It's the Dehumanization, Bitches

Amber Heard, Misogyny, and the End of Another American Myth

content warning: this essay discusses domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual violence, and dehumanization

Before we begin, a few words on context:

I’ve written about my experiences as both a child sexual abuse survivor and a person who was subjected to domestic violence on numerous occasions. I’ve told my story out loud, at a #MeToo rally, no less, in front of television cameras. My book was vetted by lawyers, as well as the evidence I had to back up what I was writing about, before publication, due recent threats of defamation suits against women who had, to that point, spoken out about abuse.

As well, as I wrote about here quite recently, I have the somewhat unusual experience of having taken a man who abused me, as a child, to court. 

And so, I woke up this morning, a scant twelve hours or so after the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp verdict came down, wondering if I now might get sued as a part of a trajectory of that abuse and the fact that I have given voice to it.

I’m not alone in this. 

A friend who recently divorced a malignant narcissist texted me last night, saying that her ex had already messaged her, threatening her with a defamation suit if she ever again discussed his abuse. 

Another friend DM’d me to tell me about her mother, who was beaten by a partner, and about her friends who are struggling with custody and divorce proceedings against abusive husbands, who are now terrified of what’s to come for them in court. 

And as for me, I was personally threatened with a defamation suit just a few months ago by text message for speaking out (I’ll just leave it at that).

I know intimately what it takes to challenge an abuser in court, and to write about one’s own abuse in an effort to raise awareness and protect others. 

I know what it’s like to live with threats against you for doing so.

I also was a trial lawyer for fifteen years, including civil cases filed on behalf of women who had been assaulted and abused. I have a lifelong history of activism on behalf of women and other marginalized folks.

And so with that lens: off we go.

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I followed the case captioned Depp v. Heard with some interest.

I followed it both as a lawyer and as someone deeply invested for decades in ending violence against women. 

I paid particular attention to the documentary evidence– the photographs, and there were many, of the bruises on her face. The photograph of the clump of hair torn from her head, lying there on the carpet. The pictures of her split lip. The text messages where her husband, by his own admission and confirmation, said he wanted to drown her, burn her body, and then rape her corpse. 

And then there was the confirming testimony, presented by her makeup artist, of the bruises and swelling that took layers of makeup to cover, more than once, to make her presentable to media and hide the abuse.

Surely, I thought, this is enough to prove the truth of what she wrote in that op-ed, truth being an absolute defense to defamation. Surely, I thought, she will be believed.

What I hadn’t remembered, of course, let alone in the age of “alternative facts,” is that it is possible to see all the evidence of abuse, hear the testimony of her being hit and dragged by her hair and raped with a liquor bottle by her husband, hear her plead to escape this man even now so that she can just raise her child and be left alone . . . and simply be a juror, or a human, who does not care.

This case, I realized late last night, was not about whether Amber Heard was to be believed, in the storied slogan of “believe women.” 

What this uniquely American trial was about (because let’s not forget these same charges were dismissed by a judge in the U.K.), both according to social media and the unsequestered jury who doubtless saw the frenzy of bots and tabloids weaponized against her in an obvious, concerted campaign, was that all that evidence can in fact be true and accurate, and it won’t matter.

It can all be true, and her abuser can still be seen as the persecuted one.

It can all be true, and she can still lose everything.

It can all be true, and the victim will still be further victimized.

Why? Well, Amber Heard had the gall to assume that she could tell the story of her husband’s vicious and abhorrent abuse, and be imperfect, and still be seen as worthy of dignity and humanity.

This case yet again belies the American mythology that we believe that all people are created equal.

As someone said to me last night on Twitter with not a hint of irony: the only perfect victim is a dead one.

Amber Heard is tall, blonde, white and conventionally beautiful according to standard patriarchal norms. She made a name for herself playing the blonde bombshell on screen. Her fame has revolved around the usual Hollywood tropes of being pretty, thin and of the right skin shade to fit exactly into traditional ideals.

So what happens when someone who conforms in those ways, who meets all the arbitrary standards our society ascribes for privilege to apply, has the nerve to speak out about being abused by a far more powerful, far wealthier, far older man with a multi-billion dollar portfolio of films, has the nerve to publicly appear for a temporary restraining order against that man with a bruise on her face?

Despite all that so-called privilege and all that conformity, she has to be put in her place.

We know now that the Daily Wire, that bastion of white supremacist and men’s rights ideology founded by Ben Shapiro, spent thousands of dollars to run ads on Facebook and Instagram bashing Amber Heard, to the tune of millions of impressions across those platforms. Candace Owens, the former advisor to President Trump, authored sponsored posts referring to Heard’s claims as “character assassination” and “toxic femininity.” Another conservative figure amplified by the Daily Wire referred to Heard as “a complete lunatic”, and supported Depp in taking “control of his household,” asking “whatever happened to strong men?”

This brew became a frenzy online through anonymous bot accounts, documented by Bot Sentinel during the U.K. trial, that absolutely torched Heard’s personal and professional reputation. After years of documented, evidence-backed emotional and physical abuse by her husband, social media was weaponized to destroy her personally and professionally in every way, and then finally, her husband weaponized the American judicial system to destroy her financially, for life.

If this is what happens to a white blonde woman with Hollywood clout, fame and a modicum of public power, just imagine what it means for marginalized women without a public platform who try to speak out or seek justice. 

And that is perhaps why the Daily Wire invested so much money in destroying Amber Heard.

For if you can silence even the arguably conforming, white, compliant and privileged women among us from speaking their abuse, if you can make a woman like Amber Heard pay for the crime of saying what he did with her reputation and her career and her entire life, then you can silence anyone.

We can ruin HER, they are telling us. Just imagine how bad it will be for YOU.

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At twenty, shortly after I filed suit against the man who molested me, I had a conversation with someone in my own family— the last substantive conversation we would have for thirty-one years and counting.

She said to me in that conversation: “I know everyone involved in this situation. I know exactly what happened here. You tell me how that was abuse.”

There is a lot more I could say about that– about how we got to that conversation and what came before it, and since.

But instead I’ll just make this point.

It is quite the thing to have someone know the facts of what was done to you and have it not matter anyway.

It is quite the thing to have someone see it all, in stark and graphic detail, know the truth of it, the violence of it, and yet deny that it harmed you, or worse yet, claim that you deserved it.

It is the sort of thing that never really leaves you.

Why?

Because it is fundamentally and at its core a denial of your humanity.

Dehumanization is a strategy used in fascist regimes, against women and any other marginalized group. As the author Jason Stanley has written in his book “How Fascism Works,” 

[i]f the demagogue is the father of the nation, then any threat to patriarchal manhood and the traditional family undermines the fascist vision of strength.

Indeed, the transformation of one’s view of another human or group toward “less than human” is a precursor to the ability to treat that person or group with extreme violence and cruelty, while absolving oneself of responsibility for harm.

Amber Heard was referred to routinely during the trial using a hashtag that compared her to feces, with someone changing her name on her IMDB profile to that name in an act of public humiliation. After she left him, Johnny Depp changed a tattoo on his hand that referred to Heard to read “scum.” Throughout the trial, social media accounts amplified by the far right referred to Heard as a “psychopath,” “trash,” “manipulative,” a “money hungry whore,” and far, far worse.

Each of these, it should go without saying, constitutes dehumanization.

And the context of the treatment of Amber Heard, the reason why it captured so much attention from the far right, should not to be ignored.  

We are weeks away from the right to abortion being overturned in this country.

We are in an epidemic of mass shootings where one of the two most common through-lines– the first being access to assault rifles– is the shooter having a history of domestic violence.

Those who sought to overthrow democracy on January 6th include groups linked to violent misogyny, as those who study far-right extremism have documented.

I’ll say it again: the transformation of one’s view of another human or group toward “less than human” is a precursor to the ability to treat that person or group with extreme violence and cruelty.

Yesterday, a prominent white male progressive commentator bemoaned the nation’s attention to the Heard trial, tweeting “Ok now that the depp heard trial is over can we go back to saving democracy and passing common sense gun reform?!?”

The abject failure of that tweet is the refusal to recognize that this is all connected, and that the Heard trial has now written the far right playbook on how to handle women (and anyone else) who try to claim some semblance of rights.

Dehumanize us, and you can justify anything.

This, too, is a part of the story of the end of America. This, too, tells us where we are headed.

You can do anything you want, anything at all, to people who you view as less than human, as long as you have the power to do it.

In the middle of the night last night, I considered all of this through the lens of my own life, and what it meant to have all the evidence of my own abuse on display in a courtroom and in front of my own family, and to still have a member of my own family claim that it didn’t matter.

I thought through the testimony of my own trial, how I was called a “slut” and “crazy” and “a liar,” despite the fact that the first time the man who molested me hugged me with an erection I was twelve years old.

There is a strange sort of clarity in realizing that, to someone else, or to a nation, you aren’t perceived as human, and that you never will be.

It creates a starkness when compared to your own effort.

We can shout all we want that we are worthy of being treated with the tiniest modicum of dignity and respect. We can voice our demands to be treated as human. We can show up in front of the Supreme Court and demand that our rights be acknowledged. We can protest.

Meanwhile, we will continue to be beaten and raped in our own homes. Meanwhile, even if we document it, we will be denied justice. Meanwhile, we will be denied dominion over organs in our own bodies. Meanwhile, we will be told that we don’t deserve anything better than this.

Meanwhile, on social media, in the streets and in our own living rooms, we will be laughed at, called hysterical, shrill, liars, whores, and far worse, for claiming that we are human beings who deserve to be treated as such.

Which brings me to this point:

Why should we bother trying to convince this nation to see us, to convince the institutions that were built on violence toward every marginalized person to give us justice, when our very survival in the day to day is now at stake? 

It seems crystal clear to me now that our efforts must to be directed toward our own survival, and particularly toward the shared survival of the most vulnerable and marginalized among us— those who are Black, brown and indigenous, trans women, poor women, non-binary folks— toward saving the lives of all those who are immediately, constantly targeted for violence. We can do this. In some sense, we always have.

When you are dehumanized to the point that violence against you is considered justified and deserved, the only thing you’ve got left is folks in the same boat.  

And screaming into the wind expecting those who see us as garbage, as “turds,” as less than human, to change their minds is not just pointless– it’s deadly.

Yesterday, on Twitter, a men’s rights activist retweeted something I wrote about Amber Heard’s abuse with the comment: “You act like you were there!”

Welp.

We were there. We have all been there. We all are there.

We know the score now. It cannot be denied.

We, all we who are deemed less than human— we are all we’ve got.