nov 30, 2017 - TEXAS MONTHLY Amber Heard, Johnny Depp, and the Changing Conversations Around Abuse

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Amber Heard, Johnny Depp, and the Changing Conversations Around Abuse

Amber Heard alleged that Johnny Depp abused her a year before #MeToo. Has the timing allowed him to evade consequences?

By Dan Solomon

In May 2016, Austin native Amber Heard filed for divorce from Johnny Depp after a year of marriage. The split wasn’t an easy one—in addition to filing for divorce, the Justice League star also filed for a restraining order against her husband.

In court documents, Heard alleged that Depp had been abusive toward her during the course of their four-year relationship. She left the Los Angeles courthouse where she filed for divorce with a bruise under her right eye. In the paperwork for the restraining order, the actress described an incident of domestic violence that took place the night before. It wasn’t, according to her filing, the first time something like that had happened.

Depp’s lawyers denied the charges, and the public reaction to Heard’s allegations was muted. Despite the accusations, the photographs of Heard with a black eye, and text messages obtained by ET in 2016 in which Heard privately expressed her fears years earlier, Depp suffered few professional consequences.

But that was 2016. In 2017, famous men who are implicated as predatory toward women have faced swift consequences. Over the past two months, the list of men accused of inappropriate behavior towards women has grown staggeringly long: Harvey Weinstein, Russell Simmons, Louis C.K., Brett Ratner, James Toback, Jeffrey Tambor, Al Franken, John Lasseter, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, and on. (Others, such as Kevin Spacey and George Takei have faced allegations that they sexually assaulted men.) Some sort of action has been taken against all of the men listed—they lost the companies they helped build, their TV deals, or now face a Senate ethics investigation.

In most of the stories that have been told as part of the #MeToo movement, the men face allegations of sexual assault, sexual harassment, or both. Heard accused her ex-husband of domestic violence, not sexual assault. But regardless of the specific nature of the claims, a question lingers: Would Johnny Depp have faced so few consequences if Heard had made her accusations a year later, in the midst of a national campaign rooted in the idea that women should be believed when they report being victimized by powerful men?

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