. Oftentimes abusers, especially people who are in denial about the fact that they are abusive, will remember when their victim hits them. They'll remember when their victim was nagging at them. Right. There's this infamous clip that went around before the trial where they are talking and he's accusing her of essentially being abusive. And Amber heard sort of taunts him. She's like, oh, go ahead, go ahead, tell the media, tell them, I, Johnny Depp, am a Victim of abuse, right? And it sounds terrible. Like, this is one of the clips that I heard, and I was like, oh, man, this is really bad. Like, she sounds awful, right? And if you listen to it out of context, it really does seem like an act of abuse. And there's. There's a real case to be made that somebody who talks to their partner like that is abusive. Right. If you're viewing it out of context. But if you view the entire transcript and if you view it in the context of actually believing her, if you're in a relationship where somebody is hitting you, using drugs constantly, and then denying everything the next day and accusing you of being the abusive one, she talks on the stand of this kind of learned helplessness that takes over where she is. Like, you know what? Forget it. Tell the media, right? You're basically in the middle of being gaslit by somebody who's been in this abuse and apology and denial cycle for years, and he is accusing you of abuse. If you view it from the perspective of she's lying, then, like, yeah, it looks really bad. But if you view it from the perspective of actually believing her entire narrative of the relationship, it starts to make a lot of sense that she would do that. Do you find that convincing?

Yes, I absolutely do. You know, it's like, oh, yeah, you're the abused one. I mean, if you've been going through this for years and years, I mean, this is just such an old story.

And I've heard from people that research this, this is a relatively common thing that abusers do that once the victim starts fighting back, they will often use kind of, oh, well, she gave me a bloody nose as a first strike. I think people know that whoever's account of events you hear first is oftentimes dispositive. If you're in an abusive relationship and you know on some level that you're an abuser, to then go to your group of friends and be like, you know, Sally gave me a bloody nose the other day. That's kind of a way to get ahead of it. And I don't know that. I don't know that that's exactly what's happening here. But this is a fairly familiar trope in actual abuse situations. And this is what Amber heard is claiming. And I also think what's really interesting is if you watch her actual testimony, she's very open about the fact that by the last year of the relationship, she was fighting back. She was starting arguments, she escalated things, she was shouting, they were calling each other ugly names, and she's always been very open about the fact that, like, she did not behave great in this relationship. She didn't ask for this. Right. He is suing her. And she was not someone who wanted to bring this out into the public eye. And she's always been really transparent about the fact that, like, her actions weren't always great. People don't react to abuse in pro social ways. This is also something that is very familiar from abuse cases. And so most of his accusations against her, and if you listen to his account of events, it's like, okay, she was annoying. She could nag you. She was condescending about your drug use. She would kind of roll her eyes if you're like, oh, I'm gonna get sober this time. Okay. I don't know. That's not great behavior. But she has 10 documented incidents of you beating her up and giving her black eyes and slamming her into walls and tearing out chunks of her hair, and at least two sexual assaults. So it's like, I don't know why we're talking about this. Like, I don't know why we're talking about. Like, well, maybe she. Maybe she hit him once. And, like, she's on tape saying, maybe she hit him. Okay. I don't know. You know, in a vacuum, that's not great behavior. But also, if you look at this relationship as a whole and what the evidence indicates, she has a very strong case for believing her. And even the fact that he is doing this is in some way evidence of her account. Part of her account is that he had these paranoid conspiracy theories that he was accusing her of all the time, and now he's suing her for destroying his career. Right. She wrote half a sentence about him in the Washington Post in 2018.

He's kind of ignoring the libel suit that he lost in England, you know, prior to that.

And there's, you know, there's been numerous magazine articles before this about Johnny Depp's fading star. He had, I think it was like, six bombs in a row. He was in this Alice in Wonderland sequel that nobody's ever heard of. He was in the Lone Ranger, which was, like, such a flop that it's kind of a legend at this point. He's also just getting older, and Hollywood thrives on youth. I mean, there's a million reasons why his star was dimming in Hollywood. And also they had a Disney executive testify at the trial who was talking about why they removed him from the Pirates of the Caribbean films. And she was like, no one even saw the op Ed we didn't even know that was happening. And there's some evidence that they actually made the decision before it came out.

This is all about the op ed.

Yeah. This whole. This whole trial. He is suing her for defamation for an op ed in which she only referred to him in a half a sentence. And she didn't say anything that wasn't factually true. Her sentence was. I became a public figure representing the issue of domestic abuse, which is factually true. She did become a figure representing that. She didn't say anything about him.

Obviously, the assumption is very clearly there that it's about him. But when he was suing her in London, that was about a prior defamatory statement, in his view.

Yes. He was suing the newspaper the sun for printing an article that called him a wife beater. And then by calling Amber Heard to testify and present all this evidence, they were able to prove under the statutory rules in the UK that he was in fact a wife beater. The claim was substantially true. Therefore it's okay to print it. It's not defamatory if it's true.

So he lost his case against the son, and then he brings a case of defamation here, and he doesn't sue the Washington Post.

Right, exactly. Which I think is sort of telling. And he also sues her for, I mean, very significantly more than she is worth. He's suing her for $50 million. In the last year of their marriage, she earned $260,000. So it's not. This is not like a realistic claim. And I believe she spent a huge percentage of her net worth on the legal defense.

Circling back to the beginning, you were saying that you observed among much of the progressive media a reluctance to dig into the facts of these charges and counter charges, partly because of a fastidious desire not to be walking through the muck. And also this kind of. Get thee from me, Satan. This is too hard. But do you have any examples of media actually doing that? Of this kind of reluctance?

I mean, I think. I mean, I don't want to name names because I think that most people were reluctant for good reasons or for human and understandable reasons. But I think that it's almost like what we see with politics, where there's this need to give both sides their due, even when they don't deserve it, even when it's very clear that one actor is being worse than the other. It's like, well, these people say.

And those people say fairness bias.

Exactly, the fairness bias. And I mean, this is one of the main Themes of the show. Right. And we see that applied to many other things. And I think that there's this reluctance on the part of journalists to sort of be seen as taking sides on things, even when I actually think that one of the roles of journalism is to just, hey, I have more time than you. I'm gonna read all the documents in this case and I'm gonna tell you my conclusions.

Part of our reason for doing the interview is derived from your observation, and we've had it too, that there was a disinclination to dig into this stuff. Progressive and even just mainstream media, leaving the field wide open for far right media and men's rights groups and gamer gators and all of those types. But you don't want to name any names.

There's podcasts that I enjoy who I think kind of dropped the ball on this. But I also. I don't know, they're doing their best. There was also a palpable sense that this is something frivolous, that these are two wealthy people, two, you know, attractive movie stars embroiled in some sort of personal civil suit. And I think that there's this idea that it's sort of too frivolous to get down into the muck of. Right. And I think refusing to provide a counter narrative allowed right wing people to kind of have this one. I also think that we live in a world where people form their opinions on things like gender and domestic violence and the relations between men and women on the basis of frivolous things. Right. I mean, you could say that some skirmish between two figure skaters in 1994, ultimately, it's not that big of a deal. Right. It's just two ladies fighting about stuff. But you look back and America learned a lot of things, or learned the wrong things about women and about the way that men abuse women.

From that case, for people who weren't born then, that was the Tonya Harding story. And I think it's really interesting that you bring up Tonya Harding, because a lot of the kinds of media that have been doing a sort of penance by going back, correcting the record, retelling and contextualizing the stories of women that were botched the first time around. I'm talking about Monica Lewinsky, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Tonya Harding, that kind of responsible media aren't engaging in the same way with Amber Heard yet. I'm just wondering why we don't seem to have learned our lesson yet.

One of the hardest things has been watching us make exactly the same mistakes with this One that we made with Anita Hill and Tonya Harding and Anna Nicole Smith and, to some extent, Amy Fisher and Lorena Bobbitt. I mean, we've done this so many times, and we see the same kind of weaponization of these tropes about womanhood that are applied to whatever woman will do and whatever facts will do. We're just going to run the same playbook again and again. And I think that's why I've gotten so obsessed with it, is because we all just watched Framing Britney, this documentary about how terrible Britney Spears was treated by the media in 2007, and then it's like, you look at what we're doing to Amber Heard, and it's like, sorry, did. Was anyone there? Did anyone pay attention to, like, the structural elements of those stories? Like, the issue with Britney Spears in 2007 wasn't just that, like, we were really mean to Britney Spears. It's that, like, this is the way that we treat women in the media, and people learn how to treat women from these narratives. Like, a lot of people are taking away from this story. She's not a real abuse victim if she doesn't have big old scars. And she's not a real abuse victim if she wrote him love letters. And she's not a real abuse victim if there's no medical records. The Johnny Depp supporters keep saying that they're standing up for male victims for doing this and that male victims have been overlooked in the MeToo movement, and male victims face real challenges in coming forward. And I think that's to some extent true. I've never heard anyone deny the fact that they are male victims of domestic abuse. But the idea that we would be smearing somebody like this for not having severe enough injuries and blaming them for faking, painting bruises on and not coming forward earlier, it's like, what was she wearing? Type stuff. That doesn't help any victim. Domestic abuse victims and domestic abusers, frankly, are watching this and going, well, this. This is how it works when people come forward. It's the kind of story that the phrase believe women was invented for, right? That instead of starting from this assumption that society has a real problem with women making up fake claims of abuse. I mean, there's vanishingly few of these. There's even fewer against powerful men. But we still have this presumption in our heads that this happens, rather than starting from just maybe she is telling the truth and trying to slot the evidence into that frame. And what she's describing is something we've seen a million times before, right? We've got a powerful man who's entitled. He's surrounded by enablers. Johnny Depp has a very long history, established history of violence, of outbursts. I found a 2000 Esquire article where two different directors talked about him blowing up on film sets. He's currently being sued by a crew member on another movie for allegedly punching him. And then it comes to Amber Heard saying, hey, I am saying that this guy did the thing to me that he's done to many other people in public, and he has a very well documented history of doing. And it was like, ah, she's lying. I don't know about that. This, this guy, the guy who blows up and trashes hotel rooms. This guy. I don't know. I mean, just people are treating it like it's some sort of exotic fairy tale as opposed to a story we've seen so many times.

Michael, thank you very much.

Thanks for letting me get my impassioned speech just there. Sorry, I was trying to end strong.

Brooke, it was great. You left strong.

Thank you.

Michael Hobbs is a journalist, essayist, and host of the podcast Maintenance Phase. Thanks for listening to this week's podcast. Coming up on the big show on Friday, which posts around dinner time, we'll be looking ahead to the hearings on the January 6th insurrection or riot or whatever you want to call that day when things were looking really bad for democracy. I'm brooke Gladstone.

[Brooke Gladstone]

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