Why I’m glad Johnny Depp prevailed over Amber Heard in defamation trial

US actor Johnny Depp had a significant court victory over ex-wife Amber Heard. Picture: AFP

Well, I’m glad that is over – and I’m glad Johnny won! The Johnny versus Amber defamation trial played out on television was as some intellectualising commentators have remarked “a new age vicarious blood sport”. So what? Suburban Australians were as glued to it as much as American and British suburbia.

No matter why you were interested in the ‘tawdry tale’ you were either on team Amber or team Johnny. And let’s face it, even the most pretentious of jaded journalists had some interest. After all, defamation is the number one hazard of their trade. So why was I glad Johnny won?

Heard has claimed to be a ‘symbol of victimhood’, and although it became confusing about who did what to whom, one thing was not confusing: both went hammer and tongs at each other, fuelled by drink and drugs. That is actually a template for most domestic violence, which is in the main caused by the pathologies that beset us.

Amber Heard departs the Fairfax County Courthouse on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

However, I think Depp deserved to win the defamation case because Amber Heard tried making herself a pin up for male initiated domestic violence, thus attempting to negate her part in this hopeless ménage. Her denial of her own actions was not only hypocritical, pandering to ideology, in line with the feminist playbook on this problem, but it also caused Depp’s career to go down the drain.

I’m one of a growing number of women who has heretical views on the subject of why domestic violence happens, who is responsible and who are the real victims, and Heard doesn’t look like a real victim at all.

The campaign against domestic violence is an off shoot of feminist ideology, and so it is seen simplistically as “gendered violence”. For some years feminists have pushed the line that domestic violence is male violence. Myopically, it is always seen as a power struggle; powerful male versus powerless female. Governments have even adopted this. Of course, the part of the equation that is missing is children, who awkwardly for the gendered violence script are just as likely to be abused by their mothers as their fathers, and trying to avoid feminine violence, feminism has invented “toxic masculinity”.

However, this notion has started to look pretty shaky of late. Men are not inherently ‘toxic’, and this trial reinforces the evidence that so called ‘toxic males’ are just as likely to end up in relationships with ‘toxic females’, who it seems can give as good as they get. Because the one overwhelming bit of ‘evidence’ in this trial was that Heard and Depp, both sophisticated adults bear responsibility for their relationship and their behaviour within that relationship.

Johnny Depp still has plenty of fans. Picture: Getty Images

Despite losing her case against Depp, Heard’s subsequent attempts to parade herself as a symbol of victimhood is more evidence of how far the domestic violence agenda has become just another part of the armoury of feminist ideology rather than a real human problem.

Instead, ideologues have weaponised and politicised a real human drama, and domestic violence has been turned into yet another opportunity for social progressives to set themselves up in an industry of social progress along with the ever-burgeoning anti-discrimination industry.

That brings me to the most disgusting aspect of using domestic violence as an ideological/ political tool. In this country at least, we know who and we know where the real victims of DV are. They do not live in the world of Johnny and Amber or you and I. They are girls like Ruby, whose story has been featured in this masthead. They are the indigenous women and children born into misery and violence, living in ghettoised hellholes where the pathologies that beset these communities breed violence of the most unspeakable, dehumanising type. That is where government funded domestic violence campaigns should be aimed. And still they run those daft adds on television about boys being overbearing on the school bus.