The Media Circus of ‘Depp v Heard’ and the Lasting Implications on the Public Perception of Allegations of Domestic Abuse

Keira Pearce

In 2022, a trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard took place after Depp accused his ex-wife of defamation in her article published in The Washington Post on the basis that her abuse allegations caused damage to his reputation and thus filed a lawsuit for $50 million in damages. Retrospectively, this trial can act as a warning against the dangers of excessive media coverage throughout court cases, particularly those surrounding topics as serious and private as intimate partner violence.

This trial was unique in the way it interacted with the media, due to the court making the decision to allow the trial to be livestreamed. Throughout the trial, Depp seemed to be winning in the court of public opinion; The TikTok tag#JusticeforJohnnyDepp gained over 10 billion views – more than the tags #AmberHeard (8.4 billion) and #JusticeforAmberHeard (37.2 million). Social media was largely supportive of Johnny Depp, with Amber Heard receiving large amounts of misogynistic rhetoric – her May 4^th testimony was watched by 587,285 people on the Law & Crime livestream, and created a viral TikTok sound in which her testimony relating to the sexual and physical abuse she endured was trivialized and mocked.

The ‘media circus’ aspect of the trial was almost amplified by the fact that the jury were not sequestered for the trial. The Depp vs. Heard jurors were exposed to the widespread media coverage and ongoing debate around the trial, while sitting on the jury and entering deliberations around their verdict. Despite being asked not to consume media relating to the trial throughout its duration, the media coverage was undeniably hard to avoid, with family and divorce attorney Sandra Radna stating that ‘Juries are only supposed to evaluate the evidence presented in court, but the sheer amount of anti-Heard and pro-Depp content online was so significant that it’s unlikely jurors weren’t exposed to it’. She also claimed that ‘the social media storm could have been avoided if cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom; because this was televised, content creators were able to cut snippets of the trials and turn them into memes, which were then viewed by billions’.

One must question if this theoretically unrestricted access to content surrounding the trial could have influenced the jury’s final decision, which considered that Heard’s references to sexual violence and domestic abuse were false and defamed Depp. This was despite the evidence that Depp abused Heard, which included witness testimony, photographs, text messages and even a prior UK-based libel trial in which Depp brought action against The Sun newspaper for calling him a ‘wife beater’, which he lost after Mr. Justice Nicol ruled that Depp was violent to Heard, “causing her to suffer significant injury and on occasion leading to her fearing for her life”. It could be suggested that the differences in publicity granted to the UK trial and the US trial, and the starkly different verdicts reached are suggestive that Johnny Depp only won the U.S. trial, which largely explored the same evidence presented in the UK trial, due to the overwhelming support for him in the media, and the pressure the jury may have felt to support him.

Perhaps Depp v Heard was the trial run for the publicization of high-profile court cases. No other case in recent history, bar the O.J. Simpson case in the 1990s, seems to have captivated public interest quite as much. But take away the public personalities of the two parties involved, and you are left with a deeply nuanced and complex relationship riddled with some form of abuse and coercive control. Should the media have the right to act as judge, jury and executioner in a case this intimate and upsetting?  Should the media have a right to involve itself in court cases at all? Is jury sequestration the best answer to these issues?

However, the main takeaway from this case, and the main implication still being felt today, over three years later, is how it undermined the severity of domestic violence. Consider that according to the Office for National Statistics, two women a week are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales, and then also consider how the media set a precedent throughout the case for domestic abuse to be seen as a ‘joke’ or as a form of entertainment and dismissed the deeply traumatic experience it can be.

Domestic abuse both during the relationship and post-separation is a serious issue impacting people of any gender, class, ethnicity or age, and should not be the subject of a livestreamed media circus of counterclaims and accusations, and the resulting tsunami of social media posts, tweets and viewpoints.

In the aftermath of Depp’s ‘win’ in this case, the public perception of women accusing men of intimate partner violence shifted to view these women as, if not completely lying, then exaggerating to some extent. It also gave rise to a public belief in ‘mutual abuse’, which Sarah Davidge, the head of research and evaluation at Women’s Aid, described as leading to gender bias in an article in The New Statesman, as it “needs to be understood in the context of gender inequality. Last year the domestic violence charity conducted joint research with the University of Bristol on how gendered narratives shape survivors’ experiences of domestic abuse and attempts to seek justice. It found that sexist stereotyping leads women to frequently be described as “hysterical” or “over-emotional”, which means that they are less likely to be believed when they come forward with abuse claims and are less likely to receive support.”

Furthermore, the verdict of the court case may deter survivors from seeking legal action against their abusers as they are unlikely to win and may fear how their abuser could manipulate the situation to appear innocent. More specifically, other women who wish to share their experiences about domestic abuse may be deterred by the fear of being sued by former partners.

For those affected by the issues presented in this article: https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/domestic-and-sexual-abuse-helpline