The Agony and the Ecstasy of Depp v. Heard

The trial was supposed to be about defamation. It became a study of abuse -- between spouses, between fans and celebrities, and between the media and the people who consume it

by Sarah Hepola

On April 12, 2022, the trial of John C. Depp vs. Amber Laura Heard began in a Fairfax County Courthouse. The location seemed random: an affluent suburb of our nation’s capital, but it happened to be where The Washington Post housed its internet servers. In 2018, the paper published an op-ed that marked the inciting incident of this ordeal. “A transformative moment for women” read the headline in the printed paper, if you remember those, but the online version pushed out the story with a swift uppercut: “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.”

The trial was about defamation, a legal gray zone where a person’s right to express an opinion clashes against another person’s right to protect their reputation. But even careful witnesses wouldn’t learn much about defamation over the next six weeks. The trial was a study of abuse: physical, sexual, emotional, virtual. More specifically it was about mutual abuse, if you believe such a thing exists, and I do, because I’ve seen it: between lovers, between fans and celebrities, between the media and the people who consume it.

Amber Heard arrived each morning in high-necked silk blouses and chic updos that called to mind Grace Kelly. Johnny Depp arrived each morning with his hair slicked back in a ponytail, a trim goatee, and though his suits were sharp, the tattoos and one dangly earring called to mind the dude running the vape store. This wasn’t their first courtroom tango. In 2020, Depp sued the British tabloid The Sun for calling him a “wife-beater,” and Heard was the star witness. After a judge ruled against him, The Sun celebrated their legal victory in a bold font: “Wife-beater Johnny Depp LOSES” read a headline.

But this trial would be different. Not public figure vs. press but ex-husband vs. ex-wife. It brought a defamation counter-suit from Heard, along with shocking new allegations that included sexual assault with a liquor bottle. The verdict would be determined not by judge but by jury — of seven people, and also millions. It was televised, but more critically, it was online, every micro-moment metabolized in #lawtube commentaries and clever story reels and memes of smug reduction, an endless river of entertainment and opinion further splitting a country that had long been split.

On one side, a global army of Depp stans, the phrase itself like a new country, Deppistan, who saw this as the last great hope to save a man wronged by media overreach, an activism gone awry, and a woman far more cunning than coverage lead us to believe. On the other side — well, what was the other side? A brave few voiced support for the Internet’s number-one villain, who dared make her bruises public (though the bruises were disputed), while most Heard supporters gathered in tucked-away corners to bond over the familiar sight of a powerful man playing the gentleman in public only to play the bully behind closed doors. Far more legion was the army of regular folks appalled that we watched this at all. A war raged in Ukraine. A war raged in our streets — gun violence, the roll-back of Roe v. Wade, a pandemic that kept leveling up — and we wanted to talk about these two assholes?

“It’s our generation’s OJ,” said a 32-year-old man standing in line to enter the court at 6am. It was the fourth week of the trial, and competition for those 100 seats had grown so fierce that people camped overnight. The line was mostly women, about 95%. They came from the area, or they drove in from Ohio, Florida, Alabama. A sign posted outside the courthouse said the line couldn’t form before 1am, so the hard-cores devised a numbering system and gathered in the parking garage till then with their fleece blankets and folding chairs, using a nearby bathroom at the juvenile detention center. They played cards, they played Johnny Depp trivia. People watching on YouTube sent delivery pizzas and cases of Red Bull. “The solidarity is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” the man told me, and that includes the time he camped overnight for a Harry Potter book release.

The trial had become an event. A voyeur’s delight of penthouses and red-carpet galas and a private island. Evidence featured star-studded cameos from supermodel Kate Moss, 80s sexpot Ellen Barkin, and grainy security-cam footage James Franco. Text messages to Elton John, Marilyn Manson, and Patti Smith entered into the record, along with disdain for Heard’s rebound boyfriend Elon Musk, whom Depp nicknamed “Mollusk.” But the trial was a horror show of black eyes and blackouts, smashed furniture and broken vows, one more cautionary tale about the collective delusion that fame and riches and “everything you want” is actually what you want.

The hustlers of TikTok launched a thousand clips on the trial’s grim details. A tabby in a wig pantomimed Heard’s testimony: “I said, ‘Johnny, you hit me. You just hit me.” (It was later taken down.) That such private anguish was being played for yuks on social media was a sign of cultural rot, but also a backlash to the years when questioning any woman’s story was verboten. “You can’t say that” tends to lay the tracks for “People are going to say that, with delight.” 

Once upon a time, Hollywood was an escape. Our ancestors turned from the bread lines and the specter of war toward a screen so brilliant we called it silver. Charlie Chaplin became Cary Grant became Robert Redford. But our screens grew small and dark, pocket-sized, and for the past several years, we’ve been hypnotized by other dramas. Harvey Weinstein became Louis CK became some random guy. A few weeks before the trial began, a movie star slapped a comedian on the stage of Hollywood’s biggest night. “When you’re at your highest moment, that’s when the devil comes for you,” the movie star told us during his Oscar speech, quoting a different movie star. Had the devil come for us, too? The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Waiting for the plaintiff’s arrival

Every Monday through Thursday around 8:45am, crowds lined along the curb behind the courthouse to catch a glimpse of Johnny Depp being driven toward the courts of justice in his black SUV. (Amber Heard snuck in from the other direction in a white Dodge pickup with blacked-out windows.) The crowd whooped as the SUV rounded the corner, and they held out their phones to capture the moment, the blur, the proximity to fame that might make them a little more famous, too.

“I got his hand!” yelled one girl as the crowd began to disperse. “Oh my God, I got his hand!” 

She was 12 years old, with wavy brown hair dyed magenta at the ends, wearing an Edward Scissorhands shirt she bought at Hot Topic. Her mother drove her down from the Bronx the previous day, and this was her first day in the trenches. I was surprised to find so many girls, but this was a legacy of sorts. Her mom was a Depp fan, and the 12 year old got hooked on 21 Jump Street. “I’m on the fourth season, but I don’t want it to end,” she told me, and I nodded, because I was 12 when I started watching 21 Jump Street. I remembered what it was to disappear into those dreamscapes, the crushing reality of middle school displaced by the cool vapors of a dashing protagonist who might only have eyes for you.

“Do you wanna see the video?” she asked, and her fingers were trembling as she tapped her phone. Sure enough, you could see Depp’s hand reaching from the shiny black cocoon. It was his right hand, whose middle finger had been severed in a ghastly Australian throw-down that culminated with Depp scrawling messages in black paint and fresh blood across the mirrors, real Stephen King shit. Pictures of the injury were shown at trial, and I could never unsee them: the hunk of flesh gouged from the soft pad, the bright red blood. But nobody could agree how this happened, who was to blame (an exploding vodka bottle, a smashed phone; his violent outburst, or hers). Anyway, his hand was fine now. 

“I’m overwhelmed,” the girl said, wiping away tears, because it was sinking in now. She was here. Johnny Depp was here. This was happening. “I cleaned my room for this,” she said proudly, sheathing the phone again. 

12-year-old Mia, left, with a friend she made at the courthouse.

I never could find an Amber Heard supporter in the bunch, but a few had shown up on previous days, and everyone stayed civil. The online Thunderdome was full of slash and howl, but here on the ground, folks were pretty chill. They did not like Amber Heard, though. A phony, a liar, a stone-cold narcissist. “If she wasn’t so beautiful, nobody would put up with her bullshit,” one middle-aged man told me. Was this misogyny? Was this an inconvenient truth? For years, feminists had longed for more complicated female characters, anti-heroes in the mold of Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper. Now we had one.

The trial would last for six long weeks. The 150+ hours of testimony would tell the dark and twisted saga of two very troubled people. Theirs was a tale of what the gossip rags called a toxic marriage and what Lady Gaga called bad romance and what the poets, in all their wisdom, had simply called love.

A Cinderella Story

Johnny Depp was born in a blue-collar Kentucky town on June 9, 1963, the youngest of four children raised by a waitress from the shacks and the hollers. Betty Sue was a firecracker. 5’2” with haunting brown eyes and high cheekbones that would be part of her son’s inheritance. Depp’s father was a civil engineer, a quiet man, but his mother’s moods ruled the home. An ashtray thrown near young Johnny’s head. A high heel used as a clobbering device. His dad punched walls on occasion, but the violence mostly came from his mother’s hands. She whipped the children with switches, a ghastly Southern tradition, and the switches had to be green; otherwise the limbs would break.

The family settled in Broward County, Florida, outside Miami. “Her feet were on fire, and we’d always have to move,” Depp testified in his mellifluous voice. He could be poetic on the stand, but also meandering. At 12 years old, Depp locked himself in his bedroom till his fingers learned the guitar, and he listened to the same album over and over. It was his disappearing act; the world made still. He was a Peter Frampton fan. In 1975, who wasn’t? But his older brother opened the door to Van Morrison. Then came Kerouac, Ginsberg, Salinger, Hemingway, he was off. Depp has no memory of puberty. His mind was somewhere else, all the time.

He dropped out of school at 15 to become a musician. One day Betty Sue came home and found his father’s side of the closet empty. Johnny drove to find him. He wanted to know why. His dad said he couldn’t take it anymore. The anger, the cruelty, the violence. He told his son something else. “You’re the man now.”

His mother went dark after that. Johnny found her crawling across the living room one afternoon, a line of drool from her mouth. She’d swallowed pills, and he watched as she was carried out on a gurney. He blamed his dad. He blamed his dad for a lot of things. He was named for his father, John Christopher Depp, but it was his mom’s name he tattooed on his arm. A heart surrounded by a tribal outline, according to websites devoted to such detail, but they look more like barbed wire to me. 

That a boy with a talent for hiding would grow up to become one of the world’s great movie stars is not surprising. Hollywood is filled with the broken hearts of children. You could read the career that followed as a charmed rise, or you could read it as the fall of a wannabe musician hijacked by his secret talents and uncommon good looks. Depp was 20 when he moved to LA. His buddy Nic Cage nudged him toward acting. Easy money, startling money. In real life, Johnny pumped gas. He worked construction. He printed T-shirts. But in 1984, his guts splattered across the ceiling in the slasher hit A Nightmare on Elm Street. And in 1986, he trudged through the jungle after setting a ransacked village aflame in the Vietnam War classic, Platoon. 

“There was no going back to music,” he said on the stand. He’d only ever been Johnny. But he was becoming Johnny Depp.

At 24, he starred in 21 Jump Street on an experimental network called FOX. Though the brand’s news channel would become synonymous with right-wing politics, the network’s debut programming drew from a counterculture spirit. The Simpsons and Married … With Children were biting send-ups of classic sitcoms. Jump Street was a teenybopper take on cop shows with a diverse cast that could have been plucked from a Benetton ad. 

I remember the first time I saw Johnny Depp on the TV set my mother finally — finally! — let me have in my bedroom. He was handsome but haunted, tough but tender. “Soft boys” is the phrase a friend coined to describe teen heartthrobs. The pretty pouts, the hairless chests, the low testosterone of their beauty. 

I was 12 when I hung a poster of Johnny Depp in my bedroom, between a poster of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and a poster of the actor River Phoenix, another artsy nomad hoping to outrun Tiger Beat. I locked myself in my bedroom, too, but I wasn’t learning guitar — I was learning boys. What did they like? Could it be me? I studied their favorite movies, their favorite bands. Their favorite color was blue? My favorite color was blue! The alt-choices of Depp and Phoenix suggest I had an eye for talent, even then. Edward Scissorhands, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood — Depp was a shapeshifter, a character actor in the body of a leading man.

River Phoenix met a James Dean end. He died of an overdose at 23 outside the Viper Room, the LA hot spot owned by Johnny Depp. I was a sophomore in college when I found out, and I got drunk that night, because it was Halloween, and because drinking had become the answer to so many of life’s pinpricks. This was 1993, the same year Depp split from his longtime girlfriend Winona Ryder and altered a tattoo from the romantic declaration “Winona Forever” to the hedonist’s motto, “Wino Forever.” Booze and drugs were a necessary prop in the fame cycle, though maybe more like a necessary shield. “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” John Updike once wrote. But those faces were so damn pretty. 

Hollywood has been called America’s royalty, but I think of it like a religion. Instruction in who to be, how to act, what to love. Fans like me worshipped. We built altars, burned candles, modeled our lives on the flickering images of compelling strangers. It’s very peculiar when you think about it; most of us never do. 

The author and the plaintiff in the ‘90s.

I’d come to Fairfax, Va., for the same reason most people outside the courthouse had: I was curious. The first weeks of testimony seemed to signal a referendum on #MeToo, which had never seen such riveting counter-evidence from a man. “I did not punch you, I was hitting you!” Amber Heard said in one of the many audio recordings the couple made trying to untangle their own relationship. After years of watching male celebrities roll over and play dead in the wake of these scandals, we had a real corker, the accused speaking of his own abuse. But was it an expansion of the movement, or its perverse mockery?

“#MeToo is over if we don’t listen to ‘imperfect victims’ like Amber Heard,” read a headline in the Guardian. The fear that the trial would silence victims was a running theme in mainstream media, but I kept hearing from female victims who felt inspired and understood by the trial; their sympathy just didn’t fall along gender lines. 

“The trial reminds me so much of my own divorce,” a 50-something woman at the courthouse told me, sipping coffee from a to-go cup. “It’s hard to liberate yourself from that trauma bond.” She owned a business in the area and started attending the trial in the third week. The pattern was so familiar to her: Love-bombing followed by brutality followed by gaslighting. She wrote Depp a victim-to-victim statement, and handed him a few bags of gummy bears on his way in and out. “I wanted him to know he’s loved and supported,” she said, though I had to wonder if the person not wanting to be alone with a difficult past was her. 

Celebrity is a Rorschach; we find what we need. One young woman became a Depp fan after watching the trial. “I liked the sound of his voice,” she told me. She was a pre-med student who’d driven in from Maryland. “I got a bit obsessed with him,” she admitted, her eyes growing nervous. “Is that creepy?”

Depp cut a sympathetic figure on the stand. Slow and soft-spoken, he had a light-hearted demeanor that could be smug, but also endearing. When someone sneezed in the courtroom, he interrupted his own tense testimony to say, “Bless you.”

One reason people flocked to YouTube and TikTok to follow the trial was that establishment media had completely forsaken it. A month in, only a handful of op-eds tackled the drama, whose primary players were proving tricky to cast in black and white. Leaked audio filled the void, painting a villainous portrait of a woman once hailed for her bravery: She’d been arrested for hitting her ex-wife; she wandered around after that Australian throw-down, muttering“I can’t lose him” and “I didn’t mean to do it” as professionals searched for part of her husband’s missing finger.

Johnny Depp wanted his side told. On its face, this was preposterous: He’d been flanked by microphones and flashing cameras most of his life. But this was also a commentary on the sorry state of establishment media, who’d gone all-in on Heard’s version of the saga and had no clue how to walk it back.

Depp’s story was about a man drawn back to his past, a beautiful and volatile woman who attacked and bullied him. He punched walls on occasion, smashed stuff, but he swore the violence was mostly from her hands. A remote control hurled at his head. A bottle thrown at his face. A roundhouse punch in his jaw.

One of the most memorable moments of the trial came on Depp’s final day of testimony. As he sat on the stand, navy cravat and a dark gray suit, he listened to the now-famous clip of his ex-wife Amber Heard. “Tell the world, Johnny.” Her voice was sneering, though later she would describe it as disbelief. “Tell them I, Johnny Depp, a man, I’m a victim of domestic violence.”

“And what did you say in response?” his lawyer asked. 

He gave a faint smile that faded quickly before lifting his eyes. “I said yes. I am.”

A Storybook Love

Amber Heard was born April 22, 1986, in the rolling ranch lands outside Austin, Texas, a little town called Manor. “Nobody’s ever heard of it,” she said on the stand. The middle of three sisters, she became the son her father never had. He was a cowboy type, who owned a construction company, but he broke horses on the side, which made for a less ordinary girlhood. “You just try to stay on,” she said on her first day of testimony. “It’s a wild animal, it doesn’t necessarily like to be ridden. And there are people like [my father] who are crazy enough to choose that as a profession.” She learned tricks. “Don’t show fear. Don’t be intimidated. Be tough. Be calm.”

She won a scholarship to a Catholic school. She won beauty pageants, though she never mentioned that on the stand, perhaps because she found it kind of embarrassing. Instead, she talked about a soup kitchen where she volunteered in the mornings. Her home life was chaotic: Her mother was sweet, but her father was violent. He hit her, he hit her sisters, he hit things. She dropped out at 16, declared herself an atheist, got a GED. She wanted to get the hell out of Texas, which was God’s country, which was Nowhereseville. Her longing coincided with the growth of a movie scene in the once-sleepy Valhalla of Austin. She got a part in the 2004 film Friday Night Lights and snagged the attention of a Los Angeles agent. She moved to Hollywood at 17 and never looked back.

If Depp’s early career was marked by lucky breaks, Heard’s was a series of near-misses. North Country? Alpha Dog? Price to Pay? Anyone? She worked at a modeling agency. She took the bus from one audition to the next, keeping a change of tank tops just in case. She was Hollywood beautiful, but generically so: The sweetheart face, the cornsilk hair, the killer body. She could use some edge. At 21, she got a role in the stoner hit Pineapple Express with Seth Rogen and James Franco. That year, 2008, she began dating a stylishly androgynous dark-haired artist named Tasya Van Ree, whom she eventually married. She had a few call-backs for a project based on the late Hunter S. Thompson’s only novel. The director arranged for Heard to meet with the film’s producer and star, Thompson’s old running buddy, Johnny Depp.

The Rum Diary is set in Fifties’ Puerto Rico, where our scoundrel of a protagonist Kemp falls for the restless girlfriend of a colleague. Chenault is a free spirit, equal parts innocence and danger, and Hunter S. Thompson wrote the character as if she were the American Dream itself. In the first official meeting of Depp v. Heard, the pair bonded over old blues records and poetry. “She could definitely kill me,” Depp remembered thinking. She was 23; he was 46. He gave her a copy of the 1944 movie To Have and Have Not, because he thought it might teach her about stillness, though it was probably not lost on him that the stars of that film, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, fell in love on set. Bacall was 19; Bogart was 43. 

Johnny called Amber a few days later. “You’re it, kid,” he said. 

In 2009, Johnny Depp was riding the biggest high of his career. Pirates of the Caribbean, a goof of a Disney film he did to please his daughter Lily-Rose, had become that most coveted of Hollywood properties: A lucrative franchise. He was the father of two children, longtime partner to French singer Vanessa Paradis, with whom he shared a villa in the South of France — and yet. Middle-age can feel like a dead end, even if it’s only another beginning. In the novels, this is an age of fancy sports cars and younger, hotter wives.

So who had the power in this first meeting of Depp v. Heard? The mega-star with the ability to hire and fire her, or the dewy-eyed ingenue? The aging actor fretting over waist lines and fading prowess, or the up-and-coming actress so ravishing in her beauty she’s just been cast as “the American Dream”? The man who possesses the power — or the woman who possesses him?

You can watch their first kiss; it’s on film. Chenault steps toward Kemp in the shower, and when he turns to find her, he pulls her toward him in a trespass they both know they are making. “I was feeling something I wasn’t supposed to be feeling,” Depp said on the stand. Her version was different. “There are certain things you do to be professional,” she said. “You don’t use your tongue if you can avoid it. And it felt like those lines were ignored.” 

Was this a helpless mutual chemistry? Or the entitled behavior of a man used to getting his way? It’s a hinge on which many a #MeToo story swings, and what’s so frustrating about these cases is that so much evidence stays locked up within, a stubborn matter of self-report. Your inner conflict, your hidden agenda, your suppressed emotion. I felt, I felt, I felt. What I often find missing in #MeToo conversations is any hint of ambivalence. In so many erotic encounters, what’s forbidden is what creates the zap. You can want something, and not want it at the same time. You can turn on your afterburners for a very taken man hoping he might love you (why not? you’re lovable!), and still long to go home to your new wife and say, “I have no idea why Johnny Depp sent me that guitar.”

A few days after the shower scene, Amber met Johnny for drinks in his trailer wearing a bathrobe she threw on between scenes. They drank red wine, another point of mutual interest. He says they made out. She says he lifted up the back of the bathrobe with his boot, and she giggled, not knowing what else to do. He says she wanted to stay the night, a prospect he deemed unwise. She says he playfully pushed her onto the sofa, raised his eyebrows, and said “Yum.”

Did all of this happen? Only some? Their stories will split like a cracked mirror, but for a while they remain more or less side by side. Two years later on press tour for The Rum Diary, both newly single, they fall in love. Crushing, passionate storybook love. He paints her portrait. They spend nights at her place, the two of them like the last people on earth. It’s almost unreal, that’s what worries her, but maybe it’s more like real life just outpaced her fantasy. The enchanted evenings, the lavish gifts — for her, for friends, for her family. He invites her to an island. It’s his island. 

“I felt this man knew me and saw me in a way no man had,” she said on the stand. But he had a way of disappearing. That bothered her. He’d light up her nervous system only to vanish for weeks on end, but he always came back. And they always came back together. Love is the maddest intoxication. Who among us could be blamed for chasing that first high?

She gave him a knife once. Johnny liked daggers, long blades shiny and curved, but this one was small and antique, a turquoise handle, and she had it inscribed with a line he often said to her, one she found achingly romantic. Hasta la muerte. Till death.

Evidence

Writers and poets once warned us about passion — its destructive powers, how blinding and de-stabilizing — but modern audiences treat it more like a litmus test for authenticity. Where’s the passion? Follow your passion. The drama of Depp v. Heard was a masterwork of passion. Heard wrote to her husband in their “love journal” that she wanted “to rip you apart, devour you and savor the taste.” A year later, Depp texted his agent: “I cannot wait to have this waste of a cum guzzler out of my life!”

It’s hard to trace a love going bad. Heard said the first warnings were subtle jabs. You really wearing that, kid? He was the jealous type. He accused her of sleeping with co-stars; he accused her of sleeping with her ex-wife. 

It took her a while to notice how the drinking tracked with violence. There was Opiate Johnny and Weed Johnny and MDMA Johnny, but drunk Johnny smashed things. A phone, a glass, a lamp. One night, she tells the jury, she asked about a muddy black tattoo on his arm, “Wino Forever,” and when he told her the words, she laughed. I find it hard to believe a woman who’s spent the past year discovering the body of her beloved took this long to wonder aloud about his very famous, very Google-able tattoo, but Heard is a millennial, and Depp has more than 30 tattoos, so OK. 

The next part comes out of nowhere: He slaps her. Is this a joke? She keeps laughing. “You think it’s funny, bitch?” Another slap. She locks eyes with him. (“Don’t show fear. Don’t be intimidated.”) He slaps her again, so hard she falls to the ground. 

This is the story Amber Heard told the jury with her face wrenched in pain, though I’ve scrolled through hundreds of comments from folks in the peanut gallery who don’t buy it. She’s too vague, too specific, too contradictory, too scripted. The OJ Simpson trial was famously televised, and armchair detectives could study for themselves whether the glove fit. But the Depp v. Heard trial was very much online, turning YouTube channels into a hectic real-time casino scroll of GIFs and emojis that read like a how-to manual in victim blaming. Why did she give him a knife if he abused her? Why did she stay? Why didn’t she go to the police? Conspiracy theories went off the rails: She did a bump of coke on the stand, she killed her own mother. 

Before #MeToo was a global movement, a modest collective of feminists had rightly observed that women often got skewered in trials like this. What they wore, what they said, what they drank — it became fodder to excuse an act of appalling intimate violence. These were irrelevant details, they pointed out repeatedly. 

But somewhere between this legal correction and a Trump-era culture gone mad, those ideas became gospel. The mantra “believe all women” started to replace “innocent until proven guilty.” Due process fell to the wayside at Title IX tribunals where young men were ousted from college before they’d even told their side. Many controversies bypassed the courtroom entirely, unfolding in the public execution chambers of Twitter and Facebook during the dawn of what some called cancel culture, and others called justice. Details and nuance didn’t stand a chance. The messiness of human life is not social media’s strong suit. The notion that women had any role in their own painful dramas — what they said, what they did, what they drank — was swept to the side in one big taboo. Don’t blame the victim. 

Courts operate on a binary: Guilty or not, victim or not. But human behavior is nothing but spectrum. And yet public discourse during these years kept falling into two camps, many of us operating in the ALL CAPS HYPERBOLE that turned every opinion into a push notification. One side was brave, noble. The other side monstrous, vile. Hero vs. human garbage pile.

Amber Heard didn’t see herself as a victim back then. This was a point of pride she repeated on the stand. Her first allegation takes place in 2011, a firmly pre-#MeToo era, and Heard had a grit and defiance that spoke to a childhood spent alongside a father who never once cried. After Depp slapped her, she says he broke down in tears, fell to his knees. She’d never seen anything like it. He begged her to come back. “I’d rather cut my hand off than ever lay it upon you,” she remembers him telling her. He showed up to her house with a couple cases of Vega Sicilia wine, her favorite. $500 a bottle. “The monster” was what they called Depp under the influence. “I put that fucker away,” he told her. She stayed.

The Monster

Evidence

Amber Heard may or may not have fallen in love with an abuser, but there is no question she fell in love with an addict. Back in 2009, Depp got hooked on the opiate Roxicodone after an injury he sustained during a Pirates sequel. The pills didn’t get him high, he said on the stand; they got him normal again. But he kept upping the dosage. “Take two,” he said, “and you’re on the nod.”

Depp spent much of his life upping the dosage. At the age of 5, Depp would bring Betty Sue her “nerve pills” to help calm her down. By 11, he came to the heartbreaking but logical conclusion they might calm him, too. He wanted to “escape caring so much, feeling so much.” By 15, he’d tried every substance under the sun. “I’ve never used drugs to party,” he said on the stand. “I used the substances to numb myself of the ghosts, the wraiths that were still with me from my youth.”

Substance problems begin as substance solutions. The rooms of AA are filled with the stories of kids who cared and felt too much — until they found a way not to feel much at all. Depp never liked AA. The higher-power business bothered him; he wanted to get clean on his own. But if he’d stuck around, he would’ve heard similar origin tales: rich kids rummaging in a liquor cabinet, poor kids picking up a can, a pipe, a bong. Addicts tend to be seekers. William James said in The Varieties of Religious Experience that alcoholics thirst for God, though they rarely use that name. They seek ecstasy in music, the mountainsides, the throb of the night sky. They seek ecstasy in actual ecstasy, peyote, Johnny Walker Black Label. Spirits become a synthetic form of spirits, a quest for some holy ghost, and the fix numbs the pain and becomes an identity, often a dangerously cool one, but the fix also creates more messes, more isolation, more pain.

“When I told him he kicked you, he cried,” Depp’s then-assistant Stephen Deuters texted Amber Heard in May 2014, following a tumultuous plane ride from Boston. “He’s a lost little boy. And needs all the help he can get.”

Loving an addict is a lonely exile. Drink with them, and you’re an enabler; challenge them, and you’re a “lesbian camp counselor,” as Depp once called Heard.

“He’s done this many times before,” Heard texted back. “Tokyo, the island, London (remember that?!), and I always stay. Always believe he’s going to get better.”

These text messages never made it into evidence; they were ruled hearsay. But they were part of the UK trial, where Deuters claimed he was only trying to placate an irrational person, a woman he called a “sociopathic show pony.” He said Depp hadn’t actually kicked her. He tapped her with his boot to get her attention.

Abuse is a matter of degree, a measure of force or harm, and the hinge of semantics can get pretty creaky in the space between intention and interpretation. So many #MeToo scandals exist in the disconnect between what one person meant to do and what the other person experienced. A hand on the knee: A predatory act, or a friendly gesture? A hand on the throat: A threat, or a turn-on? But whatever Depp meant to do on that plane, he couldn’t tell us. He didn’t remember anything.

“Once again I find myself in a place of shame and regret,” he texted Heard. “Of course I am sorry. I really don’t know why, or what happened.”

“Pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization” is how the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes the experience of addiction. You wake up, and wonder how it happened again. The dumb shit you said, the dumb shit you can’t even remember saying, the wreckage that’s become your life. It’s astonishing the lengths people will go to stay in this cycle. I heard a guy at a meeting talk about peeing the bed when he was drunk; he bought plastic sheets. 

But that August, Depp did get clean, sort of. He weaned himself from Roxicodone during one hell week on his own private island. Heard went with him, soulmate turned nursemaid, and she described a harrowing experience. He talked to people who weren’t there. He lashed out in rage. But whatever nightmare this was for the couple, it also knit them closer together. That February, they were married in Betty Sue’s living room.

Back home in LA, Depp had hired a “sober concierge” named Dr. David Kipper, author of the 2010 book The Addiction Solution who catered to celebrity clients. For this service, Depp paid $100k a month. When an old buddy saw that Johnny still had weed and wine around his pad during this period, he leveled with him: This doctor is a quack. None of this seemed to be helping.

One way to interpret this extravagant sober concierge is to say Depp was willing to shell out nearly a million bucks a year for the feeling of getting sober, while keeping drugs and alcohol in his life. AA is free, but AA is also hard work, the slow and savage process of getting honest with yourself. Johnny might have married Amber Heard, but his heart belonged to that numb and glorious escape.

Like Johnny, the higher-power business in AA bothered me, too. But I joined the group at 35 anyway, because I was done falling down the same old rabbit hole. Depp’s heroes went another direction. Kerouac drank himself to death at 47. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head at 67. Their pitiful ends lie in stark contrast to their magnificent beginnings, when they laid down tracks to a mythology that crossed generations — the idea that booze and pills and blotter paper beat a path to an extraordinary life.

“He romanticizes drug culture,” said Tracy Jacobs, his agent of 30 years, in her video deposition. She’d watched Depp become the biggest star in the world, but by 2015, his career was floundering. He starred in a series of forgettable movies; he was stuck in the velvet coffin of a pirate character he’d based on Looney Toons. He was earning a reputation as “difficult.” He used an ear piece to feed him lines, she said, though Depp would claim he was only listening to music. “Crews loved him at first because he’s so great, but they don’t like sitting around waiting for stars.”

The video of Johnny Depp slamming cabinets, first published by TMZ (9 million views), took place on the morning he learned he was broke. He’d made more than $600 million in the past 17 years, but it was gone. Depp would accuse his financial advisors of stealing from him, and they later settled out of court, but on that morning, he was flattened. “Wanna see crazy? I’ll show you crazy,” he tells his wife, pouring an oversized bottle of wine into a goblet, the kind of cartoonish glug-glug you’d see in a movie, except it wasn’t funny. Or maybe it was?

During cross-examination, Heard’s lawyer Ben Rottenborn asked him about this. “You poured yourself a mega-pint of wine,” he says, every inch the dorky lawyer.

Depp pauses, every inch the smooth operator. “A mega-pint?” A smile dances on his lips, and female laughter punctuates the courtroom.

“Mega-pint” became a running joke for podcasters and YouTubers and fans watching at home. It spawned T-shirts and candles and posters on Etsy. Comic overconsumption has long been a punchline, carrying a whiff of swaggering masochism, a hand smacking your own face, which was the story Depp told about himself.

“The only person in my life I have abused is myself,” he said on the stand. That theory is undercut by reams of testimony from friends, family, business associates, employees. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he believed it.

Women vs. Women

The author in back of the courthouse.

Three times a day during trial, Johnny Depp takes a smoke break. Around noon, I gathered near the back gate with about twenty women (and one man) to catch a glimpse of the star. “His favorite dessert is sticky toffee pudding,” the 12 year old with magenta hair told us, in case it came in handy.

We waited a while. The sun was fierce, nearly 95 degrees and humid, and the women yelled whenever a car passed on the street, the driver honking after noticing the “Justice for Johnny” signs, which brought more yelling, which brought more honking. Nothing was happening, but something was happening. The girl beside me had braces and glasses. “This is fun,” she said. 

It was near 1pm when Johnny Depp finally appeared, a blur between the bars of the gate. I could make out the slicked-back ponytail, the grey suit, but I got a better view on the iPad of the woman next to me zooming in to record him. 

“There’s a lot of women out here who know how to treat a good man!” someone shouted.

“I’m gonna make you sticky toffee pudding June 9, your birthday,” yelled the 12 year old. And then it happened: Depp turned toward the crowd, and gave them a friendly point of the finger. This was too much for the 12 year old, who doubled over. “Oh my God, he just pointed at me.”

I wanted to understand how these women could square their ideal of Johnny Depp — the Southern gentleman, the kind-hearted dreamboat — with the snarling audio and eye-popping text messages that had eaten up an entire day of testimony. Put aside whether or not you believe Amber Heard (they did not), how could you excuse the behavior of Johnny Depp?

“Let me ask you this,” said a 51-year-old woman who’d driven in from Kentucky, the first female firefighter in her unit. The women were resting in the shade between smoke breaks. “Would you rather him get drunk to get away from her or knock the shit out of her because she’s being a total ass?”

It was hard to know where to begin. “I’d rather he not drink through a difficult situation,” I said, a bit taken aback. 

A British woman seated on the grass scoffed. She was about 30, with a floppy hat over spiraling dark hair, and she took hits of a vape pen. “But he’s only inflicting pain on himself, he said on the stand—”

“No he’s not,” I said, surprised by the intensity of my own voice. “When you’re a blackout drinker, you hurt other people,” I said, and maybe I was talking about myself, but I was also talking about Johnny Depp: The armies of staffers who cleaned up his messes, the crew who lost hours of their own lives, the lovers and family members struggling to negotiate between the hurt boy and the self-destructing star. His kids. What did they see?

“He’s not a blackout drinker, he said so on the stand,” the woman said, matching my intensity and adding a hint of disdain. “See, you’re not watching the trial. This is how media misrepresentation happens.”

Then I reached for a card I rarely use, and I played it. “I literally wrote a book about blackout. You don’t want to argue with me on this.”

She shrugged, a quick puff on the vape. “I’ve blacked out so many times when I’m drunk,” she said, and gave a little chuckle.

The trial was not about Depp’s substance abuse, but it had became a tug of war over who was the most reliable witness, and on this count, I thought Depp was on shaky ground. I don’t know how a life-long boozer can say, with unwavering confidence, “I have never hit a woman in my life.” If he were in a blackout, how would he know?

The former firefighter was bothered by Depp’s substance abuse, too, but she was inclined to forgive him. She was raised by an alcoholic father who eventually got 40 years of sobriety under his belt. Depp’s behavior was reckless, but understandable. What she couldn’t understand was this Amber character. What did she want? It bothered her that she’d cheated on her husband (his cheating didn’t come up). It bothered her that Depp once asked his wife to quit drinking in order to help him, and she’d refused. I could interpret that incident two ways: Perhaps drinking wasn’t her problem, or perhaps she had a problem of her own.

Amber Heard had developed a real taste for Vega Sicilia wine. “She could easily drink two bottles of wine a night,” Depp said on the stand. Her audio recordings often sound slurry, scattered. Pills or booze, I have no idea. What I know is that drinkers are drawn to other drinkers, they make their messes together, and one side can wind up the poster child for bad behavior in a dynamic built by two. By the end of their marriage, the duo of Depp-Heard ran up a wine bill at one merchant for $160k.

“None of us are God, so we’re not supposed to judge,” the former firefighter told me. “So I’m just giving my heartfelt opinion that she’s done some crooked shit.”

She mentioned the turd. People loved to talk about that turd in the bed. Was it real? Did it matter? “A practical joke that went badly wrong” is what Amber Heard said to a chaffeur, according to his deposition. But on the stand, she told another story. “That’s disgusting,” she said, perhaps the only piece of testimony on which everyone agreed. But the rogue turd hit escape velocity, smearing what was left of her reputation. #AmberTurd trended for weeks. The detail was so twisted, so repulsive that for a lot of people, the case was closed right there.

I was still inclined to sympathize with Heard. I’ve been stuck in doomed relationships. I’ve slammed the door only to open it again, I’ve forgiven more than I’d want strangers to know, and I felt for a woman who’d fallen for a Hollywood giant only to wind up caretaking a drunken toddler. But the audio recordings were so indicting. Not one mention of the allegations she made in court, and she sounded like someone seeking conflict as opposed to avoiding it. “There can be no physical violence,” Depp told her once, in a calm voice, to which she responded, “I can’t promise you I won’t be physical again. God, I fucking sometimes get so mad I lose it.”

Dr. Laurel Anderson saw the couple in the fall of 2015 for therapy sessions that lasted as long as three hours. Her deposition described two people locked in broken communication: Heard spoke like a “jackhammer,” interrupting Depp frequently, while he had trouble finding his voice. Dr. Anderson saw Amber alone for an intake. “She admitted always hitting back as a point of pride but eventually began instigating the violence,” Dr. Anderson said, reading from her notes. Heard’s biggest fear was abandonment. He’d never stopped disappearing: to do drugs, to hang with friends, to play music, to hide from her, who knows. “She would rather be in a fight than let him leave.” As for Depp, Dr. Anderson believed his wife had somehow tapped a violence in him he’d long kept at bay. “I thought he'd been well-controlled for decades, and then with Miss Heard, he was triggered, and they engaged in what I saw as mutual abuse.” 

“Mutual abuse” struck me as a phrase the trial badly needed, an acknowledgment that there were no heroes here. But in the days and weeks after that testimony, some experts on the Internet pushed back hard. Mutual abuse was a myth, stories warned us. “Abuse is about power and control. In an abusive relationship, only one person has power and control,” read a website I found when googling the phrase. “The person who has power and control manipulates the victim into 1) getting pushed to their limit so they react back, and 2), believing they are also an abuser (blame shifting).” Or as one YouTube commentator put it: “When you are goaded, mocked, shouted at, accused, baited, shoved, name called day in, day out,  it’s natural to occasionally yell ‘shut up’ or use a little verbal abuse in return. It’s not ‘mutual abuse.’ It’s simply because the victim is at a breaking point.”

It’s hard for me to argue with that. It’s also hard for me not to observe that power and control can be a fluid currency: One partner retains power over finances, say, while another wields power in the home. One has physical prowess, the other rules in social and emotional spheres. But in the binary language of activism and social-media squabbles and culture-war endgames, there was no such thing as “both sides.” Even the phrase had become a slur: both-sidesism. And so we had a marriage, a very tangled one, with bruises and black eyes on both parties — but only one victim could be crowned.

Depp fans picked their side. #AmberIsALiar #JohnnyDeppIsInnocent. I kept hearing the word “misogyny” thrown around to describe Depp supporters, a page ripped from the call-out play book — ding-ding patriarchy, ding-ding sexism — but how do you make sense of the fact that the vast and overwhelming majority of Depp supporters were women? If these women were committing the grievous sin of “not supporting other women” — well, so were their detractors.

These female Depp supporters didn’t like the idea that women couldn’t be underhanded, manipulative, deceitful. They’re just as human as men.

The Humiliation of Amber Heard

Evidence

On May 27, 2015, Amber Heard walked into a quiet courthouse in Los Angeles. She generally wore makeup, because she was never sure when the paparazzi might catch her, but on this day, she did not. She brought her best friend Rocky Pennington and her publicist, a close friend, along with a cache of photos that showed her flawless face marred by mysterious red blotches and little purple crescent moons. The judge granted her a restraining order, known as a TRO, and as she exited the courthouse, reporters swarmed her, flashbulbs strobing. She made the cover of People.

A few relevant details. Johnny Depp was on tour in Europe with his band The Hollywood Vampires for the next two months. May 27 was the day his film Alice Through the Looking Glass hit theaters. It also happened to be his daughter’s birthday. 

“Why would she go to the courthouse with a photo of her that looks like she's been abused???” Depp texted Heard’s mother that day. “This is my life too, what are my children and my children's friends supposed to think??? I do not deserve this, and they do not deserve this ... especially not from her."

Six days before the filing, the couple had a fight. Betty Sue had just died, and the loss brought an epiphany for Johnny: He did not want to be married anymore. He went to Heard’s penthouse, which was technically his penthouse, and the row that resulted is one more case of incompatible testimony. He says he asked his security guards to stand at the door in case things went awry. She says he trashed the place and hurled a phone in her face so hard it left a bruise. 

You could see obtaining this restraining order as the triumphant moment a battered wife stopped protecting her husband and finally started protecting herself. Or you could see it as the devious moment a scorned ex took advantage of her husband’s absence to inflict maximum carnage. Heard’s own parents apparently saw it as neither.

“It’s the lawyers on both sides doing this not Amber,” Heard’s mother texted Depp, an exchange that never made it into evidence (Objection: Hearsay). “I heard the whole story very teary — if I could just talk to Johnny. She didn’t want this. … She was told she would be evicted and out in 30 days if she did not do this.”

Depp wasn’t buying the eviction excuse. “SHE COULD STAY THERE AS LONG AS SHE LIKED!!!” he texted Heard’s father. “WHY WOULD I FORCE HER OUT IN 2 WEEKS??? I AIN’T NO SCUMBAG!!!” Depp was still wearing his wedding ring, but he took it off that day.

Heard’s parents had a tempestuous past, though I suspect they would have simply called it “a marriage.” The lines of demarcation were shifting: What women should tolerate, what men were allowed to do. But her parents didn’t see Depp as the bad guy that day. “Please don’t pass this on if you ever talk to Amber again,” Heard’s mother texted him. “I love you son.”

The securing of the restraining order was a turning point in the public perception of the Depp-Heard saga. The specter of “spousal abuse” transformed Another Messy Celebrity Divorce into something far more sinister. On the stand, a former reporter from TMZ confirmed it was Heard who tipped him off to her courthouse appearance on May 27. But privately, Heard was having a change of heart. A few months later, in July, she begged Johnny to see her in San Francisco. She wanted to try again. He was done. “You will not see my eyes again,” he told her, a promise he kept. Through six weeks of testimony, he never looked at her once.

A few weeks after their San Francisco meeting, where she failed to get him back, a video of Depp raging in his kitchen hit TMZ. “Johnny Depp Goes Off on Amber … Smashes Wine Glass, Bottle,” read the headline. 

This, too, came from Heard’s side, according to TMZ testimony, but Depp hardly needed the confirmation. He texted his agent, “She’s begging for total global humiliation.” He prepared for war. 

But a broader war erupted before his personal one could. Steubenville, “mattress girl,” and Brock Turner were like smaller earthquakes before the rupture. In October 2017, #MeToo radically expanded our sympathy about the suffering women face — online, in office cubicles, on random street corners, on a late Friday night — but it also contracted our sympathy for men. The entertainment industry started purging its sinners and libertines, and eventually, Depp’s buddies Ryan Adams and Marilyn Manson would find themselves swept to sea. But Johnny was first.

Amber Heard’s op-ed hit on December 5, 2018, only six weeks after the Kavanaugh hearings unleashed a feminist fury that could’ve been measured on the Richter scale. As a piece of rhetoric, the op-ed was middling. “Two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out,” she wrote. Actually she didn’t write that. The ACLU drafted the op-ed for her, and installed her as an “ambassador for women’s rights,” after she promised to donate half of her $7 million divorce settlement to them. It was a shocking revelation at trial — that an op-ed meant to showcase a woman who’d finally found her voice proved the opposite. Her empowerment was ghostwritten.

Actors speak other people’s lines. I can hardly fault her for wanting professional help at such a high-stakes moment. But that op-ed was such a missed opportunity. Imagine if she had used her voice — to tell us about the despair, the confusion, the twists and dead ends of a troubled marriage. To tell us ALL parts: Hers and His. “I don’t think I’ll ever change,” she texted her therapist after another horrific fight. Maybe she felt there was no appetite for complication. Her divorce settlement included a non-disclosure agreement, after all. So the op-ed became a bland piece of puppetry, timed to the release of her new movie, Aquaman. 

Depp’s career crashed into the ocean. A few days after the op-ed’s publication, he was cut from Pirates. “One day you’re Cinderella and the next day you’re Quasimodo,” Depp said on the stand. 

But pendulums have a way of swinging. One day you’re the ambassador for women’s rights at the ACLU, and the next day you’re AmberTurd.

The cross-examination of Amber Heard was surgical in its precision. Depp’s lawyer Camille Vasquez stalked the courtroom in stilettos, speaking in an efficient clip, her girlish voice sharpened by a total lack of feminine accommodation. She slung around “objection: hearsay” and “objection: non-responsive” like pebbles lobbed into Heard’s face. Heard directed all her answers toward the jury with an upturned chin, and I found myself distracted by the constant motion, wondering what her body was telling us that her words did not. “Haughty” was the description that came to mind as I watched her under siege. Even on mundane matters, she refused to give an inch — either because she was right, or because she refused to be wrong.     

Vasquez played that damning audio in court one more time. Heard stared at the ground as her voice filled the courtroom. One side of her mouth seemed to twitch. Tell the world, Johnny, tell them: ‘I, Johnny Depp — a man — I’m a victim, too, of domestic violence’ — and see how many people believe or side with you.

“I was saying that to the man who beat me up,” Heard explained on the stand. “I found it preposterous.”

“And the man you beat up,” Vasquez said. “Numerous times.”

“I could never hurt Johnny,” Heard said, and Depp, staring down at the table, raised his eyebrows.

Did she believe it? Was it true? And what did truth mean in conflicts of the heart, anyway? “The truth” had been supplanted by “my truth.” I felt, I felt, I felt. But Heard took a major blow on the matter of her donation to the ACLU and a children’s hospital. The courtroom watched a video clip from a UK talk show, where she humble-bragged of her generosity. “Seven millions dollars,” she said. “I gave it away.” Except she hadn’t. She’d given around $350k, and good old Mollusk had coughed up $500k to both foundations in her name. 

“I use pledge and donate synonymously,” she said. You could almost hear the jury raising their eye brows, too.

But Also, There Were Alpacas

The alpacas showed up to Fairfax County Courthouse one day around 5pm. Early in the trial, Heard’s lawyer Ben Rottenborn said to Depp, "If Disney came to you with $300 million and a million alpacas, nothing on this earth would get you to go back and work with Disney on a Pirates of the Caribbean film? Correct?" Depp flashed a smile, and confirmed it was true.

The alpacas came courtesy My Pet Alpaca, whose owners figured why not? I squeezed Truffle’s tail, a perfect squish, and expressed confusion that animals I’d only seen in the Andes were kicking around Northern Virginia. “You’d be surprised how many alpacas are in the area,” the owner told me. “Google it.” 

The scene outside Fairfax County Courthouse was so much lighter than the fathomless sorrow inside. One guy brought a parrot named Lulu. Another guy dressed like Gilbert Grape, holding a sign that quoted the movie, “I want to be a good person.” Couples exited the front doors smiling and laughing, the woman in a white cocktail dress and the man in a dapper suit, holding up a marriage license as they took selfies. Oh, right: A civil courthouse is a place where marriages begin, too. 

I stopped a young man I’d heard interviewed by the local news that morning. James was 29, dressed so professionally I’d mistaken him for a lawyer, but he was just a dude who’d come to the trial on a whim. He was sitting on Heard’s side when the camera caught his surprised expression during Camille Vasquez’s cross-examination, and the photo went viral. 

“That was you!” I said, and asked him to repeat the expression, which he did.

James From Court

He kept coming back. He was getting so much attention he started a new Twitter account, James From Court, which got 22k followers the first day. People tweeted him questions about trial strategy and backstage drama, but James’ only professed area of expertise was the jury. What were they like? Could you tell whose side they were on? Were they sad, bored, angry, tired, mad that day? James was on it.

He began appearing as a Depp-Heard expert on #lawtube videos that racked up more than 100k views. The commentator Emily D. Baker, his lawyer friends from the courthouse, Ian Runkle and The DUI Guy. He got a little bit famous.

“Do you ever read newspapers?” I asked James. 

“Oh God no,” he said. 

YouTube was his news source. He liked Breaking Points, with Saagar and Krystal. He didn’t have time to read, and anyway, half the newspapers were behind pay walls. One of the biggest twists of the Depp v. Heard drama — for me, anyway — was the rise of YouTube commentary as legacy media fled the scene. I expected a mob of reporters, but I only saw the well-appointed female host of the Law & Crime Network walking in heels across the otherwise empty lawn. I met a British documentarian and a French reporter who’d flown in from New York. Was it possible I was the only American print journalist here? 

“I blame the judge for that,” said Nick Wallis, a BBC-trained reporter and host of the excellent podcast Reporting Depp v. Heard. He’d covered the UK trial in 2020 and crowd-sourced his trip to Fairfax, where his coverage proved fair, curious, rigorous but compassionate. Old-school. He told me reporters from the Daily Mail and the New York Post attended the trial at the beginning, but the judge wouldn’t reserve space for them in the courtroom, and no journalist on earth was gonna wait in line overnight for a trial and then file their story the next day. (Even though that’s exactly what some YouTubers did.) But where was the New York Times? Where was the Washington Post? This was their backyard. Their paper started this. But the trial was deemed too lurid, or too low-brow, or perhaps too inconsequential — even as one consequence of their abdication was the rise of YouTube to the media throne.

Legacy media might not have been interested, but the people they’re supposed to serve were. Law & Crime, a channel I’d never even heard of before this started, had YouTube livestreams that topped 20 million. Over on TikTok, #JusticeforJohnny got 19 billion views. But why did we watch this? Were we that desperate for escape? The unraveling of a marriage is always gripping drama — a bit of Schadenfreude, perhaps, but also one of life’s necessary lessons. That everything beautiful comes to an end.  

The Verdict

I watched the closing arguments on my laptop at my home in Dallas. Each side offered a narrative that was persuasive and heart-rending and Teflon-resistant to the other side’s point of view. This is how the legal system works, but I found it so frustrating: It was like nobody had been listening at all. Each team doubled-down on the most generous self-presentation and the least generous presentation of their opponent. It reminded me of our toxic marriage on Twitter, where each side seizes on the sickest burns, flees all common ground, and refuses to give an inch. All closing arguments, without any work of discovery. 

The verdict arrived with the first day of June. Johnny Depp had once again fled the argument to hang out with friends, performing in England with guitar god Jeff Beck. Amber Heard sat in the courtroom in her chair of pain, the last Hollywood star in Fairfax County, as the jury read what had to be the worst review of her life. 

“Do you find that Mr. Depp has proven all the elements of defamation?” 

“Answer: Yes.”

Her blonde hair fell in beachy waves, her vixen eyes downcast. The hits kept coming. 

“The defamatory implication was designed and intended by Ms. Heard?”

Yes on three counts. 

“Malice?”

Yes, yes, yes.

Amount awarded to Mr. Depp: $10 million in compensatory and  $5 million punitive (reduced to $350k by Virginia law).

She seemed to sink ever so slightly in her chair. Even her one victory, $2 million awarded for a defamation claim against Depp, didn’t move her eyes from the floor. She’d wound up $8 million in the hole. Her face betrayed nothing, but her body was in subtle rebellion, her breath becoming so sharp you could see her chest rise and fall. And as someone who studied her micro-movements for more than a month, I found it her most honest moment. 

The scrutiny Heard experienced during those six miserable weeks is a punishment I would never wish on anyone. Then again, the scrutiny of being a celebrity is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone either, and millions scramble and scrape for that honor. And I suppose it is an honor to represent the heroes and villains of our narratives — on the screen or in the courtroom. But what a burden, to carry the weight of your own identity as well as the thousands thrust upon you from the private lives of strangers. An abusive ex. A cruel mother. An avenging angel. Heard’s shoulders sank for a reason. 

There will be an appeal. There will be sit-down interviews. Maybe Amber Heard will rise like the phoenix. Her ex-husband certainly did. The unhappy divorce of Depp v. Heard united the couple in a way their marriage never could. And as long as we keep casting them in our image, they’ll keep trading roles like this— one Quasimodo, one Cinderella, a doomed waltz of public realignment hasta la muerte.

Sarah Hepola is the author of “Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget” and the co-conspirator of the podcast “Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em,” with Nancy Rommelmann. She is working on her second memoir about (among other things) love.