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
Trump’s ‘American people derangement syndrome’
Voters must stop him before he destroys democracy
Trump, in a deranged, evil, post on X, accused Rob Reiner of suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” I guess that would apply to everyone who thinks Trump is an evil, dangerous, asshole who is trying to destroy our society as we know it. With that definition, I would surmise the felon himself suffers from “American people derangement syndrome,” because clearly, he thinks we are all evil, dumb, assholes, and a danger to him, and the fascists surrounding him.
His speech to the nation was called bellicose, by the New York Times. I would call it unhinged and vile. It was a plea to the populace, containing a pack of lies, to continue to believe his lies, and distortions. We all know the felon is full of shit when telling us prices have come down. We go shopping every week to feed ourselves and our families, even if he doesn’t. We have to pay heating and rent bills each month. We know since he became president nearly a year ago, all those costs have gone up. Talk to any honest person at a chamber of commerce in your area, and they will tell you small businesses are suffering. They will tell you the felon’s tariffs are hurting everyone. We know he is screwing the poor and middle class; trying to end SNAP benefits, and refusing to help with healthcare costs. All the while giving tax breaks to corporations, and the rich. People are not dumb Mr. Felon, and your lies are no longer resonating.
The evil, deranged, felon in the White House lives in a world where he can do favors for his friends in return for getting them to donate hundreds of millions for his follies. He is a grifter who hosts dinners for rich people to make money for his crypto business. He is said to have made more than $3 billon since his election. This while farmers are going broke, and losing their farms, because his tariffs screwed them. He is undermining vaccines and caused a measles epidemic in the United States. This a disease eradicated before he came into office. He ended grants to research cures for HIV/AIDS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and an assortment of childhood diseases. He stopped research grants for mRNA vaccines. When we have the next pandemic, and it will come, that will result in millions of deaths, all on his head.
He is embarrassing the United States around the world. They watch him give unhinged speeches, raise and lower tariffs irrationally, screw our allies, and now trying to interfere in their elections. He is bombing fishing boats, claiming they are carrying drugs, with no proof at all. Then he releases from prison the man who brought more cocaine into the country than anyone else ever did. All this is what the lying, cheating, grifting, evil, heartless, felon in the White House, is doing to you, the good people of the United States, and the world. He sounds more unhinged every day while trying to blame everything on former President Biden and Democrats, who haven’t controlled the levers of government in nearly a year.
I know the results of the 2025 elections must scare him. They show him the majority no longer accept his BS. We will go into 2026, and the midterm elections, with our eyes wide open. He wants to be King and we don’t want kings in our country. He has what his chief of staff calls, “an alcoholic’s personality” “because he believes there’s nothing he can’t do.” She is right about that, but we will call him on it in the next election. We will say clearly, with our voices, and our votes, “no more, enough is enough.” We are taking back the country and will throw out anyone in office who still supports him.
We try and forgive those who voted for him, as long as they now recognize he lied to them, and is screwing them. Young people must understand they will suffer their whole lives because he is a climate denier. Latino and Hispanic voters, who believed he was going to support them, now see he wants to deport them. Farmers who once thought he supported them, until he screwed them. We must now all join together, and show the evil SOB in the White House, who is building his grand ballroom, taking planes, and other gifts, and pardoning the guilty; his time is coming to an end. Again, we will go into the voting booth, eyes wide open, and vote to stop him before he completely destroys our lives, our families, our democracy, and brings fascism to our country.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
Opinions
Using movement to boost your mental health during holidays
Sometimes the goal is simply steadiness
We’re told this is the season of Ho Ho Ho. Joy. Family. Home.
But let’s be honest. The holidays are stressful for almost everyone. Even in the best situations, this time of year comes with pressure. Expectations. Family dynamics. Financial stress. Comparison. The emotional labor of trying to make everything feel warm and magical while quietly holding a lot inside.
For some people, home is comfort. For others, it’s complicated. A place where old roles come back fast. Where you’re expected to be a version of yourself that no longer fits. Where love exists, but understanding feels incomplete.
And for many of us in the LGBTQ community, that stress can carry extra weight. Sitting at tables where parts of who you are feel debated instead of celebrated. Navigating politics and beliefs that don’t feel abstract, but personal. Deciding when to speak up, when to stay quiet, and when to just go refill your drink. Grief changes how the holidays land.
For me, the holidays have often been quiet. I’m deeply grateful for the family I still have and the support they’ve given me, and I also need to be real. I’ve been jealous. Jealous AF. Jealous that I can’t go home and hug my mother. Jealous that my dad isn’t there. Jealous when I see the cozy movie version of the holidays play out in other people’s lives. Not because they don’t deserve it, but because I wish I had it too.
Long before fitness became my career, the gym was my sanctuary. Without movement, these seasons would have been much harder. My body changed as a byproduct, sure, but what movement gave me first was something more important. Stability. A place to put grief. A way to move stress out of my body when words weren’t enough. Stress doesn’t just live in the mind.
We like to think stress is something we can talk through or think our way out of. But stress and anxiety live in the body. Chronic stress has been shown to disrupt sleep, weaken the immune system, and show up physically as tension, fatigue, and pain. When it’s left unaddressed, it doesn’t just affect how we feel emotionally. It affects how we function.
Most people don’t come into fitness because they’re thriving. After 20 years of coaching, almost everyone I’ve met started with physical goals. Lose weight. Build muscle. Look different. What they don’t always see is how stress, burnout, emotional eating, and putting everyone else first got them there. Most people aren’t failing. They’re exhausted.
When we talk about mental health, we think about therapy, medication, boundaries, vacations, or staying away from that one family member who always finds a way to press your buttons. All of those things matter. They save lives. But movement is rarely treated as part of the mental health plan, even though every single person who moves consistently feels better mentally. Not perfect. Just better. As my business partner Chase likes to say, sexy is the side effect. This isn’t just empathy. It’s a strategy.
The holidays don’t sneak up on us. We know which dinners will be hard. We know which brunches will test our patience. We know which days we’ll feel alone. So instead of raw-dogging our way through it, we can prep for it.
First, plan your movement the same way you plan the hard stuff. If you know a dinner is going to be stressful, don’t show up already hot. Schedule your workout that day, the day before, or in the days leading up so your nervous system is already in a better place. You’re not trying to win the day. You’re trying to lower the starting line.
Second, give yourself time limits. You don’t have to do the full four hours. There’s a lot of space between not showing up at all and staying until you’re emotionally fried. Do an hour. Schedule a fake work meeting if you have to. Show up in a way that lets you stay in character and protect your peace. That still counts.
Third, move how you can move. If you’re traveling, alone, out of routine, or your gym is closed, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Twenty minutes works. A walk works. A jog works. A short breathing or meditation session works. Even a quick bodyweight circuit in your childhood bedroom works. And if you need ideas, we share our monthly programming and workouts on the SWEAT DC Instagram so anyone can follow along and move, wherever they are.
Fitness doesn’t have to look good to be effective. It just has to be intentional. Especially this time of year.
As the year comes to a close, my hope isn’t that this season suddenly feels easy. It’s that you feel supported. That you remember movement isn’t about punishment or perfection. It’s about care.
Sometimes the goal isn’t happiness. Sometimes the goal is steadiness. And honestly, some years, that’s a win. We can do that. And we don’t have to do it alone.
Gerard Burley, also known as Coach G, is founder and CEO of Sweat DC.
Commentary
Protecting the trans community is not optional for elected allies and candidates
One of oldest political tactics is blaming vulnerable group for societal woes
Being an ally to the trans community is not a conditional position for me, nor should it be for any candidate. My allyship doesn’t hinge on polling, focus groups, or whether courage feels politically convenient. At a time when trans people, especially trans youth of color, are under coordinated attack, elected officials and candidates must do more than offer quiet support. We must take a public and solid stand.
History shows us how these moments begin. One of the oldest political tactics is to single out the most vulnerable and blame them for society’s anxieties — not because they are responsible, but because they are easier to blame than those with power and protection. In Nazi Germany, Jewish people were primarily targeted, but they were not the only demographic who suffered elimination. LGBTQ people, disabled people, Romani communities, political dissidents, and others were also rounded up, imprisoned, and killed. Among the earliest acts of fascistic repression was the destruction of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, a pioneering center for gender-affirming care and LGBTQ research. These books and medical records were among the first to be confiscated and burned. It is not a coincidence that these same communities are now the first to suffer under this regime, they are our canaries in the coal mine signaling what’s to come.
Congress, emboldened by the rhetoric of the Donald Trump campaign, recently passed HR 3492 to criminalize healthcare workers who provide gender-affirming healthcare with fines and imprisonment. This bill, sponsored by celebrity politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, puts politics and headlines over people and health outcomes. Healthcare that a number of cis-gendered people also benefit from byway of hair regeneration and surgery, male and female breast augmentation, hormone replacement therapy etc. Even when these bills targeting this care do not pass, they do real damage. They create fear among patients, legal uncertainty for providers, and instability for clinics that serve the most marginalized people in our communities.
Here in D.C., organizations like Planned Parenthood and Whitman-Walker Health are lifelines for many communities. They provide gender-affirming care alongside primary care, mental health services, HIV treatment, and preventative medicine. When healthcare is politicized or criminalized, people don’t wait for court rulings — they delay care, ration medication, or disappear from the system entirely.
As a pharmacist, I know exactly what that means. These are life-saving medications. Continuity of care matters. Criminalizing and politicizing healthcare does not protect children or families — it puts lives at risk.
Instead of centering these realities, political discourse has been deliberately diverted toward a manufactured panic about trans women in sports. Let me be clear: trans women deserve to be protected and allowed to compete just like anyone else. Athletics have always included people with different bodies, strengths, and abilities. Girls and women will always encounter competitors who are stronger or faster — that is not a gender or sports crisis, it is the nature of competition.
Sports are meant to teach fairness, mutual respect, and the shared spirit of competition — not suspicion or exclusion. We should not police young people’s bodies, and we should reject attempts to single out trans youth as a political distraction. Families and doctors should be the authority on sex and gender identity.
This narrative has been cynically amplified by the right, but too often Democrats have allowed it to take hold rather than forcefully rejecting it. It is imperative to pay attention to what is happening — and to push back against every attempt to dehumanize anyone for political gain.
Trans people have always been part of our communities and our democracy. Protecting the most vulnerable is not radical — it is the foundation of a just society. My work is grounded in that commitment, and I will not waver from it. I’m proud to have hired trans political team Down Ballot to lead my campaign for DC Council At Large. We need more ally leaders of all stages to stand up for the LGBTQ+ community. We must let elected detractors know that when they come for them, then they come for all of us. We cannot allow Fox News and social media trolls to create a narrative that scares us away from protecting marginalized populations. We must stand up and do what’s right.
Anything less is not leadership.
Rep. Oye Owolewa is running for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council.
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Reasons to be optimistic about 2026
Long-awaited ‘Pillion’ surpasses the sexy buzz
Protecting the trans community is not optional for elected allies and candidates
Trump’s ‘American people derangement syndrome’
