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A few weeks after the six-week mutual defamation lawsuit against Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, Hurd described the first time her ex-husband hit her – a charge he denied, as he denied all other allegations of abuse.
Hurd told the jury she noticed a tattoo on her husband’s arm. He was old and faded, and she couldn’t understand him, she said. He told her it said “Wino Forever.” She laughed, thinking she was joking – and then, according to Hurd, he punched her in the face.
As I looked at this testimony, I had the most inappropriate and confused thought: How did Amber Heard not know about the Wino Forever tattoo? Of course, I knew about it, as did every self-respecting older millennial beaten by Edward Scissorhands and the tabloid magazines of the 1990s. The tattoo once said “Winona forever” in honor of Winona Ryder, Depp’s fiancée at the time. But the ink outlived their relationship, so Depp removed two letters.
How is it possible that I knew this about Johnny Depp and his own partner didn’t?
It was ridiculous to wonder in a process that taught me how no one knows anything about a celebrity’s personal life. And nobody knows the hell about someone else’s marriage.
Watching the process felt alternately delicate and surreal, a kind of process in which Marilyn Manson was casually featured as a guest at Thanksgiving dinner at one of Johnny Depp’s penthouses. Day after day in the courtroom was devoted to looking at photos, text messages, and recordings that Depp and Hurd made of each other during a relationship that was, if nothing else, an absolute blazing Porta Poti.
Johnny says he never hit Amber. That he “restricted” her from time to time when he hit him. He says she threw a bottle of alcohol at him and she cut off the tip of his finger. That she was making fun of him, cursing him, holding back his medication. That she or one of her friends once climbed on his bed.
Amber says Johnny beat her many times, usually when he was drunk or believed she was cheating on him. That it had nothing to do with cutting off his finger, but when he woke up the next morning, he had used the bloody number to write strange messages on the wall. That one of their dogs must have jumped on the bed because seriously, she said, which 30-year-old woman would do that?
This kind of summary makes him sound crazy and ridiculous – divorces of the rich and famous – when I watched him he actually felt ordinary and desperately sad. Staring and excitement about the dirty washing of celebrities is a well-honed sport for spectators, but throughout the process I continued to read reports that were tonal confusion: The Daily Beast turned the hottest accusations into brazen points – “The Poop-On-The-Bed” Fiasco “,” The Headbutt “- as if describing in detail a reality show, not the breakup of someone’s life and marriage.
It was more complicated than the fact that both Johnny and Amber are actors, probably capable of producing emotions to play on the audience’s sympathies – and perhaps trapped by the possibility that the acting skills that made them famous to make some people doubt the sincerity of the normal human suffering on both sides. Johnny is a movie star with a 40-year career under his belt; Amber is much younger and much less famous. The #JusticeforJohnny online hashtags are exponentially superior to the #IStandWithAmber hashtags. TikToks were made to mock Amber’s tears and present her every gesture as proof that she was lying. It turned out that the most noisy theory in the court of public opinion was that she was a manipulative liar, and Johnny was robbed.
Nobody knew what to do with this process, it seemed to be the problem. If you’ve tuned in to see the interior of a celebrity relationship, you’ve got what you wanted to the point that you realized you still didn’t want it:
At the booth, Johnny Depp spoke softly and so slowly that by the time he reached the middle of a sentence, he seemed to have forgotten that he had ever started one. He seemed confused by his entire relationship with Hurd. “It was a quick shot, an endless parade of insults, and you know, looking at me like a fool,” he said, looking depressed.
At the booth, Amber often held back tears, and sometimes she couldn’t hold back.
While Depp says Hurd threw a bottle of alcohol at him, Hurd remembered a different story with a bottle of alcohol. She claims that Johnny was the villain, that the villain led to many broken bottles. She says that at one point he pressed her and she felt a lot of pressure on her pubic bone – a square pressure; at first she thought Johnny was punching her. Then she realized that the pressure was coming from a bottle of alcohol, she testified.
At that moment, her lawyer asked her to clarify: Did Amber say she broke in from a bottle of alcohol?
Yes, Amber explained. Johnny was pushing the bottle of alcohol inside, she testified (and says again that all this never happened). At that moment, all he could think about was whether the bottle inside it was one of those that had previously been broken at the jagged edges of the glass.
Please, God, she said, she thought at that moment. “Please, I hope it’s not broken.”
If you’ve stuck to the process, day after day – if you’ve watched cross-examinations and endless sidebands – then you realize that what you’re watching is a bad example of what it means to be a celebrity, but a brightly lit primer on what you can do. means being in a violent relationship.
Lawyers asked for answers, under oath, to the unanswered questions we always ask victims of domestic violence: Why didn’t everyone see that he or she was hitting you? Why don’t you have more bruises? Show us the bruises you have; we will judge them.
I watched part of the trial with my mother, who spent many years as a marriage and family therapist and whose clients were both victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. I released her segments in which Amber admitted her role in the toxic relationship.
“I was going to yell at him and yell at him and call him ugly names,” Amber said. “I am so ashamed of the names we would call each other. It was awful. “
She said that “she will always try to take as much of the blame for the battles as possible” – it is almost better to accept the blame for something than to accept the meaningless nature of the violence, which you cannot change no matter what you do. ”
I wondered if my mother would take this as evidence of “mutual abuse” – a term I’ve seen spreading a lot online – a way to make sense of Amber and Johnny’s relationship while sharing the blame equally.
But my mother said no, it wasn’t so common in her experience. More common was that a victim of domestic violence would try anything he could to try to stop the violence. They would try to shout back, not shout back, stand up, stay down. Eventually, they may resort to hitting. They would try anything they could think of because they thought that if they tried the right thing, then their partner would stop abusing them.
However, this did not mean that the abuse was mutual. This meant that the abuse had cascading effects, that it poisoned an entire relationship, that violence on both sides became normal, even if only one side was really to blame.
This meant that domestic violence was scattered and nuanced and often contradictory and confusing. Not only is marriage a mystery to everyone, but to the two people inside it, sometimes it is a mystery even to the two people inside it.
I am worried about this process. After looking at almost every part of it, I left, feeling deeply dirty that I had watched almost every part of it – wondering where the line between staring and testimony was. I am concerned that the horrific spectacle of this process could lead the alleged perpetrators to prosecute their accusers in court, possibly forcing them to survive the alleged violence.
I am worried that watching this mess of condemnation and humiliation will be seen by unknown victims of abuse as another reason not to speak out when speaking out is so difficult. I’m worried about the way the process, as cultural critic Ella Dawson wrote on Twitter, “took over the internet and distorted our understanding of the abuse in ways that hurt victims right now.”
A couple’s intimate relationship is nobody’s business. But the issue of domestic violence is everyone’s business, and once the public has free access to Johnny and Amber’s relationship, viewers have speculated that they can solve the mystery of the relationship, that they can know exactly what happened.
Here is what we know in six weeks within the courtroom:
We know there were bruises on Amber Heard’s face. We saw pictures. Her make-up artist testifies that she is covering them up; she described the appropriate color palette used to conceal bruises. We know there is broken glass and looted property. We also saw pictures of this, as well as Johnny Depp’s severed finger and bloody inscriptions scratched on the wall. We’ve seen text messages sent by Johnny Depp to friends joking about Hurd’s death, citing her “rotting corpse” decomposing in [expletive] trunk of the Honda Civic. “
We know that there were terrible battles that the couple recorded sometimes with the knowledge of the other, and sometimes without, in which Johnny moaned incoherently, and Amber told Johnny that he was “washed” and “sold.”
We know that the relationship lasted five years. Five years of what they thought was an unbearable relationship. Even longer than Depp’s relationship with Winona Ryder, which led to the Wino Forever tattoo.
In the segment of the process that will remain for me the most, Amber Heard …
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