The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Has Johnny Depp Changed the #MeToo Game?
We haven’t covered the defamation lawsuit actor Johnny Depp brought against his ex-wife Amber Heard because, well, eww. But cultural commentator Kyle Smith weighs in with an angle well worth pondering — how the trial will impact the #MeToo movement.
“As a matter of law,” Smith says, Depp’s suit is “ridiculous and damaging to his own interests.” Depp is not a good man.
But it strikes me now that Depp isn’t really trying to win a legal case. He’s trying to win in the court of public opinion.
What Depp seemingly hopes to prove is not that Heard defamed him but that she’s a rotten person and habitual liar who abused him. Mission accomplished!
Indeed, much of the buzz on social media is more favorable to Depp than Heard. He lost jobs on “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Fantastic Beasts” thanks to an op-ed that she wrote, but she’s a terrible person in her own right and the mediocre actress may find that her own career went down with Depp’s ship. That’s when Smith gets to the bigger point:
I doubt Depp’s trial will stop the reckoning with sex-related abuses of power in Hollywood — just in the last month, Frank Langella, Bill Murray, and Fred Savage have all gotten canceled over allegations of misconduct — but if his secondary motive is to demolish the “Believe all women” standard, he’s doing a fine job of that. Anyone who argues in the future, “Women never lie about this stuff” will be soundly and sharply rebutted with a mention of Heard’s name. A single counter-example to a series of claims, if it is sufficiently salient, can dog the lot of them. How many other women out there accusing men of bad behavior have, behind the scenes, been as horrible as Amber Heard? Is it proper that there is usually no due process whatsoever offered a man when his reputation gets blown up by a woman alleging sexual misconduct? …
Depp is causing millions to wonder whether we let #MeToo go too far. The scales of justice aren’t thrown away when it comes to murder or terrorism, nor should they be. Did we throw them away when it comes to allegations of sexual misbehavior and domestic abuse? … Is it fair to destroy a man’s reputation and livelihood based on whispers made behind closed doors?
Smith says he doesn’t “pretend to have the answer” to all of his own questions, but he concludes:
Men who have been publicly linked to sexual wrongdoing have no court to which to appeal and perhaps no hope of altering perceptions. It’s reasonable to wonder, after the details of the Depp-Heard relationship came to light, how many men are being ruined by murky allegations whose underlying truths may be considerably more complicated than whatever She Said.