This piece originally appeared in The Present Age, a newsletter on communication, media, culture and politics in a time of hyperconnection, with Parker Moloy. Subscribe now.
On Wednesday, a Virginia jury found Amber Heard responsible for slandering her ex-husband Johnny Depp and awarded him $ 10 million. (Depp was also found responsible for Hurd’s defamation, but awarded her only $ 2 million.) Officially, this was the end of a six-week defamation trial between two celebrities. In fact, it was the culmination of the biggest explosion of online misogyny since Gamergate – and a chilling vision for the future of the Internet.
At the trial, Hurd told a plausible, evidence-based story of abuse. She testified that she and Depp met in 2009 during the filming of The Rum Diary. She was 23; he was 46. They were both dating other people at the time, but they were flirting on set and connecting because of a common passion for books, art and poetry. Eventually, they parted ways with their respective partners and began dating in 2012.
Depp was sober when they first met, but when the relationship deepened, he started drinking again. In his testimony, Hurd describes how he disappears for days, then reappears as a different person. He accused her of “fornication” in Hollywood and made her audition for roles that included sex scenes. When he didn’t get the answers he wanted, she testified that he overturned tables, threw glasses and hit the wall next to her head.
The first time he hit her, she said, she thought she was joking. Depp was drunk and maybe on cocaine, she believed, and Hurd asked him what his Wino Forever tattoo said – the letters were confused and she couldn’t make them out. Depp thought she already knew, and that her question was a way to make fun of him. He hit her. She laughed, so confused by his answer that she thought it must be an expression of his dark sense of humor. She said he hit her again and again and again. She fell off the couch when he shouted, “You think you’re funny, bitch !?”
He ran away, then came back, burst into tears and apologized. “I believed it,” Hurd said on the stand. “I believed there was a limit he would not cross again.”
She said he kept his promise for several months, but drinking, paranoia and mood slowly returned. Hurd testified that the shouts turned into collisions, slaps into blows. At least once she said he sexually assaulted her. After he explodes, he will disappear, then return to her sober with a promise and a plan to stay that way. The cycle, repeated so many times, Hurd had a name for these post-abuse periods: “warm glow.”
But the radiance always faded. In May 2014, Hurd and Depp flew from Boston to Los Angeles on a private jet. Hurd was going to make a film with James Franco, a constant source of tension in their relationship because, she said, he was significantly younger than Depp and had thrown her in a previous film. Hurd had already told her assistant to make sure Depp hadn’t seen the script for this project because it included a love scene.
Hurd said Depp arrived on the flight at least drunk and probably on cocaine. According to his texts to Paul Bethany, he behaved like “an angry, agro-Indian in a fucking eclipse, shouting obscene words and insulting any devil who approached.” According to Hurd, he accused her of cheating, followed her when she changed places, slapped her, then kicked her when she got up to move again. Eventually, he began to howl like an animal and fainted in the bathroom.
Here’s Hurd telling the story, if you can understand it.
Hurd said the plane crash was a model for the rest of their relationship and that almost every future incident of violence follows a similar pattern: Depp experienced external stress – an explosion followed a meeting at which his financial advisers told him he had lost millions, another after his mother’s death – and he was abusing alcohol and drugs. He accused Hurd of cheating or picking and eventually escalated into bumps, slaps or worse.
If Depp’s behavior was a textbook abuser, Hurd’s was a victim of textbook abuse.
Depp then withdrew in denial, according to her testimony. Almost all violence occurred when he was drunk or strong, often darkened, and his life was deliberately structured to allow him to never face the consequences of his addictions. His checkbook took care of the discarded hotel rooms; his servants soothed his self-harmed ego; doctors give him medicine to get him through the shoots; his celebrity status ensures he never loses his job.
Until 2014, Hurd said she was the only person in his life to tell him the truth about his anger and his drug problem – “the lesbian camp counselor”, as he once said memorablely, who ruined his fun and reminded him of what he had done on nights he could not remember. He became increasingly indignant that she treated him like a drug addict and abuser, something his mind would not allow him to accept. His texts to her were apologetic, but his messages to everyone else were unrepentant.
“I’m out. I’m done,” he wrote to his sister after the plane crash, a period when Hurd treated him silently. my friends… their wives keep calling them. ”
If Depp’s behavior was a textbook abuser, Hurd’s was a victim of textbook abuse. She tried to fix it, starting more and more desperate attempts to detoxify him. Eventually, she began photographing him fainting in hotel rooms and nightclubs, evidence she could show him the next day to prove he had a problem.
“I loved him,” she said on the stand. “But he was something else. And the other was awful. “
In the last year of the relationship, something like learned helplessness prevails. “I will try to defend myself,” she said. “I would reject; I would push him away from me.
“I was going to yell at him and yell at him. I would call it ugly names. “
When their marriage fell apart, Hurd testified that Depp became even more addicted to drugs and alcohol, disappearing for longer periods and returning with even more paranoid accusations. Hurd grew more and more fragile, rolled his eyes at his strange denials of his addiction, and ignored his empty promises to sober up.
The last straw was a series of escalating incidents in which he disappeared for nearly a week, then showed up late and drunk at her 30th birthday party, then blew himself up against her. In the middle of their last argument, Hurd testified that he threw his phone at her, hitting her in the cheek. She filed for divorce the next day and a restraining order a week later.
Hurd’s story is remarkably inconspicuous. Every rhythm of her story — the honeymoon period, the relentless escalations, the first-day apologies followed by the second-day denial — follows well-established patterns of interpersonal violence.
Hurd’s account also coincides with almost all the available evidence, even the evidence against her. In 2018, Depp sued the British tabloid The Sun for calling him a “women’s fighter”. To protect himself from the UK’s notorious strict defamation laws, the tabloid called Hurd to provide evidence to support his claim.
She identified 14 cases of violence during her four-year relationship with Depp. I will not look at them one by one (I recommend that you read the UK decision yourself), but I will give an overview of the types of evidence she has presented in support of her testimony.
Photos: Hurd’s injuries and the damage Depp caused to their homes are well documented. Hurd took pictures of herself in the later stages of the relationship, and her injuries appeared in at least one photo on the red carpet. The LA Times report from the day she filed her remand order notes that she arrived at the courthouse with visible bruises.
Contemporary communications: Hurd and Depp’s texts from their relationship confirm her main outlines of events. In the earliest incident of violence, Hurd told friends and family about his jealousy, attacks and denials. The trial in the United Kingdom includes a text from Depp’s assistant after the explosion of a private plane, who said: “When I told him he hit you, he cried.
Depp’s texts also confirm the outlines of her account. Both trials contain numerous texts in which Depp admits that he becomes a different person when he is drunk or strong. “My illness somehow crawled in and grabbed me,” he told Hurd. “Of course, I pushed and showed ugly colors of Amber on a recent trip,” read a message to a friend. One day his sister texted Depp to say, “Stop drinking. Stop Coca-Cola. Stop the pills. “
Hurd had more evidence in her favor than the vast majority of victims of violence in widely accepted “Me” cases.
Witnesses: Many people saw Hurd with bruises, cuts and missing pieces of hair. Depp’s employees testified about the damage he caused to their homes and hotel rooms. Hurd’s acting coach said she needed to schedule a longer session with Hurd to help her overcome the trauma of the relationship; make-up artist said she helped cover the bruises.
The latest alleged abuse incident, in which Depp allegedly threw his phone at Hurd, was witnessed entirely by her friend at the other end of the conversation. Two other friends testified that they saw him act aggressively towards her in one case, and her sister confirmed another. (She also testified in the trial in the United States that Depp once kept his dog from …
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