On Monday the respective legal forces behind Johnny Depp and Amber Heard will kick off a trial over accusations of defamation. Depp is suing Heard for $50 million after she wrote a 2018 op-ed about her alleged experience as a survivor of domestic violence. She is countersuing for $100 million.
If these facts have induced a sense of déjà vu, it’s wholly warranted. The pair has been here, by which I mean a courtroom defamation trial, before. Depp and Heard’s aughts-to-teens relationship cycled through some familiar-sounding beats of a Hollywood marriage—meet-cute on a film set, marriage, decline, divorce. But its drawn-out ending has become something very rare in the realm of celebrity mega-couples, especially in a post-conscious-uncoupling world. Heard alleged that she had been the victim of domestic violence, and Depp sued the parent company of The Sun in Great Britain for defamation over a headline that read, “GONE POTTY How Can J.K. Rowling be ‘genuinely happy’ casting wife beater Johnny Depp in the new Fantastic Beasts film?” Over the course of the lawsuit, Heard took the stand to testify that the name the paper called him—“wife beater”—was by and large true. The lows of their marriage were splashed across many more headlines on this continent and that one, and discovery in the case revealed some of the darkest moments of their lives together. Depp ultimately lost. (Depp and his team continue to maintain that Heard’s allegations of domestic violence against him are a “...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...