I would rather have avoided seeing anything about the Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp case. I have muted key words across multiple platforms, turned away from reading the tidal wave of media reports, but avoiding it has become near impossible.
Whilst it could be easy to dismiss the case as another salacious spectacle in the celebrity media behemoth, there is far more to it than that.
The case is a perfect storm, a nexus of a much loved actor with legions of admirers accused of domestic violence and sexual abuse by an imperfect victim. Fans of the actor have been chomping at the bit to tear his former wife to pieces, mulling over the daily televised footage for hours and cutting segments of it into neat little chunks on TikTok to prove what an awful person she is. It’s also come out that Ben Shapiro’s right wing media outlet The Daily Wire has spent extortionate amounts of money to fan those flames, placing misleading articles and videos on Instagram and Facebook biased against Heard that mount to an all out attack campaign as a Trojan horse to get the fanbase on board with their political agenda.
When a huge case like this comes about, victims of sexual violence steel themselves for what they know is coming; eye rolls, distant Facebook friends posting about how they find it all very amusing, chat amongst work colleagues that lacks empathy and understanding, out-and-out bile against those who accuse others, misattributed anecdotal statistics about how many accusations are false. It’s emotionally draining, painful to absorb and adds to a victim’s existing trauma.
Sexual violence is endemic in our society. Talk to any group of your friends and the chances are you will find out quickly how common it is. Rape Crisis figures from 2021 show the scale of the issue. 1 in 5 women, 1 in 6 children and 1 in 20 men have experienced sexual violence at some point in their lives. For LGBTQ+ people, it’s 1 in 10. Yet on average only 1 in 100 are ever reported to police. In the UK alone in 2021, 1.3% of those reported result in a perpetrator being charged. On average, less than 1,500 people are convicted.
As a culture, we have an idea of what sexual violence is and who the victim is. It’s a woman going down a dark alley on her way home who is jumped by a random ne’er do well. Yet when we look at the statistics, time and again we see that this perfect scenario is not the case; 2018 research from Glasgow University found 90% of victims know their abuser, with 44% reported being a victim of someone they know, 24% who were assaulted by a family member and 23% who were assaulted by a partner or ex-partner. This myth of the “perfect” sexual assault is so ingrained and powerful in our culture that a victim themselves may not think what happened to them was sexual violence at all, coming to the realisation later in life when they feel nothing can be done about it.
The way the Heard/Depp case has been fought, reported as a piece of entertainment and absorbed into our culture neatly distills why so few victims of sexual violence come forward: as a culture, we would rather diminish the hurt of the victim, humiliate them and absolve the perpetrator than face the ugly truth that there are people out there who abuse others because they know they can get away with it, especially when the accused is a beloved public figure. The toxicity of contemporary Stan culture, the publicity and the parasocial relationships the public form with noted people that they have no personal relationship with has made this particular case even more ugly.
If we look at the defence team’s attacks on Heard in court, these follow a script used by defence teams in other high profile Me Too cases such as Harvey Weinstein’s. The victim is blamed, their mental health and personal conduct is brought into the matter as a weapon to beat them with, their behaviour is dissected in meticulous detail as a gotcha to somehow prove there is no possibility that they are a victim, they are torn to bits piece by piece and made out to be the true villain. It becomes them who is on trial rather than the accused. As a society, we want a perfect victim, an innocent, someone who has never dressed a certain way, acted in a manner we deem unacceptable or any other of the myriad of behaviours that are a fairly normal part of human behaviour.
All this exhibited on such a public platform reaffirms a belief that is all too common in society, that people who come forward about the abuse they’ve experienced are liars hellbent on ruining someone’s life and reputation. Statistics from the FBI state that around 8% of reported sexual violence cases are “unfounded”, a statistic often cited by those who want to discredit victims as proof of how often victims lie. Yet closer examination of that statistic shows that this is because evidence of the assault could not be substantiated, not that it didn’t happen at all.
This, more often than not, is because proof of sexual violence is almost impossible to gather. DNA can be dismissed as evidence, especially in cases where the assailant knows the victim; in cases of rape, the victim must be examined almost immediately by a trained medical professional where the victim’s body must not be “disturbed” in any way prior to that examination, making cases of historic crimes even more problematic to investigate. To add insult to injury, police investigations rarely go further than the initial report by and interview of the victim and are mired in stereotypes and patriarchal myths of what “real” sexual violence is. The humiliation, fear of reprisal, fear of being disbelieved and high profile horror stories of how victims are treated by an uncaring system means that victims are too scared to come forward. An in-depth report from Sky News in 2020 argues that rape has become a “perfect crime” due to the process of reporting and investigation. When an act that is an abuse of power boils down to a case of “he said/she said”, it’s no wonder why.
Although the Heard/Depp case feels removed from a normal everyday person’s life, the venom and spite towards the accuser is not unique. Boil that down to a smaller group of non-celebrities and those attitudes prevail, with victims experiencing social ostracisation and attacks on their character rather than care and support to move on.
Truth be told, as a culture we are more willing to believe the accused rather than the accuser. By believing the accuser, we have to look at our own behaviours, examine the way we may have acted and face uncomfortable truths about our past behaviour that may make us concerned about what we’re capable of.
Speaking from personal experience as someone who has experienced sexual violence at the hands of people I knew and trusted, the onslaught and tone of the coverage has been extremely difficult to witness and absorb. I have mulled over the events in my head in minute detail, questioned my responses, thought about what I could’ve done differently to prevent what happened to me, and I know I’m not alone in that way of thinking. It shouldn’t be this way. When the case is over and the public moves on, those feelings won’t go away as if by magic — they stay with you, eat away at you and leave you feeling lost and utterly alone.
This has been a difficult piece to write but I felt compelled to do so. As victims, we’re tired of having to navigate a world that doesn’t care about what happened to us and is happy to let offenders carry on with their lives as if nothing happened. We have a responsibility as a society to do better in how we talk about sexual violence and put victim support at the heart of the discourse rather than seek to diminish their suffering. We can do better, the question is whether we choose to or not.