So on the nose as always. Recently, I've been thinking about the way that major media has talked about sexual violence and I think your writing gets at a big idea I've turned over in my head: every so often, a certain individual will be taken out of the entertainment industry (Weinstein, Spacey, etc) as some form of higher justice. However, their abuse will have been known in the industry for years. The displacement of these individuals comes only after they have created mass profits for shareholders, investors, producers... it seems the sacrifice of the individual perpetrator has no correlation to to the harm they cause, but rather for the industry itself to be able to say that they have done the work rather than investigating the inherent exploitation of the cultural industry, economies of performance, and labor/ capital relations in general. I know we had a very brief Twitter interaction about how the founder of Time's Up consulted with Andrew Cuomo to discredit his victims in the media, but this kind of irony serves as the apex of liberal discourses around sexual assault: present the idea of action while maintaining the power and systems that allow abuse to thrive.
Thank you so much for your continued public questioning of these structures and defense of Amber (and all the women in her position). Beautifully written and I'm so glad to have found this piece.
I remember so naively believing that if only they knew what I lived through they would want to help me. They knew he assaulted me with a knife, a deadly weapon. The police came in the middle of it and stopped it. You couldn’t deny it. It was documented. He was exposed. But about 2 weeks earlier… I slapped him. He was in my face harassing me during my suicide attempt and I changed my mind and asked for his help while the pills worked. He was threatening to leave me to die if I didn’t let him check my phone to make sure I wasn’t cheating. I’m a human. I have to have some dignity. I can’t let a man mock me while I die and do nothing. Also I needed help. I was about to die after all. Do you know what it feels like to be mocked like your life means nothing while you are dying? It makes you feel like an insect being killed for being in someone’s house. So insignificant. Like the light can go out, you can be erased from the planet, but you better not cause a scene. That slap alerted 911 and saved my life. Someone saw it and called the police. I got the medical care I needed. The nurses labeled me a victim of domestic violence on my hospital file. The police and my university labeled me an abuser. After I woke up from my coma and was discharged from the hospital a nurse came up to me visibly distressed. She told me she was so sorry, that she had to call law enforcement and tell them when I was being discharged. She almost looked like she was shaking telling me this. The police came to the hospital after my suicide attempt, after being raped and abused for almost 2 years, and walked me out in handcuffs in front of everyone like it was a show. I didn’t know what to do. I am a human and have to have my dignity. I held my head up and plastered the biggest shit eating grin I could come up with and walked with as much pride as I could out of that hospital with my police escort. Inside I didn’t feel pride. I just felt scared, but I can’t be vulnerable in front of them because I can’t trust them. They took me to jail on Friday. It was a holiday weekend. I got out on Tuesday when vacation was over and Court reconvened and only because I ran back to my abuser. No matter how much he hurt me, everyone else did nothing, and at least he posted bail, although the never let me forget it. He forced me to have sex with him the moment I got home from jail. He wouldn’t let me even take a shower first. I was on my period in there and they didn’t let me have access to proper hygiene. I got a UTI from it and I didn’t want to have sex. It hurt. Because I was in the hospital and jail I couldn’t take my birth control. I didn’t want to risk a pregnancy. I wanted to be in charge of my reproductive freedom. But I owed him and he didn’t care about whether it hurt me, whether it risked a pregnancy, and whether I wanted to. He posted my bail and I owed him. A week after I got out he tried to kill me. He dragged me out of a house in front of witnesses who were never called upon and then pulled a knife on me when we got back to his dorm room. By the time my case came up weeks later at the university everyone was aware of what he did. He assaulted me with a knife for daring to hang out with a female friend while he was at work. I pointed this out. I was told those are 2 separate incidents, they aren’t related, and we are focusing on your actions from your incident. I told them he forced me to do vaginal checks whenever I came home to make sure I didn’t cheat and it was abusive and humiliating. They didn’t acknowledge it. I told them he forced me to have anal sex I didn’t want to daily. I would beg him, can we at least just do vaginal? Please? He didn’t want vaginal. He wanted what he wanted. He didn’t care about me. He hurt me. I told them he controlled me. He made me write letters to people to cut them off. I told him I didn’t want to. He made me draft them, he checked them to see if they were scathing enough, he approved them and made me send them. He physically assaulted me regularly. His parents heard, ignored it the summer I lived with them and then when things calmed down said “so any ways, do you want to go to the zoo?” I told my school this. They didn’t acknowledge it. The closet they came was “This is clearly not a healthy relationship and you need to leave, but that doesn’t excuse your part in it.” They expelled him and suspended me because they were separate unrelated incidents I suppose. Damn… if only I didn’t slap him, then maybe I would have been worthy. Maybe they would have helped me. Maybe he wouldn’t have had a chance to stalk me and harass for 2 years after I left him until the day he died of a drug overdose. If only I didn’t slap him maybe I wouldn’t have deserved everything I got.
Really good read. I am always so frustrated when people act like powerful abusers have something to be afraid of in this world, as if they aren’t all still enjoying incredibly profitable careers.
HOW I DECIDED WHO I BELIEVED MORE. . AMBER DID NOT TURN OVER HER PHONE, BUT JOHNNY TURNED OVER HIS PHONE AS EVIDENCE. AMBER DID NOT HAVE SUFFICIENT MEDICAL RECORD DOCUMENTATION AS PROOF OF ABUSE. 20 POINTS THAT SUPPORT WHY I DIDN'T BELIEVE AMBER: #1 Amber Heard says this trial & the social media avalanche has been the most humiliating thing she's ever been through. What about being raped with a liquor bottle inside her? I would think that would have been the most humiliating thing, if it really happened. #2 Amber took sleeping pills after johnny Depp supposedly threatened to carve her face and raped her with a liquor bottle. Taking sleeping pills would just ensure that Johnny could carve her face or do whatever while she slept, and pills would also make her less effectively be able to defend herself if he started up fighting with her again during the night. #3 A victim would have tried to call the police if she had access to a phone; run out of the house (screaming bloody murder) to get help; see a doctor and have photos taken as evidence. #4 A woman who makes a living by being a model and movie star reconciling with a man who threatened to carve her face?? Get real. #5 She said she bought a book on relationship advice after he raped her with a liquor bottle and threatened to carve her face Give me a break. #6 Either she or someone she knows sent the cabinet slamming video to TMZ #7 She possibly altered evidence (photos) to suit her agenda. #8 She was not trapped and forced to stay in the relationship with him- she had enough money to support herself and she did not have a child with him. #9 One of the gross emails about her "burnt corpse" that he sent to a friend was based on a Monty Python skit. He sometimes has a dark sense of humor when he vents; #10 I believe that some of his angry behavior actually took place, but she exaggerated it by making wild claims #11 Her sister's friend wrote a letter to her sister Whitney, pleading with Whitney to tell the truth and not lie for her sister under oath. #12 Amber drank one to two bottles of wine per day, in front of him, but wanted him to not drink. She also did drugs, so we don't know if her memories of events are accurate #13 Amber taunted Johnny and laughed at him, which indicates not having fear of him and his reactions. #14 Amber did not cry during her testimony of the most heart wrenching details of horrible assaults. #15 The Op Ed coincided with the opening of her new movie, so it profited herself. #16 His mother was ill in the hospital when the feces on the bed incident happened and his mom died a month later. Not too nice of her. #17 She gave her so called “abuser” a knife as a present. #18 His rings on his fingers didn't leave marks on her #19 She said that the trailer at Hicksville was trashed, but the witness said that only a cheap light fixture was broken. #20 After getting a restraining order against him, she met him in San Francisco and begged him not to break up with her. I know that Johnny went through rehab to get off opiates and went through Hell. I hope both of them get their lives together and move on in peace and make wiser decisions in the future.
This is both wonderful and heartbreaking to read. Thank you!
Last week my mum wrote a piece for my newsletter about the way she saw her own mother’s story of abuse in Amber Heard’s experience. It felt scary to publish and people were hating, or at the very least uncomfortable. “You believe Amber then?” Was the refrain.
It’s so sad, the way we treat women. Nothing has changed since my Nanna experienced untold violence at the hands of her husband. Nothing.
It's really simple. The reason the media is treating the story in this, as you put it, "weird" way, is that anyone observing these proceedings can deduce that Amber Heard is fabricating her way through the trial (much in the way a middle school child would strain credulity when delivering a whopper). It's put the media in a strange position in which to actually report on the veracity of Ms. Heard's testimony, it would have to go against the narrative that it usually espouses of "believe the women." What this case has come down to in the public sphere is, on the one hand, people willing to sacrifice a defamed man in order to preserve an otherwise valid movement and everyone else who is incapable of pretending that Ms. Heard is telling the truth.
I remember how after I was raped and choked by my then boyfriend how a man looked at me and said you don’t look like you were raped because you aren’t beat up. Most people don’t realize that only about 10% of sexual assault victims are brutally beaten. The good ol’ boy mentality of it’s his word against yours just sickens me. They don’t understand, rape and physical assault have nothing to do with sexuality, it’s about power over another person. Sexual assault and intimate partner violence education needs to be taught to the world. The whole ugly truth needs to be shoved in people’s faces so they stop making excuses and rationalizations.
For one thing, Amber acted like she was reading from a script. She acted like she was........acting. She did not cry during the testimony of supposed horrible abuse. Sorry, but despite your flowery words, Amber can't hide behind the shield of the Metoo movement. She is a big girl now, a grown woman, and her words were not facts. In fact, some of them were lies. We are not as gullible as she thought we were. She is not in the same category as other people who truly have been abused. Not even close. I am someone who was abused, and I smell a rat.
Amber Heard is not innocent simply because she's a woman who claimed sexual assault, that's the point of the case, a powerful, rich, white woman manipulator hijacking the popular movement of her gender to take advantage of the canceling, silencing effects, accusing a man of sexual assault, to protect her career and public reputation, and do the opposite for his. The only reason this at all works is because of the sexist, problematic attitudes by people like the author that let them get manipulated.
Author's tweets about how women don't lie about sexual assault, because they "have no incentive" (!!!) are just wrong, for the incentives above
So on the nose as always. Recently, I've been thinking about the way that major media has talked about sexual violence and I think your writing gets at a big idea I've turned over in my head: every so often, a certain individual will be taken out of the entertainment industry (Weinstein, Spacey, etc) as some form of higher justice. However, their abuse will have been known in the industry for years. The displacement of these individuals comes only after they have created mass profits for shareholders, investors, producers... it seems the sacrifice of the individual perpetrator has no correlation to to the harm they cause, but rather for the industry itself to be able to say that they have done the work rather than investigating the inherent exploitation of the cultural industry, economies of performance, and labor/ capital relations in general. I know we had a very brief Twitter interaction about how the founder of Time's Up consulted with Andrew Cuomo to discredit his victims in the media, but this kind of irony serves as the apex of liberal discourses around sexual assault: present the idea of action while maintaining the power and systems that allow abuse to thrive.
Thank you so much for your continued public questioning of these structures and defense of Amber (and all the women in her position). Beautifully written and I'm so glad to have found this piece.
Thank you so so much. This was beautifully written and argued. I needed to read this. I believe Amber and I hope she finds safety and peace.
I remember so naively believing that if only they knew what I lived through they would want to help me. They knew he assaulted me with a knife, a deadly weapon. The police came in the middle of it and stopped it. You couldn’t deny it. It was documented. He was exposed. But about 2 weeks earlier… I slapped him. He was in my face harassing me during my suicide attempt and I changed my mind and asked for his help while the pills worked. He was threatening to leave me to die if I didn’t let him check my phone to make sure I wasn’t cheating. I’m a human. I have to have some dignity. I can’t let a man mock me while I die and do nothing. Also I needed help. I was about to die after all. Do you know what it feels like to be mocked like your life means nothing while you are dying? It makes you feel like an insect being killed for being in someone’s house. So insignificant. Like the light can go out, you can be erased from the planet, but you better not cause a scene. That slap alerted 911 and saved my life. Someone saw it and called the police. I got the medical care I needed. The nurses labeled me a victim of domestic violence on my hospital file. The police and my university labeled me an abuser. After I woke up from my coma and was discharged from the hospital a nurse came up to me visibly distressed. She told me she was so sorry, that she had to call law enforcement and tell them when I was being discharged. She almost looked like she was shaking telling me this. The police came to the hospital after my suicide attempt, after being raped and abused for almost 2 years, and walked me out in handcuffs in front of everyone like it was a show. I didn’t know what to do. I am a human and have to have my dignity. I held my head up and plastered the biggest shit eating grin I could come up with and walked with as much pride as I could out of that hospital with my police escort. Inside I didn’t feel pride. I just felt scared, but I can’t be vulnerable in front of them because I can’t trust them. They took me to jail on Friday. It was a holiday weekend. I got out on Tuesday when vacation was over and Court reconvened and only because I ran back to my abuser. No matter how much he hurt me, everyone else did nothing, and at least he posted bail, although the never let me forget it. He forced me to have sex with him the moment I got home from jail. He wouldn’t let me even take a shower first. I was on my period in there and they didn’t let me have access to proper hygiene. I got a UTI from it and I didn’t want to have sex. It hurt. Because I was in the hospital and jail I couldn’t take my birth control. I didn’t want to risk a pregnancy. I wanted to be in charge of my reproductive freedom. But I owed him and he didn’t care about whether it hurt me, whether it risked a pregnancy, and whether I wanted to. He posted my bail and I owed him. A week after I got out he tried to kill me. He dragged me out of a house in front of witnesses who were never called upon and then pulled a knife on me when we got back to his dorm room. By the time my case came up weeks later at the university everyone was aware of what he did. He assaulted me with a knife for daring to hang out with a female friend while he was at work. I pointed this out. I was told those are 2 separate incidents, they aren’t related, and we are focusing on your actions from your incident. I told them he forced me to do vaginal checks whenever I came home to make sure I didn’t cheat and it was abusive and humiliating. They didn’t acknowledge it. I told them he forced me to have anal sex I didn’t want to daily. I would beg him, can we at least just do vaginal? Please? He didn’t want vaginal. He wanted what he wanted. He didn’t care about me. He hurt me. I told them he controlled me. He made me write letters to people to cut them off. I told him I didn’t want to. He made me draft them, he checked them to see if they were scathing enough, he approved them and made me send them. He physically assaulted me regularly. His parents heard, ignored it the summer I lived with them and then when things calmed down said “so any ways, do you want to go to the zoo?” I told my school this. They didn’t acknowledge it. The closet they came was “This is clearly not a healthy relationship and you need to leave, but that doesn’t excuse your part in it.” They expelled him and suspended me because they were separate unrelated incidents I suppose. Damn… if only I didn’t slap him, then maybe I would have been worthy. Maybe they would have helped me. Maybe he wouldn’t have had a chance to stalk me and harass for 2 years after I left him until the day he died of a drug overdose. If only I didn’t slap him maybe I wouldn’t have deserved everything I got.
Really good read. I am always so frustrated when people act like powerful abusers have something to be afraid of in this world, as if they aren’t all still enjoying incredibly profitable careers.
heartbreaking
This is a great read. Too bad she's actually the manipulative and abusive person in this situation.
jfc. Thank you!
HOW I DECIDED WHO I BELIEVED MORE. . AMBER DID NOT TURN OVER HER PHONE, BUT JOHNNY TURNED OVER HIS PHONE AS EVIDENCE. AMBER DID NOT HAVE SUFFICIENT MEDICAL RECORD DOCUMENTATION AS PROOF OF ABUSE. 20 POINTS THAT SUPPORT WHY I DIDN'T BELIEVE AMBER: #1 Amber Heard says this trial & the social media avalanche has been the most humiliating thing she's ever been through. What about being raped with a liquor bottle inside her? I would think that would have been the most humiliating thing, if it really happened. #2 Amber took sleeping pills after johnny Depp supposedly threatened to carve her face and raped her with a liquor bottle. Taking sleeping pills would just ensure that Johnny could carve her face or do whatever while she slept, and pills would also make her less effectively be able to defend herself if he started up fighting with her again during the night. #3 A victim would have tried to call the police if she had access to a phone; run out of the house (screaming bloody murder) to get help; see a doctor and have photos taken as evidence. #4 A woman who makes a living by being a model and movie star reconciling with a man who threatened to carve her face?? Get real. #5 She said she bought a book on relationship advice after he raped her with a liquor bottle and threatened to carve her face Give me a break. #6 Either she or someone she knows sent the cabinet slamming video to TMZ #7 She possibly altered evidence (photos) to suit her agenda. #8 She was not trapped and forced to stay in the relationship with him- she had enough money to support herself and she did not have a child with him. #9 One of the gross emails about her "burnt corpse" that he sent to a friend was based on a Monty Python skit. He sometimes has a dark sense of humor when he vents; #10 I believe that some of his angry behavior actually took place, but she exaggerated it by making wild claims #11 Her sister's friend wrote a letter to her sister Whitney, pleading with Whitney to tell the truth and not lie for her sister under oath. #12 Amber drank one to two bottles of wine per day, in front of him, but wanted him to not drink. She also did drugs, so we don't know if her memories of events are accurate #13 Amber taunted Johnny and laughed at him, which indicates not having fear of him and his reactions. #14 Amber did not cry during her testimony of the most heart wrenching details of horrible assaults. #15 The Op Ed coincided with the opening of her new movie, so it profited herself. #16 His mother was ill in the hospital when the feces on the bed incident happened and his mom died a month later. Not too nice of her. #17 She gave her so called “abuser” a knife as a present. #18 His rings on his fingers didn't leave marks on her #19 She said that the trailer at Hicksville was trashed, but the witness said that only a cheap light fixture was broken. #20 After getting a restraining order against him, she met him in San Francisco and begged him not to break up with her. I know that Johnny went through rehab to get off opiates and went through Hell. I hope both of them get their lives together and move on in peace and make wiser decisions in the future.
This is both wonderful and heartbreaking to read. Thank you!
Last week my mum wrote a piece for my newsletter about the way she saw her own mother’s story of abuse in Amber Heard’s experience. It felt scary to publish and people were hating, or at the very least uncomfortable. “You believe Amber then?” Was the refrain.
It’s so sad, the way we treat women. Nothing has changed since my Nanna experienced untold violence at the hands of her husband. Nothing.
It's really simple. The reason the media is treating the story in this, as you put it, "weird" way, is that anyone observing these proceedings can deduce that Amber Heard is fabricating her way through the trial (much in the way a middle school child would strain credulity when delivering a whopper). It's put the media in a strange position in which to actually report on the veracity of Ms. Heard's testimony, it would have to go against the narrative that it usually espouses of "believe the women." What this case has come down to in the public sphere is, on the one hand, people willing to sacrifice a defamed man in order to preserve an otherwise valid movement and everyone else who is incapable of pretending that Ms. Heard is telling the truth.
Finally, thank you.
so so so good
I remember how after I was raped and choked by my then boyfriend how a man looked at me and said you don’t look like you were raped because you aren’t beat up. Most people don’t realize that only about 10% of sexual assault victims are brutally beaten. The good ol’ boy mentality of it’s his word against yours just sickens me. They don’t understand, rape and physical assault have nothing to do with sexuality, it’s about power over another person. Sexual assault and intimate partner violence education needs to be taught to the world. The whole ugly truth needs to be shoved in people’s faces so they stop making excuses and rationalizations.
An ideology should not be considered more important than the people it purports to represent.
For one thing, Amber acted like she was reading from a script. She acted like she was........acting. She did not cry during the testimony of supposed horrible abuse. Sorry, but despite your flowery words, Amber can't hide behind the shield of the Metoo movement. She is a big girl now, a grown woman, and her words were not facts. In fact, some of them were lies. We are not as gullible as she thought we were. She is not in the same category as other people who truly have been abused. Not even close. I am someone who was abused, and I smell a rat.
Amber Heard is not innocent simply because she's a woman who claimed sexual assault, that's the point of the case, a powerful, rich, white woman manipulator hijacking the popular movement of her gender to take advantage of the canceling, silencing effects, accusing a man of sexual assault, to protect her career and public reputation, and do the opposite for his. The only reason this at all works is because of the sexist, problematic attitudes by people like the author that let them get manipulated.
Author's tweets about how women don't lie about sexual assault, because they "have no incentive" (!!!) are just wrong, for the incentives above