It’s been a year since the high-profile defamation trial involving Johnny Depp and Amber Heard became a ubiquitous fixture on our social media, whether we wanted it there or not. And if this documentary is anything to go by, we’re still disappointingly bad at talking about it, and about domestic violence as a whole.
On August 16th, Netflix premieres Depp v. Heard which examines the trial and the following social media frenzy.
It does so, however, without saying anything new or insightful.
The director, Emma Cooper, sets about compiling a veritable police line-up of YouTube and podcast commentary, TikTok memes, and news coverage, apparently to explore a range of perspectives on the matter.
It’s thanks to this aforementioned footage that the internet formed such a dour view of Heard, with anti-Heard memes popping up everywhere you looked. These memes mocked her testimony while glorifying Depp’s trial performance and his legal team. Content creators found profit in covering the trial from a pro-Depp perspective and pivoted away sharply from their usual fare, with some of them creating literally thousands of videos on the subject.
What Depp v Heard actually covers
You’d be forgiven for thinking that any documentary on the topic might try to shed new light on such a contentious issue which had a lot of misinformation flying around, some of it perpetrated by leading figures on the right – For example, Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire spent thousands of dollars on Anti-Amber propaganda.
But strangely, for a documentary seeking to ask “how much did social media influence our opinions on Depp vs Heard,” all it really does is condense a six-week trial into three episodes of what can only be described as uncomfortable, rubbernecking voyeurism.
For example, the documentary doesn’t spend much time exploring how Depp lost his lawsuit against News Corp in 2020, after they called him a wife-beater in The Sun. It’s a verdict that was upheld in the HIgh Court by two appellate judges, and it still stands to this day. In the UK at least, you can still legally call Depp a wife-beater without fear of legal recourse.
And being that that verdict was extremely damning, and not a result that was expected – The UK is famously a country hostile to libel defendants, and The Sun in particular not only has a reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth, but has lost libel trials prosecuted by the same judge that presided over the 2020 trial, Justice Andrew Nicol – You might be forgiven for thinking that surely, there’s some mileage to exploring why the two verdicts were so different. Apparently, not for Emma Cooper.
Initially, Depp v. Heard examines how social media shaped public opinion and possibly influenced jurors’ views on the case. The first episode hints that the trial was a #GamerGate-esque flashpoint of misogyny and targeted harrassment. However, as one watches the subsequent episodes, more attention is paid to uninformed and sexist critiques of Heard, leaving that thought trail puzzlingly unexplored.
Where this doc is really lacking
Notably, there is a frustrating lack of interviews with experts who might have been able to provide a much needed understanding of the complexities surrounding domestic violence.
Ruth Glenn, the CEO and President of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and Dr. Jennifer Freyd, who coined the term DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), who were both outspoken (and notably pro-Heard) during the trial are conspicuously absent. As are any of the now 300 plus experts and organisations who have signed an open letter in support of Amber Heard since the trial, many of them experts in law, domestic violence and academia. 59 of those experts felt so strongly that they wrote two amicus briefs for the Virginia court of appeal before Heard decided to settle in December 2022.
That’s not to say there’s no analysis of any pro-Depp behaviour – there are a few efforts to lend credibility to Heard’s testimony, such as highlighting the controversy around Milani Cosmetics, and the discussion of the term “megapint.”
It even highlights the controversy around the poop-on-the-bed incident, with some thought into this being overblown, and possibly pure character assassination – something that had been sorely missing from other mainstream analysis.
And indeed the documentary unambiguously paints these moments as a ridiculous circus sideshow. But any semblance of fact checking of Team Depp’s claims pretty much stops after that, as does any exploration of any developments since the verdict.
For example, there’s no real exploration of the unsealed court documents from the Virginia trial, which Depp’s supporters crowdfunded to purchase. These revealed among other things that Depp’s team likely manipulated images according to a metadata expert, tried to exclude a lot of damning text messages between Depp and Marilyn Manson that painted him in an unsavoury light, and in a move that calls Depp’s repeated claims of his being a ‘Southern Gentleman’ into question, tried to submit nudes of Amber Heard into evidence.
To sum it up
Depp v. Heard is an extremely disappointing missed opportunity to explore the post-#MeToo backlash, stan culture, the impact of social media on legal proceedings, or society’s continued misunderstanding of domestic violence. Any attempts at analysis are very shallow, and ultimately, you come away from watching this feeling like you watched the cliff notes of the trial.
The only people who will ultimately enjoy this are the people who ghoulishly wished that the Megan Thee Stallion/Tory Lanez trial was televised, and the people who missed the public spectacle of a witch burning the first time around.
