Depp v. Heard: A Feminist Mea Culpa

The week I sat down to write this reflection, the big news story was that the actor Johnny Depp had won his defamation case against his former wife Amber Heard, sparked by a 2018 opinion piece written by Heard and published by the Washington Post in which she described herself as a 'public figure representing domestic abuse'.1 Depp's name was not mentioned, but he sued for libel and sought damages to compensate for lost earnings, prompting Heard to countersue on the basis that she had endured domestic violence during their 15-month marriage. The larger cultural impact of the Depp-Heard court case-together with the preceding November 2020 United Kingdom libel case in which Depp lost against the tabloid the Sun, who described him as a 'wife-beater' after the judge ruled the claim was 'substantially true'-will no doubt be assessed for months and years to come, including by feminist historians.2 In the immediate wake of the verdict, feminist legal historian Jessica Lake very usefully placed the case in a larger history of the gendered dimensions of defamation law in the United States: Historically the common law of defamation was built to protect public men in their professions and trades. Another asked me to comment on the case in relation to its implication for survivors of domestic violence, presumably because, along with Ann Curthoys and Catherine Kevin, I am part of a team of historians currently researching an Australian Research Council funded history of domestic violence in Australia.