Opinions
Johnny Depp, Amber Heard and the deeply unsatisfying matter of re-litigating their trial
The series was panned by critics
On Aug. 16, Netflix released a three-part docuseries revisiting last summer’s televised civil litigation over allegations that Amber Heard had defamed ex-husband Johnny Depp by claiming to have survived sexual violence and domestic abuse during their four-year relationship.
Rather than offering anything new by way of insight or analysis from anyone with relevant qualifications or experience, each episode features clips from some of the online “creators” who turned their hot takes on the trial into a veritable cottage industry of amateur legal commentary and courtroom conspiracy theories, feeding the rapacious demand for anti-Heard and pro-Depp content. (As if to underscore the project’s unseriousness, these included a men’s rights YouTuber who wore a Deadpool mask and was surrounded by Spider-Man costumes.)
Worse still, “Depp v. Heard” director Emma Cooper fails not only to answer but also to even ask the obvious questions that have lingered since a verdict was returned more than 14 months ago by seven jurors in northern Virginia who were not sequestered as the case became, by far, the most popular topic on social media and online platforms.
At the same time, however, the episodes include footage of courtroom testimony that offer a glimpse, though incomplete, into some of the trial’s more salient and dispositive moments that I otherwise would never have seen (with neither the time nor the inclination, either last year or now, to follow 120+ hours of argument by the parties presented over the course of a seven-week trial.)
Do these scenes redeem the series? Hardly. But that does not mean they offer nothing of value, especially considering that while this was not the retelling of last summer’s events that we deserve, it remains the only one we’ve got. At least, for now.
Susan Sontag, in her 1977 collection of essays “On Photography,” proclaimed “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”
In “Depp v. Heard,” the cameras facilitate a very specific kind of tourism that feels both exploitative and voyeuristic, because the reality in which we find ourselves trespassing is dark: the unraveling of a relationship between movie stars through patterns of dysfunction and abuse both familiar and alien, knowable and unknowable, like a city you have visited but never called home.
Especially when coupled with the more outrageous moments from trial that made headlines at the time – such as the debate over whether Heard defecated on Depp’s bed and blamed his teacup Yorkshire Terrier – there is a temptation to treat footage of testimony concerning the smashing of liquor bottles and hurling of wine glasses, the shoving and taunting and threats, even the physical and sexual violence, as though it were pure spectacle.
However, this would suggest, wrongly, that the painful realities of the actors’ relationship are so far removed from our lived experiences that we do not, cannot, or should not relate to them. As if a seven-week trial adjudicating the conflicts in our own intimate relationships or those involving the people we love would not turn up evidence of trouble and dysfunction, or worse.
Considering that we are primed to pick winners and losers and heroes and villains, perhaps it was unsurprising that incomplete and selectively edited footage from the case provided ample fodder for Instagram reels and TikTok videos that were created in the service of narratives that, most often, favored Depp and vilified Heard.
For me, witnessing these scenes in their proper context revealed a picture so much more complicated and, frankly, ugly that the prospect of framing the case in this manner seemed as preposterous as the idea that audiences leaving a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” should find themselves allied with either Martha or George.
To take just one example: From the witness stand, Heard recounted how she would often return home to their shared Los Angeles penthouse to find Depp nodding off in a chair because he had washed Roxicodone down with whiskey, or lying supine on the sofa fully unconscious with melted ice cream pooled in his lap. Worried about her husband’s apparent substance use disorder and unsure how best to help, the actress admitted she would sometimes take photos of him and share the pictures with a trusted friend.
Or, Depp’s attorney asked, was she just trying to humiliate him? Or, online commentators asked (often rhetorically), was this a calculated and premeditated move to collect evidence she would use against Depp in litigation or for purposes of extorting him?
As if these motives are mutually exclusive.
Having experienced the pain of watching loved ones spiraling in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction, I can tell you why I suspect Heard took the photos, but of course the reality is neither I nor anyone else – perhaps not even she – has any clue.
Last year, so much of the online noise about the trial came from content creators who made specious arguments to poke holes in the credibility of Heard’s testimony or alleged ulterior, sinister hidden motives based on the actress’s countenance, demeanor, speech, and other behavior.
For example, in clips that were often selectively edited or presented outside of their proper context, Heard might have seemed to cry more hysterically upon realizing the cameras were trained on her, which were used as supposed proof that her claims of suffering abuse at the hands of her ex-husband must therefore be fabricated.
Watching the footage in the manner presented on screen in “Depp v. Heard,” it becomes even more obvious how silly these interpretations were. In reality, of course, no one – not even police officers, trial court judges, F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents, trial lawyers or forensic psychiatrists – can reliably spot when someone is lying to them.
However convincing some YouTuber may have been, and however comforting the idea that we are able to see through the lies of others, I’m sorry to tell you the research on this is overwhelming and uncontested.
As Malcolm Gladwell observes in “Talking to Strangers,” Amanda Knox was falsely convicted for a murder she did not commit because “much of the prosecution’s case…rested on the allegedly strange, guilty behavior she exhibited,” which “the public deemed not in line with typical responses to grief and trauma.”
The cameras did not tell the complete story.
Well before 2022, private details about Depp and Heard’s troubled relationship had spilled onto the pages of tabloids like The Sun, which called Depp a “wife beater” in a 2018 story alleging that “overwhelming evidence was filed to show Johnny Depp engaged in domestic violence against his wife.” After he sued the paper for defamation, London’s High Court of Justice ruled against the actor in 2020, concluding the claims at issue were “substantially true.”
Still, last summer’s litigation between the actors earned far more public attention and unearthed far more (and far more titillating) private information, causing, therefore, far more damage than the supermarket rags and gossip blogs – as well as, ironically, the financial and reputational damage resulting from the very defamation claims that were adjudicated at trial.
As a reminder, Depp sued his ex-wife for a 2018 opinion article in the Washington Post in which she had written, “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.” Heard was referencing the backlash against, essentially, identical claims she made in a statement after securing a restraining order against Depp following their divorce in 2016. (“During the entirety of our relationship, Johnny has been verbally and physically abusive to me,” she wrote.)
In so many cases including this one, intimate partner abuse is messy. An audio recording of one of the couple’s arguments shows Heard acknowledging she had struck her ex-husband but denying that she punched him. Her testimony, meanwhile, detailed serious violent crimes, including that Depp had thrown her into a ping pong table and repeatedly hit her in the face before sexually assaulting her with a liquor bottle that may have been broken.
Of course, assuming their sworn testimony to be true, it must also be said, domestic violence is a gendered crime. And the imbalanced power dynamics within their relationship put Heard at a disadvantage, including in this respect. While both are famous actors, the wealth, power, and fame wielded by Depp was then (and remains, now) much greater.
The disparity was evident from the outset. In the Netflix series, throngs of fans are shown cheering the Pirates of the Caribbean star and booing Heard on the first day they were sighted arriving separately to the Fairfax County Circuit Court. Meanwhile, online, evidence of a sustained and coordinated character assassination of Heard had just begun to emerge.
The smear campaign would persist through the trial and beyond. The actress was called a manipulative liar, a gold digger, an abuser, a violent psychopath, a drug addict, and worse. Some of the most outrageous claims were among the most widely circulated: She snorted cocaine on the witness stand, killed her own mother to conceal testimony that would have exonerated Depp, plagiarized lines from the film The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Creators mocked Heard by lip-synching over audio of her testimony about suffering violent abuse in videos that went viral on TikTok along with hashtags like #JusticeForJohnnyDepp, which was seen nearly 3 billion times on the platform. (#justiceforamberheard earned just 25 million views.) One-sided articles and videos, many containing false and misleading claims, were promoted by Ben Shapiro’s conservative media outlet The Daily Wire through its estimated $35,000 and $47,000 purchase of Facebook and Instagram ads.
“Depp v. Heard” was panned by critics.
“If ever a true-crime documentary needed the usual collection of talking-head interviews with esteemed journalists, law enforcement veterans and legal experts to put things in perspective,” Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun Times wrote, “this is it — but that never happens.”
Others, like CNN’s Brian Lowry, agreed: “How much is gained from listening to a guy in a Deadpool mask offering extensive trial takes is a question ‘Depp v. Heard’ should have contemplated and apparently didn’t,” he wrote.
Several reviews added that part of the problem was that not nearly enough time had elapsed between the events and their retelling. Bustle’s Scaachi Koul pointed to other recent projects involving the private lives of public figures (especially women) that, with sufficient space and distance, found new and interesting things to say about their subjects and opportunities to tell their stories anew.
Ryan White’s excellent documentary “Pamela: A Love Story,” which was released by Netflix in January, manages to find plenty of material about actress and model Pamela Anderson along with the broader sociocultural forces of the 90s and early aughts that helped shape – and were shaped by – the era’s most enduring sex symbol.
The film would have been nothing, however, without Anderson. Listening to her tell her own story, one realizes how poorly suited everyone else was to the task – particularly the leering talk show hosts and journalists who treated her as nothing more than a sex object.
And maybe that, above all else, is the lesson to be gleaned from “Depp v. Heard”: Let’s come back to this story, sure, when we’re ready to cut through the bullshit, reframe the conversation away from the “him vs. her” framing, stop relying on provably unreliable evidence, and consider the broader context of their relationship and the impact of the trial that happened on TikTok and YouTube. And let’s definitely listen to Heard if and when she’s ready to talk about this again.
Until we get that docuseries (or documentary, scripted series, film, book, whatever), I fear everything else will be deeply unsatisfactory and unsatisfying.
Opinions
Gun reform is an LGBTQ rights issue
‘I am sick of Congress refusing to lift a finger to protect our communities’
Earlier this month, 44-year-old Ousman Ceesay allegedly shot two people in the parking lot of Venture-N, a well-known gay bar in Tucson, Ariz. Both victims — Vincent Anthony Siquerioes and Cameron Davis Capara — died at the scene. Police discovered a list of several LGBTQ businesses on Ceesay’s person, and evidence points to how Ceesay confronted Siquerios and Capara in the bar’s parking lot before killing them. According to a news release, police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.
The event was reminiscent of the 2022 Club Q shooting and the Pulse nightclub shooting, where Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded more than 50 more at the gay nightclub in Orlando. Survivors and the wider queer community recognized the 10th anniversary of the shooting this past June 12. As the queer community grieved another shooting targeting LGBTQ safe spaces this month, some members of the LGBTQ community are raising the call for gun reform as a key step to protect LGBTQ rights.
Gun violence is a major issue for the LGBTQ community. LGBTQ people are more than twice as likely to be the victims of violent crime than straight and cisgender people, with one in five hate crimes in the United States motivated by queer phobia. This means that LGBTQ folks are more likely to be violently attacked by a stranger compared to their cisgender, straight counterparts. In school settings, 29% of transgender youth and 16% of gay and lesbian youth have been threatened or injured with a weapon, compared to 7% of cisgender youth.
There is an ongoing epidemic of gun violence injuring and killing trans women of color in the United States today. One study by the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety identified that the number of trans people who were murdered in the U.S. doubled between 2017 and 2021, increasing 93% in that time period. Everytown for Gun Safety recognizes that these aren’t even the actual numbers as many trans people are misgendered or deadnamed by the police, media, or their families so their deaths are not incorporated into these numbers and tied to systemic gun violence against the wider LGBTQ community.
As a community with higher rates of self harm and suicide, easy access to firearms increases the risk that a suicide attempt will end in death. This does not mean that LGBTQ people are mentally ill, a popular far right talking point. LGBTQ people are not more likely to experience suicidal ideations and die by suicide not because they are LGBTQ but because of the stigma surrounding their identities. LGBTQ young people are more than four times likely than their non-LGBTQ peers to attempt suicide, and the Trevor Project estimates that 1.8 million LGBTQ people between the ages of 13 and 24 consider suicide in the United States.
As the Williams Institute shows, this makes gun violence a serious public health concern for the queer community. As Dr. David Hemenway, co-author of a 2016 study published in the American Journal of Medicine said, “differences in overall suicide rates across cities, states, and regions in the United States are best explained not by differences in mental health, suicide ideation, or even suicide attempts, but by availability of firearms.”
Gun violence is also a major queer issue given that trans and gender expansive individuals are at greater risk of experiencing intimate partner violence. Compared to the 35% of straight women who experience intimate partner violence, 44% of lesbian and 61% of bisexual women report experiencing rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. This number is also higher for bisexual men (37% of whom experience intimate partner violence compared to 29% of straight men). This number is much higher for trans folks; more than half of people surveyed reported some form of intimate partner violence, according to a 2015 survey.
During the second Trump administration, ongoing legal attacks on LGBTQ rights, executive orders that deny the existence and protections of trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive individuals, and virulent opposition to and disbanding and defunding of DEI initiatives, LGBTQ employee resource groups, queer history collections, exhibitions, and education, LGBTQ representation in libraries and school settings, and the firing of federal workers allegedly because they are queer — realizing a new Lavender Scare — have emboldened violent homophobes.
After the Club Q shooting, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, explained that “the rhetoric and the legislative attempts to erase transgender people sends a signal that violence toward us is tolerated.” This has become even more dire after a 2025 White House memo prioritized identifying “radically pro-transgender” groups as national security threats, in line with the Heritage Foundation’s plan to designate trans people terrorists. In response, Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici shared, “the Trump administration’s endorsement and proliferation of hateful and violent rhetoric against the trans community is putting lives at risk,” particularly the push to label trans people and their allies as terrorists.
As Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva said on the House Floor following this latest tragedy, “when that [anti-LGBTQ+] hate is combined with easy access to firearms, the consequences can be deadly. I am sick and tired of Congress refusing to lift a finger to protect our communities while, every day, dozens of people are shot and killed across the country.”
A 2018 survey shows that the wider LGBTQ community supports gun reform — with 93% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults supporting background checks and 72% opposing legislation and procedural changes that make it easier to obtain concealed weapon permits. This is not to say that the wider LGBTQ community opposes gun ownership. In fact, a growing cohort of LGBTQ individuals and other members of minority and marginalized groups are investigating gun training and ownership to protect themselves. Part of their motivation is not just protecting themselves against perpetrators of hate-motivated gun violence but also against state and federal agents that are increasingly attacking the LGBTQ community.
After the shooting, Tucson police increased their presence at other LGBTQ businesses in the city, but locals expressed concern that this would alienate some LGBTQ patrons, especially queer and trans patrons of color, and might also lead to further violence knowing that police continue to be instigators in and perpetrators of queer phobic violence. A Williams Institute study published this past year highlighted how LGBTQ people, especially queer people of color, LGBTQ youth, and trans and gender expansive individuals experience higher rates of profiling, discrimination, harassment, and entrapment from law enforcement.
This is one of the reasons that police presence at Pride events continue to be controversial, as community members remember how the police were the major antagonists at the Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria riots. The LGBTQ rights movement came to be largely because queer and trans people of color fought back against violent police harassment and abuse.
As someone who was traumatized by active shooter drills in elementary, middle, and high school, I am exhausted and heartbroken by continued gun violence and politicians’ refusal to consider and take action through gun reform legislation. Whether intentional or not, their hesitation to discuss and address this issue publicly and to use their political power to prevent future shootings communicates to LGBTQ+ people that they do not care about us. With gun violence disproportionately affecting our community, their silence and inaction is a form of queer phobic violence itself allowing tragedies like Tucson to continue happening.
(If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources. You are not alone.)
Emma Cieslik is a D.C.-based museum worker and public historian.
Opinions
Trump’s Cabinet: Dumb, dumber, dumbest, and evil
Corrupt officials working to undo 250 years of progress
Dumb, dumber, dumbest, and evil. Any of the felon’s Cabinet and close aides could fit these terms depending on the discussion.
You have Commerce Secretary Lutnick saying “no American military were killed in Iran war.” Then it was reported our venal Vice President JD Vance said, “The current hostilities shouldn’t even be called a war, since ‘active combat operations’ ended months ago. Right now, there is no active shooting, Vance insisted. This despite the U.S. and Iran still currently exchanging fire, including around the Strait of Hormuz.
Then the fool-in-chief, the felon in the White House, said about Vance’s comments, “U.S. strikes on Iran are now “intermittent” and a lot of people don’t call it a war. I can understand what he’s saying. I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us. It’s not a big thing.” All this even though this so called “conflict” has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $37.5 billion and left 18 U.S. service members dead, hundreds injured.
All this after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “the Trump administration’s objective in the conflict surrounding the Strait of Hormuz is to restore shipping conditions to what they were before the war with Iran began.” Then self-hating, gay, Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, chimed in, after two days of meetings with finance ministers from around the world, blaming Ukraine for high oil prices citing “Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure as part of the reason for the global energy shock.” These people all belong in an asylum, or jail.
When not talking about the war, as he is losing it badly, the felon-in-chief talks BS at a rally in Texas. Then he talks about redesigning Washington. Lutnick, speaking at a judicial hearing on whether Trump can put his name on the National Monument honoring JFK, said, “Donald Trump is the most credible person in the world” while arguing that the Kennedy Center should bear his name because he’s vowed to raise the funds to renovate it. That, even though the funds were approved by Congress and not raised by Trump. Then Trump’s tariff war on the world, now focused on Canada, which is screwing the American people, and his believing an Executive Order can get the world to call bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico, and Lake Ontario, by different names. Or that he can change the name of the Department of Defense, to the Department of War, which only Congress can do. With the help of the fascist sycophants around him, he creates chaos in the world.
He has torn down part of the White House, and tries to build an arch. Spent millions and caused the destruction of the reflecting pool. Some of these things will be undone, others will remain, but his name will go down in history, not on buildings, as the worst president ever. People will laugh at him as they move to remove his name from everything they can, just as New Yorkers did when he was first elected, embarrassed to be associated with him.
Now for any sane person looking at, and listening to, this chaos, it is abundantly clear how embarrassing all this is for the country. It is clear he is moving the nation backwards when it comes to the equality and equity we have fought so hard to accomplish. Our country began with us killing, and taking land, from Native Americans. The founders of our nation 250 years ago only recognized white men. They left out women and Black men. We have spent the past 250 years trying to move forward from that beginning. Trying to live up to the statement in the Declaration of Independence that said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
We have come a long way, but still have not been able to add women’s equality to our Constitution. But Trump, along with his fascist aides and sycophants in Congress, is trying his best to undo all we have accomplished in those 250 years. Trying either to take away the right to vote, or make it harder to do. They took away the right of women to control their own healthcare, and are making it harder for Black people and the LGBTQ community, to live their lives fully, with dignity and safety. They will accomplish all this, and more, if not enough people come out on Nov. 3 and say, NO MORE. However, if enough decent people vote, we can take back our country, and our future.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Opinions
Gloria Steinem’s life of substance and consequence
Iconic activist never stopped working to make life better for women
Gloria Steinem was an icon, a feminist, a woman of substance and consequence. A rare person who made a difference her entire life; sometimes quietly, sometimes by making noise. She was an incredibly beautiful woman, inside and out.
I heard of Gloria Steinem and admired her for all she was doing. But that was from a distance. I read about her, and saw her on TV. It was 1963 when Steinem wrote and published her undercover Playboy Bunny exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” about her going undercover at New York’s Playboy Club. Her account revealed the physical toll, exploitative conditions, and pervasive sexism faced by the women employed there, challenging the magazine’s image of empowerment.
It was 1972 when I first met her in person. That first meeting happened while I was campaigning for Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.) at a street rally. I said “Hello, Ms. Steinem,” and she said “It’s OK to call me Gloria.” I was honored to do so.
Gloria was there to support her friend. Bella had been through a grueling primary against Bill Ryan, after being redistricted out of her seat. She lost, but then Bill died of cancer before the election, and Bella was named the Democratic candidate in the general election for New York’s 20th congressional district. When Bella won that race, I went to work for her full time. It gave me the chance to meet Gloria again a number of times after that, once even with Bella at her apartment. While she was one of the many famous people I met while working for Bella, she was different. She wasn’t Hollywood. She began her career as a reporter, and worked hard for all she believed in. She was a true activist. That was what she saw herself as. She could say she came by the activism gene from her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem who Wikipedia reported, “chaired the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association and was a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women. Also, the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education and a leader in the movement for vocational education. She helped rescue many members of her family from the Holocaust.”
So yes, in many ways, activism was in Gloria’s genes. She was the one who told me it was OK to call myself a ‘feminist’. That it isn’t only women who can call themselves that, but also men who believed and fought for full social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. She helped me to understand I was brought up by a feminist. My mom, though she never called herself that, was one by dint of how she lived her life, and fought for others.
Gloria never stopped working to make life better for women, and to make sure other women joined her in her activism. In 1969, she co-founded Ms. Magazine. Then in 1971, with Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and Shirley Chisholm, she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, which provided training and support for women seeking elected and appointed office. Then in the same year she co-founded the Women’s Action Alliance, which until 1997 supported a network of feminist activists and worked to advance feminist causes and legislation.
Gloria would hold other women to task if they didn’t speak out, even at difficult times, but always with love. In 1986, Bella’s husband Martin died at the young age of 69. We were at the funeral home the night before the funeral, and Bella was sitting with some of us, and saying she didn’t know what she would do without Martin. It had been a true love affair. She was saying things like she didn’t even know where the checkbook was, what their rent was, etc., because Martin handled all that. Well Gloria overheard this and came over and said to Bella, “Don’t you dare say that in public, women look up to you as a feminist, as independent, you can’t say that.” And we all laughed, even Bella, as did Gloria, but she was serious.
Then in the 1990s Gloria helped to establish what she called ‘Take Our Daughters to Work Day.’ She did this to try to have young girls learn about future career opportunities. But her work wasn’t done and in 2005, along with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, she co-founded the Women’s Media Center. It is an organization that “works to make women visible and powerful in the media.”
The last time I saw Gloria was at the opening night of “Gloria: A Life,” at Theatre J in D.C. She was 88, as beautiful, and sharp as ever, having just come back from a speaking engagement in some far-off country.
Gloria, the world will miss you, RIP.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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