“An orgy of misogyny” was how Guardian contributor Moira Donegan described the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard defamation suit. But to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies’s witty riposte during another famous trial: “She would say that, wouldn’t she.” Moira Donegan faces her own legal troubles. Like Amber Heard, she has also been accused of defamation. In her case, the suit is being brought by one of the men who appeared on the “Shitty Media Men” spreadsheet created by Donegan back in 2017, just as the #MeToo movement was taking the world by storm.
Men accused of sexual misconduct under the rubric of #MeToo are reported to be initiating defamation actions in ever-increasing numbers. What is surprising about this trend is that so many #MeToo women are surprised by the headlong masculine flight to the law courts. Where else are males accused of heinous offences against women going to go for relief, when the mere accusation of misconduct is enough to get them fired from their jobs or see their businesses ruined? Not all of the men outed by #MeToo were as guilty as Harvey Weinstein – some may even have been entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. Robbed of their livelihoods, their reputations besmirched, the pursuit of legal restraints and retribution by these individuals is entirely predictable.
Less predictable, perhaps, was the global outpouring of support for Johnny Depp and the extraordinary degree to which Amber Heard was ridiculed and reviled. What was it about this case that touched so many raw nerves around the world?
First and foremost there was Depp himself. Not the real Depp (who comes across as a deeply flawed individual) but the Depp of Edward Scissorhands and Pirates of the Caribbean. Those imploring, puppy-dog eyes. That irresistible quality of wounded whimsy that Captain Jack Sparrow presents to an unfeeling world that would just as soon hang him from the nearest yardarm. Depp specialises in being the helpless little boy inside the grown, and none-too-wholesome, body of a man.
It was all there on show in the witness box: that sense of bafflement and hurt. The female characters in Depp’s movies cannot resist this little-boy-lost act, and neither, it would seem, could the millions of ordinary women around the world who watched the trial. To the utter dismay of the #MeToo feminists, the sympathies of these women were not engaged by the sad testimony of their sister Amber but by poor Johnny’s harrowing tales of marital misery.
There was also plenty to identify with in Depp’s testimony for the 14 per cent of men who are the victims of serious abuse at the hands of their female partners. For these men, Depp offered proof that their experiences were not peculiar to themselves. It will be much easier now for them to open up to their male friends and family members about the shame and anguish that, before Depp v Heard, they opted to suffer in silence.
Which is not to downplay, in any way, the equally harrowing experiences of women routinely abused by their partners and husbands. Male-on-female violence is significantly more common than female-on-male. In virtually every family there is someone known to be either dishing out, or on the receiving end of, domestic abuse. Unfortunately, knowing such behaviour is going on does not make us any the wiser when it comes to knowing how to make it stop.
Few experiences are more intensely personal than the intimate relationship between one human being and another, and those wrapped up in them generally do not take kindly to outsiders poking their noses in. Those involved in relationships of their own are all too aware of how difficult it can be to explain to each other – let alone to anybody else – the behaviour they indulge in behind closed doors.
Perhaps that’s why so many people sided with Depp. Because they too, have behaved badly and because they knew that if they were placed in the witness box and asked to justify their most spiteful and violent actions, they would struggle to make people understand. Christ’s famous challenge, ‘Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone’, goes to the heart of this reticence. We are all sinners, all guilty.
Is that it? Is that why Depp’s supporters around the world outnumbered Heard’s by such an extraordinary margin? Because she, and the #MeToo movement that she had – justifiably or unjustifiably – come to represent, had somehow contrived, over the five years since the New York Times exposed the sins of Harvey Weinstein, to convey the impression that its activists did, indeed, believe themselves to be without sin? What other conclusion is possible when the destruction of other human beings’ livelihoods and reputations can be undertaken, not on the basis of evidence, with the legal presumption of innocence, but by means of a tweet? Because women do not lie, cannot lie, never lie, when accusing men of intimate violence.
Most people recoil from this sort of moral absolutism, because most people know that men and women are not separate species, but fully equal human beings. They understand that slogans like “Women can do anything!” cut both ways. If a woman can run a country as well as any man, then she can also lie as well as any man. They also know that in a situation where simply to accuse a person of wrongdoing is all it takes to see them convicted and punished, all manner of terrible miscarriages of justice are bound to occur.
Yes, men commit dreadful crimes against women. And yes, far too many of them escape punishment. But, that does not mean that retribution may be visited upon men in a manner contrary to, and destructive of, the rule of law; if it is, then no one should be surprised that the victims of such injustice insist upon having their day in court.
Johnny Depp won his case against Amber Heard not because he was without sin, but because his former wife had come to symbolise the #MeToo movement and the #MeToo movement absolutely will not stop casting stones.