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Johnny Depp / Amber Heard trial
Thierry Vissac
June 2022
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Translated from french with DeepL
I have been trying to understand the male/female
war for a few years. I have initiated groups to explore the workings
of this old tragic mechanism and to contribute to reconciliation. Although the world of Hollywood stars is far
from my interests, when I heard about the Depp/Heard trial and its
live public broadcast, I decided to look into it a bit. I didn't
know if I would find anything of value in it for my own exploration
of gender conflict, but my intuition told me that the effort would
be worth it. I would now like to gather my impressions and outline a
lesson that emerges from this morass. The trial lasted several weeks and was intensely
followed and commented on on social networks as well as in the
mainstream media. Johnny Depp (59) is a renowned actor (Pirates of
the Caribbean) who has many die-hard "fans" and who, in France, is
known for being the husband of Vanessa Paradis. Amber Heard, younger
(36 years), is much less known. This fame of one is presented as one
of the causes of the interest in this trial, but it seems to me that
the issue went beyond the question of popularity of the two
protagonists. It was more than anything a staging of this bloody war
that has been going on since human societies existed. There was a
taste of a sanitized Roman arena where two gladiators, with whom one
might want to identify as a woman or a man, were fighting. The trial, despite the complexity of the legal
rituals, was more followed and commented on than most popular TV
series. Social networks (especially TikTok) commented, illustrated,
instrumentalized, mocked and played with the interventions of all
the participants, fiercely, and with a bias (the popular court) that
first confirmed to me the violence of freewheeling crowds, the
little general interest for the measure, the nuance and the
complexity of human relationships. If it were up to the millions of
Mr. Depp's fans, the most virulent among them and in other times,
Amber Heard could have been burned in the public square from the
first days, "without any other form of trial". Saying this, I do not decide in favor of one or
the other, in terms of Justice. There are certainly troubling
reasons to doubt some of Ms. Heard's statements, but no more than
there are for Mr. Depp. In fact, detached from any personal interest
in either of them, it seemed obvious to me that we were dealing
above all with a toxic high society couple in a relatively classic
format (the presence of drugs and alcohol to excess never helps
matters). In the absence of absolute justice, the lesson
that I find interesting to draw from this chaos, pathetic and
terrifying at times, lies in what was not the most visible. There is a woman and there is a man. They were
strongly attracted to each other and lived a passionate relationship.
This is the universal storyline. Both of them have psychic
particularities that characterize a little their history: he was
abused by his mother, humiliated and beaten daily. The traces are
heavy, alcohol and drugs are not surprising by-products in this
environment. On such a basis, I am simply surprised that
anyone would question Ms. Heard's word when she speaks of violence.
Violence is evident throughout the (many sordid) recordings of their
outbursts, and while she herself often participates in it, where did
the violence really begin? The question is crucial. Like others, I found
Amber Heard overall to be unauthentic and unreliable in what she
says, in how she reports things, with a tendency to continually
disclaiming responsibility. But we're in a global context of truth-seeking
that can't go by this epidermal impression or "consequences" alone.
After all, she can be less good at communicating than Mr. Depp, feel
the weight of her ex-husband's popularity, be troubled by it, feel
less able to seduce than he was (yes, he was often moving), etc. It
is necessary to push the glance further. Men have been abusing women for ages. Verbal/psychological
violence has only recently been recognized in our society and is
still often relativized (by men) in many cases. The famous scene
where Johnny Depp attacks the furniture in his kitchen, ready to
break everything while Amber Heard is in the room, is an act of
violence. It can feel like more of an assault than a man can imagine
sometimes. Women have become accustomed to this, they often have
trouble getting it across that violence doesn't always have to be
purely physical to exist, but it is still violence and a cause of
trauma. Yet again, in this trial, the popular court preferred to see
Ms. Heard as the manipulator... the witch. Despite my criticism, my impression is not so
clear-cut on this subject. I felt, from the testimonies, that she
was indeed part of this perverse game of fallacious arguments, dead-end
dialogues, toxic strategies to cry out the lack of love. The
recordings, which certainly played a big role in the jury's
appreciation, do not present a peacemaking woman, as men would like
to see them. She fights and with twisted weapons at times. But I
return to my crucial point: if their passionate relationship went
off the rails, as it often does, where do we find primary
responsibility? (The purpose of a trial is to determine who is
guilty). Mr. Depp said it was defamation when Ms. Heard says she is
"a public figure representative of domestic violence." He is seeking
redress. He has "never laid a hand on a woman. But domestic violence does not begin with
physical violence. What I was able to observe in female behavior,
within my work groups, was how women were objectively victims of
unspoken violence, partially invisible to most witnesses, chronic
disrespect, constant devaluation, and a muted threat to their very
survival, over time. From there, how, with the understanding we have
or seek to have today of the workings of the male/female war, can we
argue that it is defamation when a man is verbally and physically
abusive (even just against objects in the room!)? This is objective
domestic violence (especially since in the scene in question, Ms.
Heard is not even the cause of Mr. Depp's anger, which I understand
comes as a result of the recent death of Mr. Depp's mother). No one
has been able to assess the escalation from this initial violence
and apportion blame. But if we want to see what was played out in
the "invisible", we must take into account what is played out
upstream of our slips, the ghosts of our actions. I see in Amber Heard a woman crying out for
help, caught up in the toxic saraband of impulsive defenses, of "devious
strategies", as I call them. If she failed to get her message across
(as a pretty woman, she also carries the burden of an implicit
accusation in the male milieu, which makes her a perfect "witch" in
this old imaginary) and failed to be as convincing and charming as
her opponent, she is probably a victim of domestic violence... and
failed to respond in any way other than with more violence. The man, the one who was never pointed out in
this trial, is responsible for an ancestral domination that has
never declined, even if it is questioned today. But this lawsuit, by
making Johnny Depp "win" (Ms. Heard owes him 10 million dollars for
defamation), allows the men to exonerate themselves once again from
this established tyranny, as if it had not played a primary role in
this couple, as in so many others. In the end, as it turns out, they are in my eyes
50/50 responsible. They have destroyed the potential of their couple
and the end has drowned them in a filthy molasses, an odious
unpacking of what one human being can do to another in the name of
love. The trial, as a very limited tool to extract a truth from our
human complexities, does not interest me at all. Its verdict is too
clear-cut and "off the ground". And in a way, that's too bad,
because I don't expect institutions to be particularly subtle about
the flaws of our humanity. But I wanted to point out, because I
haven't read much of it, that NO, this laborious and painful process
has not done a service to the reconciliation of the masculine and
the feminine. NO, it does not release a truth. NO, Amber Heard is
not really lying on the merits, she is defending herself poorly and
has resorted, in a desperate way, just like Johnny Depp (and the
millions of lesser-known men and women who are going through the
same things with less support than they are), to words and actions
that do not uplift us and betray the longing at the root of every
relationship. I felt like reminding both of them that what
they aspire to, in their nostalgia for love, is not this unpacking
of their private struggles, that there were other ways to find each
other, to make each other understood and that the world could use
popular personalities to make the process of reconciliation
attractive rather than perpetual tearing. But this implies having a
taste for a truth that is not that of the courts. It is a question
of respecting the woman or man who desires in the depths of his or
her heart that love triumphs and is embodied in the relationship. It
is above all a question of reconnecting with this pure heart which
does not want to tarnish the reputation of the other person by
revenge or to recover its own, or even to punish the enemy, but to
make a healthy and loving relationship exist... or to let it die out
with dignity.
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