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
Pentagon says hormones make trans troops unfit but gives them to men
A man who needs a screening program to feel like a warrior is telling on himself
Last week, the Secretary of Defense posted a video to announce what he called the “High-T Department of War.” In it, Pete Hegseth ordered annual testosterone screening for every service member over 30 and offered testosterone therapy to those who want it, all in the name of keeping American warriors, in his words, on the “leading edge of lethality.” A hormone, he explained, is part of “the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”
I have spent years writing about masculinity, so I know a performance when I see one. But this one is different, because at the exact moment Hegseth is prescribing testosterone to the men, his department is throwing other Americans out of uniform for taking it.
Here is the contradiction, and I promise I am not the one straining to find it. Since early 2025, the administration has worked to remove transgender troops from the military. One of its stated reasons, laid out in the executive order and in the government’s own court filings, is that these service members require ongoing medical treatment the military cannot easily sustain. Hormone therapy, the argument goes, means cost, monitoring, lab work, and stretches of non-deployability. A soldier who needs a standing prescription, the logic runs, is a burden the force cannot carry.
Then the same department launched a program to put a standing hormone prescription in the pocket of any man over 30 who wants one.
You do not have to take my word for the hypocrisy. A federal judge has already put it on the record. Last Wednesday, in the case challenging the transgender ban, Judge Ana Reyes took formal notice of the new testosterone program and ordered the government to explain how the very same class of treatment can be readiness-enhancing for one group of troops and disqualifying for another. It is the question at the center of the case now. Reyes has been skeptical of the medical argument from the start. Last year she pointed out that the military spent roughly $41 million on Viagra in a single year, and called transgender care, by comparison, “not even a rounding error.”
That is the tell. It was never really about the medicine. Testosterone is testosterone. The prescriptions, the monitoring, the lab work, the deployability questions are identical whether the person filling the vial is a trans man or a cisgender colonel chasing his youth. The only thing that changes is who is holding it. When the man taking the hormone fits the picture of a warrior, the treatment becomes “lethality.” When the man taking it is transgender, the identical treatment becomes a fatal risk to readiness. The medicine did not change. The identity did.
I want to be fair, because the argument only works if it is honest. The government has other claims in the case that a court has not yet resolved, about surgeries, about facilities, about unit cohesion, and it insists that cisgender men on testosterone and transgender men are simply “not similarly situated.” Those arguments can be debated on their merits. But the medical one, the claim that hormone therapy itself is too much for the military to manage, is the one Hegseth’s own policy just detonated. You cannot brand testosterone a warrior’s birthright on Monday and a disqualifying liability on Tuesday and expect a judge, or the rest of us, not to notice.
And notice what the whole spectacle is actually selling. A “Department of War” rebrand. A hormone reframed as a weapon. A Secretary who mocks “dudes in dresses” while rolling out mandatory bloodwork so the men can optimize their manhood by the milligram. This is not a medical policy. It is a theory of masculinity, the same tired one, that a man is a number on a lab report and a posture for the camera. It arrives, not coincidentally, as the administration moves to loosen testosterone prescribing across the country, turning manhood into a supplement you can top off.
I have known a lot of strong men. My father crossed an ocean as a laborer to build a life; the strongest men I was raised by never once measured themselves in a vial. Real strength was never a hormone level, and the men who most need to announce their lethality are, with remarkable consistency, the ones least sure of it.
The House declined last week to write the transgender ban into law, so it still rests on nothing sturdier than executive will and a medical excuse. That excuse just ran out of testosterone. A man who needs a screening program and a war-department rebrand to feel like a warrior is telling on himself. The rest of us should say so out loud.
Dimitrios Aletras is a queer, first-generation Greek-American writer and survivor-advocate, with work published in Salon, The Advocate, and the Reading Eagle.
Opinions
Trump tries to scare Americans into not voting
Will he deploy military to the polls in November?
By saying we cannot trust our elections, the sick, old, demented, felon, in the White House is trying to scare Americans into not voting. He, and his faithful fascist appointees, dragged out old documents, already proven to be false, to scare people. He revisited claims that threats, and interference from China and Venezuela, impacted our elections in 2020, all of which have already been shown were not implemented effectively in any way.
Even a few Republicans are saying this is nonsense, reminding people the felon is making claims the only elections we can’t trust, are the ones that he lost. Those Republicans who dare to speak up, and are running for office, have said he is making it harder for them by focusing on this BS, and doing nothing about the future. We must remember the only election he lost, was when he was president during the election. He won when Democrats were in office in 2016 under Obama, and in 2024 when Biden was president.
We can only hope if he moves further with this, which some think he will, the courts will tell him no. There are some who believe he will try to call a ‘national emergency’ and deploy the military to the polls.
The only effective response to his lies is very clear. Democrats and independents must come out in huge numbers in November, and vote for Democrats, up and down the ballot. By doing this they say to the felon, we believe our elections are fair, we trust the process, and we will win big enough so there is no question about the results.
All anyone has to do to hear the felon lie, is to watch his mouth move. Every time he opens it, another lie comes out. He promised the nation, among other things, he would lower gas prices, lower grocery prices, lower rent prices, lower inflation, and even more important to the world, he promised the United States would not go to war. So, what we got instead, from him and his fascist cohorts, and sycophants in Congress, are higher gas prices, higher grocery prices, higher rents, higher inflation, and an expensive, in terms of both money, and human life and suffering, an illegal war with no end in sight. Even his own Secretary of State recently said, “the initial U.S. operation in Iran, Epic Fury, is over. The U.S. was now focused on Project Freedom. This is the name of the operation to get ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz again.” Something that was the case before Trump began this absurd and illegal war.
I applaud those media outlets that didn’t give Trump free air time to lie to the American people, despite the threats he made to have the FCC punish them for it. Kudos to those who had the guts to say we will not be a party to this, and went further, debunking the lies he told in the speech. The felon can continue to threaten those who call him out, but I believe they will win in the end, because the American people will not let him silence all the ‘free’ press. His fellow billionaires might take over some of it, like has been done with CBS, but the truth will come out.
In his continuing efforts to control elections, Trump has ousted members of a bipartisan federal election commission, the Election Assistance Commission, that resisted his efforts to require would-be voters to have extra documentation of their U.S. citizenship before registering. The commission distributes federal grants to states, oversees the testing of voting systems, and maintains the national voter registration form. He did this to get the Congress to pass his ‘Save Act’ which would make it harder for legal voters to vote. But congress once again voted against this after his speech, and there aren’t the votes to pass it. But the felon has shown fairness is not in his quiver when he plays any game. He cheats, and screws, as many people as possible in his business dealings, as long as he can make money. He is now doing the same to the American people.
Again, it is my belief in the end, the American people will win. Trump will be shown to be the loser he is, and our democracy will survive.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Opinions
No Pride without Disability Pride
Anti-ableism must become part of the foundations of queer activism
On Saturday, June 20, Capital Pride hosted the Pride Parade through the heart of Washington, D.C. I broke my foot just a couple days before and couldn’t attend, but beyond my mobility, Pride celebrations have always been difficult as a multiply disabled, queer person. As someone who is autistic with heat and sensory sensitivities, and autoimmune conditions, I also want to be part of Pride celebrations, to feel part of and be in community with others, but it is rare that Pride celebrations — not just Pride marches — are accessible to me.
Back in 2022, I wrote a piece for The Unwritten issuing a call to action: “it’s time to make all queer spaces accessible” after a woman in a wheelchair was denied entry to my favorite — and one of the few remaining — lesbian bars A League Of Her Own. Back in 2022 when I had just moved to Washington, D.C. for graduate school, the bar became my queer safe space where I watched Willow Pill’s win on season 14 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Pill, who openly discussed having cystinosis, a rare genetic disorder that causes the build-up of the amino acid cystine on the show, was the first person who openly discussed how being disabled affected the way she was able to share and experience her queerness. Because of her disability, she admitted that she would have to quit performing drag much sooner than her fellow queens.
Yet four years after I published the piece, little has changed. Many Pride celebrations remain inaccessible to people who use mobility aids, have sensory or heat sensitivities, or require ASL interpretation or audio description to participate. When queer, disabled people ask for these services, ask for events that include everyone, we are met with excuses about expense and convenience, about serving the majority of community members rather than all — and invitations to future events that never end up planned or taking place.
For many queer, disabled people like me, this sends a very clear message about whose presence is valued and prioritized at Pride celebrations and it is part of larger systems of racism, ableism, and transphobia that are solidified when people participating in Pride forget the event’s roots. While many people pointed out that corporations and cities cancelled their participation and events this year, it’s important to recognize that Pride was never about pinkwashing, was never about getting free rainbow fans in the street or catering events to a socio-political status quo. Pride began as a protest against police brutality.
When we remember that history, it becomes clearer than ever that events focused on our visibility must be accessible. In the United States today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have hurt and even killed disabled people during the arrest and detention of immigrants and people of color. Autistic and individuals with cognitive disabilities, especially neurodivergent people of color, are at much higher risk of being hurt or even killed by the police, and disabled people are increasingly at risk for sexual violence in institutions and when living in their communities. Pride began as a fight against state-sanctioned violence.
If people want Pride to remain true to its roots and honor the people who paved the way like Marsha P. Johnson who herself was disabled, we need Pride to be accessible.
While I can recommend that people who are set to host Pride celebrations next year arrange shaded and cool space for people to sit, rest and recover, provide water and food for people to sip and snack on to keep their energy and blood sugar up, offer sensory support including earplugs and headphones, and access services like ASL interpretation, audio description, and captioning for events, this is not enough.
It can’t just be about tacking on accessible services to an already planned event, it has to involve electing disabled queer people to Pride leadership boards, thinking about accessibility from the very beginning when we envision events for the LGBTQ+ community, and incorporating anti-ableist action into queer protesting. Anti-ableism (and anti-racism and xenophobia) has to become part of the very foundations of our queer activism before we can make changes that push for our collective liberation. And queer people’s and disabled people’s liberations are inextricably linked—both are rooted in bodily autonomy, access to healthcare, and right to love and marry as we chose (today, many disabled people are denied access to marriage without losing lifesaving medical care).
And it’s not just disabled queer folxs who benefit from accessible events. Everyone can benefit from events that focus on preserving and protecting our bodies and energy.
How many people use captions when they watch a show, or could use a shaded, cool, sensory-friendly space at Pride amid all the sounds and smells of the parades and festivals? How many people could use access to food, water, and chairs to sit or mobility aids so that they are not hurting the following day? How many more people would show up, would lend their voices to the fight for gender-affirming care, for trans rights, if the protests we organized and participated in were accessible? And how would the visible inclusion of disabled queer and trans people change our collective perceptions and goals of intersectional activism–knowing that not everyone can access gender affirming care because of their disabilities?
Making events accessible isn’t just about including disabled folxs, it’s about crafting spaces that serve and uplift everybody and all bodies in our fight for liberation. For disabled people who have long been infantalized and desexualized (while at the same time being fetishized and facing increased sexual violence), making Pride accessible is about affirming that disabled people are whole people who also have rich, diverse sexualities and gender expressions.
And let’s be clear, it’s not up to disabled queer folx to do this work for the community. For too long, disabled people are asked to educate their peers and superiors on accommodations and accessibility services, on what anti-ableist action looks like. It’s the responsibility of a community that itself has long been marginalized to recognize the ways in which ableism is interwoven into the very power systems that disenfranchise and deny the rights of queer and trans people and educate themselves. Along with creating pathways to leadership uplifting queer disabled folxs and planning events that are accessible by design, this is about queer and trans people educating themselves in and committing to anti-abelist action.
If Pride is truly about protesting state-sanctioned violence against us, against all marginalized communities, it cannot involve events that are inaccessible, events that routinely exclude a part of the community. There’s a reason that Disability Pride Month is scheduled the month after Pride month in the U.S. — it should be a continuation of protests fighting for the liberation of all bodies, rather than some.
Emma Cieslik is a D.C.-based museum worker and public historian.
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