Over the past few weeks, I’ve absentmindedly and dragged my feet over coverage of actor Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife, actress and model Amber Heard. I said to myself: “Come on, you have to at least know what’s going on”; something like a duty to follow the legal cases that are directly in the wake of the #MeToo movement, to better understand where we are, almost five years later.
But all the same, I said to myself, who cares about those two; these multi-millionaire stars who epitomize everything I strive to criticize here week after week — and the crass legal circus, and the PR one-upmanship, all that. Criticism is heard. Still, when misogyny is so vulgar, uninhibited, violent, we want to say that it forces solidarity.
All of this became very tangible when watching the verdict. I noted that the alerts I received on my phone only went one way (okay, The duty sent a second, after). She defamed, the jury said, but we were careful not to write in the headline that he too, and that in fact the story was in the difference in the amounts awarded to them.
It’s also been careful not to name what it means that a court finds it can be defamatory to portray yourself to the world as a survivor of domestic violence, even without naming anyone. That someone could very well raise their finger and decide to take revenge by legal means, only because they have the desire and the means. If the subtext escaped the cultural discourse, the message was clear for those who, one day, thought of denouncing something.
Throughout this painful process, one could clearly see, at a distance from the blaze, that the smoke drew in the atmosphere forms too clear to be confused. Finally, you don’t have to be the shrewdest of analysts to see that there is something akin to violence when a guy writes in a text message that he would like to “fuck [le] burnt corpse” of his wife. And despite everything, they are there to say: well, it is not so clear what the dynamic between these two was made of, what a mystery! The jury had quite a riddle before their eyes. You know, she hit him too, don’t be fooled by her angelic air, men can be victims too, she’s crazy, maybe a sociopath.
One after another, one hundred percent. They’ve spouted them all, the stereotypes about victims of domestic violence that serve to mask relationships of control and domination — when it’s not outright used as a legal tactic, which was clearly the case here. Those myths and stereotypes that have been detailed in scholarly literature for ages: the fabrication of symmetry in female violence, madness and revenge, the inconsistency of the detailed narrative of violence as so-called proof of a lie, the refusal to even consider the fact that the violent relationship often includes an escalation, gestures of self-defense, even revolt, and that this in no way erases the relationship of domination.
None of this is new and yet we scratch our heads thinking that she must have deserved it. Beyond the horde of propagandist trolls who are unleashed on behalf of Depp, we never stop reading and hearing, on social networks, in the media, supposedly posed arguments that try to cut the pear in half. They look at the elephant of patriarchal violence and they say to us in all seriousness: “Perhaps it is really about ten thousand mice hidden under a big gray sheet! » Is this a joke?
If the #MeToo movement has shaken the columns of the temple for a time, the institutions finally come out of it intact, and those who have been chomping at the bit in the last five years feel entitled to start speaking loudly again: as it It’s good to be able to be misogynistic in broad daylight, it was beginning to be burdensome to have to be it only between us, behind closed doors. It’s beautiful, all this solidarity. Power regains its rights. We know some of them here too, but we won’t name them: they have understood that the judicial system is their eternal accomplice and that we, unlike them, do not always have the money to defend ourselves.
In the New York Times Not long ago, this trial was referred to as the death of the #MeToo movement. The “backlash” would be complete, total—perhaps. Because beyond the verdict, scabrous details exposed at the trial; beyond the application of the criteria of defamation to the remarks of one, then of the other, we do not seem to see that the eagerness of the public to comb through everything in the hope of finding the key to decipher a situation, however drawn with a very thick line, is the illustration of the problem.
That said, I don’t know if this trial really marks the end of #MeToo; perhaps it only marks the end of the era of conciliation, of cooperation with the institutions. If #MeToo died through its legal defeats, and we are punished on top of having tried, maybe we will have to start speaking the language of the response.