AUTOR’S UPDATE: This article was originally published at the beginning of the Depp/Heard defamation trial. The guess I made below in the original article about how the trial would end was correct. The jury gave Johnny Depp an overwhelming victory that essentially agreed that Amber Heard was the only one proven to have committed actual violence. Perhaps more important, the jury found that Heard acted with actual malice against Depp, so awarded him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million dollars in punitive damages, the latter a strong indicator that the jury believed Heard lied. – SB
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It’s anybody’s guess how the Depp/Heard defamation trial will end. My guess is that, while both will be shown to have behaved poorly, Amber Heard will be the only one proven to have committed actual violence against the other:
- Heard has a family history of domestic violence, a recognized predictor of subsequent intimate partner violence. She also has a documented arrest in 2009 for assaulting her then-girlfriend, and in audio recordings she has admitted to physical violence against Depp.
But one last bit of proof of Heard’s abusive nature was provided by Heard herself. In a breathtaking display of self-sabotaging arrogance, early in the trial she began copying Depp’s outfits and hairstyles in an attempt to intimidate him. Although the media has reported on this, I haven’t seen anyone state the obvious: if Heard is willing to display this kind of mocking cruelty in public, isn’t it likely that she abused Depp in private?
- Depp also has a family history of domestic violence – his mother verbally and physically terrorized his entire family – but because children raised in abusive families tend to imitate that abuse, it appears that Depp copied the behavior of his father who “who never raised a hand against his mother”.
Here’s what we know:
- The Washington Post has a long, troubling, and provable history of feminist-inspired bias. This bias is self-evident: for decades the Post has published thousands of sad articles that almost universally depict domestic violence as “men battering women”, ignoring substantial evidence that men are equally battered by wives and that mothers commit a large majority of child abuse. In 2018 the Post published a repulsive article, Why Can’t We Hate Men?
- Only six months after the “Hating Men” article, the Post again proved its gender bias by publishing the column at the heart of Depp’s lawsuit, imaginatively titled I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change. Heard’s diatribe was essentially an anti-male gender hit piece meant to defame Depp and to publicly shame him for his standing up to her odious behavior – and by extension, by using a smorgasbord of feminist talking points, shaming all men.
Like much of feminism, she maximized her victimhood, oblivious to her own (female) culpability while shifting blame onto her (male) ex-husband.
- Finally, although it was published under her name, Heard didn’t write it – it clearly had feminist fingerprints all over it. The National Organization for Women and the Feminist Majority Foundation came to mind. A quick Google search proved that it was ghost-written by the ACLU, a fact that Depp’s legal team also discovered, even naming the organization as “co-conspirators”.
Following the ACLU’s example, and in the interest of gender equity, I have taken the liberty of ghost-writing an “imagined rebuttal” to Heard’s column with Mr. Depp as the “author”. This rebuttal deconstructs their article, paragraph by paragraph, and provides a more balanced and truthful examination for each.
Note that Mr. Depp doesn’t know me from Adam and has no prior knowledge of this effort. I’m simply doing it as a public service to him and to fair-minded men and women everywhere. Also note that in keeping with Heard’s assertion that the Post article “wasn’t about Depp because it didn’t name him”, in his rebuttal, Depp only refers to “the defendant” (wink-wink).
Johnny’s Rebuttal: I spoke up against female domestic violence and false accusations against MEN — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
I was exposed to abuse at a very young age. I knew certain things early on, without ever having to be told. I knew that men have the power — physically, socially and financially — and that a lot of institutions support that arrangement. I knew this long before I had the words to articulate it, and I bet you learned it young, too.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
I too was exposed to abuse at a very young age. As a childhood victim of my own mother’s domestic violence, I knew certain things early on, without ever having to be told. I knew that “boys didn’t hit girls” and that, contrary to widespread belief, women can be violent too – every bit as violent as men.
I now know that despite the popular perception pushed by feminists and ignorantly parroted in the defendant’s article that “men have the power — physically, socially and financially”, the reality is far different. Most men have little power, yet are burdened with responsibilities, obligations, and life hazards (e.g. military service and working in the “death professions”), burdens of which nearly all women are blissfully unaware. Doubters are encouraged to read the book The Myth of Male Power.
The defendant unwittingly provided a quintessential example of these male-only burdens by including in her article an odd analogy of “powerful men as a ship like the Titanic”, completely oblivious to the undeniable fact that the men of the Titanic, burdened by the demands of chivalry, courageously gave up their lives so women and children could live.
Who knew that some fifty years later feminists would begin a process that would turn these men from noble heroes into “patriarchal oppressors of women”?
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
Like many women, I had been harassed and sexually assaulted by the time I was of college age. But I kept quiet — I did not expect filing complaints to bring justice. And I didn’t see myself as a victim.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
Like many millions of other men and boys, I was the victim of a woman’s abuse.
In my case, I was a victim of my mother’s violence and verbal abuse, along with my father, brother, and two sisters. But I kept quiet — I did not expect filing complaints would bring justice. And I didn’t see myself as a victim. In fact, I later took my abuser to the Oscars and bought her a million-dollar horse farm!
And I’m by far not the only male victim of female violence. Other prominent men who have been abused by wives or girlfriends include golfer Tiger Woods, comedian Christopher Titus, model Lewis Burton, baseball player Chuck Findley, and John Bobbitt.
All these men survived their abusers, but others did not: Texas dentist David Lynn Harris, comedian Phil Hartman, and American salesman Travis Alexander are but a few men who lost their lives to female murderers.
Women also abuse children. Susan Smith and Casey Anthony are only two of many, many monstrously selfish mothers convicted (or charged) of killing innocent children.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing both female domestic violence and false accusations against men. I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for men who dare to challenge the feminist-driven lies and misinformation about both types of abuse of men and boys.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
Friends and advisers told me I would never again work as an actress — that I would be blacklisted. A movie I was attached to recast my role. I had just shot a two-year campaign as the face of a global fashion brand, and the company dropped me. Questions arose as to whether I would be able to keep my role of Mera in the movies “Justice League” and “Aquaman.”
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
Friends and advisers told me I would never again work as an actor — that I would be blacklisted.
And indeed, I have been. I’ve been dropped from the next Pirates of the Caribbean and Fantastic Beasts movies while the defendant was still casted in the latest Justice League and Aquaman movies. My future acting career is in jeopardy; the defendant’s future appears to be secure.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how feminists, the media, and other institutions protect women accused of abuse, mostly by denying that women are equally guilty of committing domestic violence.
This is feminism’s Big Lie.
Here are just a few of an endless inventory of facts that completely contradict the one-sided, feminist-driven lie that women aren’t violent:
- Erin Pizzey, the founder in 1971 of the world’s first women’s shelter observed that 62 of the first 100 women let into her shelter were as violent as the men they left. She wrote a book Prone to Violence that revealed this truth. Feminists killed her dog and made death threats that forced her to flee England.
- Domestic violence researcher Dr. Susan Steinmetz received death threats from radical women’s groups after publishing a book, The Battered Husband Syndrome, that first documented the existence of battered men.
- Richard Gelles and Murry Straus, along with Dr. Steinmetz, performed two federally sponsored studies, the National Family Violence Surveys of 1975 and 1985, that were the first to conclusively reveal the equal female role in domestic violence. Feminists drowned out this message by making bomb threats at conferences that they attended.
- California State University professor Martin S. Fiebert published an annotated bibliography that lists hundreds of studies that all show women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their intimate partners. (Yes, you read that right: “or more aggressive”.)
- Self-described feminist Patricia Pearson in her book When She Was Bad – Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, challenged the stereotype of men as aggressors and women as innocent victims:
“The idea that domestic violence refers exclusively to wife abuse or to violence against women is so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness that it is impossible to grapple with [stories of male victims of DV] without first unraveling some potent conventional wisdom. … At the heart of the matter lies human will. Which partner – by dint of temperament, personality, life history – has the will to harm the other? By now it should be clear that such a will is not the exclusive province of men.”
- The feminist claim that DV is predominantly “men beating up women” is completely demolished by proven higher rates of violence between lesbian couples – i.e., females – than between heterosexual couples. This article discusses two federal studies that revealed this truth. One study showed that lesbian women are almost 75% more likely to be victims of domestic violence than are heterosexual women.
- For more information about female-perpetuated abuse, see the “Women’s Contribution to Domestic Violence” section in this article.
The repulsive hypocrisy of feminists threatening violence against people who exposed the truth about female violence reveals the shameful deceitfulness of both these feminists and their abusive movement.
If feminists could lie about this essential fact, what else might they lie about?
Everything:
- the feminist-proclaimed wage gap between men and women
- women don’t make false accusations against men (recall the Duke Lacrosse Rape and UVA’s A Rape on Campus hoaxes)
- women don’t rape (denying the reality of female sex offenders, including mothers who molest their own sons and teachers like Mary Kay Letourneau who rape boys)
- grossly exaggerated claims of sexual assault and a “rape culture” on college campuses
- lying about children’s real fathers, i.e., “paternity fraud”
- the existence of a “Patriarchy” (eerily similar to the “Jewish conspiracy” of Nazi Germany)
- And finally, feminism’s Second Big Lie: that women don’t lie, asserted under the false flag “Believe women”.
Might these many provable feminist falsehoods also induce wives to lie about abuse by husbands? Is it possible that the defendant accused me of abuse for preemptive advantage in our divorce or to extract even more money from me?
Of course it’s possible! As Elaine Epstein, former president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association stated in 1993:
“Everyone knows that restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually all who apply . . . In many [divorce] cases, allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage. [emphasis added]”
Anyone who doesn’t think that women are capable of lying has been bamboozled by hundreds of years of groveling chivalry and the past fifty years of feminist, gynocentric indoctrination.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
Imagine a powerful man as a ship, like the Titanic. That ship is a huge enterprise. When it strikes an iceberg, there are a lot of people on board desperate to patch up holes — not because they believe in or even care about the ship, but because their own fates depend on the enterprise.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
(This odd analogy is covered in my first rebuttal point)
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
In recent years, the #MeToo movement has taught us about how power like this works, not just in Hollywood but in all kinds of institutions — workplaces, places of worship or simply in particular communities. In every walk of life, women are confronting these men who are buoyed by social, economic and cultural power. And these institutions are beginning to change.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
In recent years, the #MeToo movement has taught us how feminism uses the stealthy power of the female sex to abuse men.
#MeToo has morphed from a movement for the expression of legitimate complaints by women about the sexual misbehavior of some men into a two-faced juggernaut that allows any man to be accused, tried, and sentenced in the court of public opinion, hounded out of his job, and made a social pariah without a shred of due process, often by anonymous accusers. Just ask Mike Tunison!
#MeToo also serves as an example of female hypocrisy because it fails to recognize women’s own appalling sexual behavior or the female contribution to men’s sexual misconduct. As explained in this online article, the #MeToo movement should be called the #MeTwoFaced movement.
#MeToo is the smug, spoiled, arrogant daughter of feminism and both are expressions of predatory, gynocentric female behavior.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
We are in a transformative political moment. The president of our country has been accused by more than a dozen women of sexual misconduct, including assault and harassment. Outrage over his statements and behavior has energized a female-led opposition. #MeToo started a conversation about just how profoundly sexual violence affects women in every area of our lives. And last month, more women were elected to Congress than ever in our history, with a mandate to take women’s issues seriously. Women’s rage and determination to end sexual violence are turning into a political force.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
We are in a transformative political moment. Men and women are both recognizing the awful, hateful excesses of feminism, and are beginning to speak out against these excesses. The rage of both men and women and their determination to expose female violence against men and children and to end false accusations against men are turning into a political force.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
We have an opening now to bolster and build institutions protective of women. For starters, Congress can reauthorize and strengthen the Violence Against Women Act. First passed in 1994, the act is one of the most effective pieces of legislation enacted to fight domestic violence and sexual assault. It creates support systems for people who report abuse, and provides funding for rape crisis centers, legal assistance programs and other critical services. It improves responses by law enforcement, and it prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ survivors. Funding for the act expired in September and has only been temporarily extended.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
We have an opening now to bolster and build institutions protective of both men and women.
For starters, President Biden and Congress can either repeal or make the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) gender neutral. First passed in 1994, under the sponsorship of then-Senator Biden, the act is one of the most horribly biased pieces of legislation ever passed by the U.S. Congress. It enshrines a fundamental lie into American law: that women aren’t as violent as men.
This lie is well summarized in the previously-referenced book When She Was Bad – Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence:
“Women commit the majority of child homicides in the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killings of newborns, and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults.” [emphasis added]
Next, we need to demand that equal funding be made available to male victims of domestic violence. How many people are aware that VAWA expressly denies funding for these male victims, and that effectively all DV shelters refuse to serve men?
Finally, all Western media needs to closely examine their own chivalrous gender biases and remove hateful, feminist-inspired prejudices from their reporting.
For example, how many people are aware of the previously-mentioned #MeToo-motivated Post Opinion piece Why Can’t We Hate Men?, written by a smug women’s studies gender bigot who openly and shamelessly broadcast a Nazi-like hatred for men in a nationally-read newspaper? (Many of the article’s more than 3,300 vastly negative commenters responded, “just change ‘men’ to ‘Jews’”.)
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
We should continue to fight sexual assault on college campuses, while simultaneously insisting on fair processes for adjudicating complaints. Last month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed changes to Title IX rules governing the treatment of sexual harassment and assault in schools. While some changes would make the process for handling complaints more fair, others would weaken protections for sexual assault survivors. For example, the new rules would require schools to investigate only the most extreme complaints, and then only when they are made to designated officials. Women on campuses already have trouble coming forward about sexual violence — why would we allow institutions to scale back supports?
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
The defendant’s ghost writers at the American Civil Liberties Union, by raising the issue of sexual assault on campuses in their feminist-dominated rant, illuminated the moral rot of their organization.
An organization that was founded in 1920 “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States” today spectacularly fails to meet that objective for one group of citizens: men, and in particular male college students.
The ACLU’s voice was conspicuously silent during the Duke Lacrosse Rape and UVA’s A Rape on Campus hoaxes. One writer aptly described this silence in a 2006 article:
“If ever there was a case screaming for the assistance of the ACLU on behalf of defendants suffering denial of their civil rights and the need to go after a prosecutor abusing his power, the Duke lacrosse case is it. Yet the ACLU remains silent.”
Can any right-thinking person think that these two horrendous assaults on the civil rights of male college students appeared suddenly, completely out of the blue, with no causal event?
No, they’re the result of an even larger feminist hoax, driven by decades of lies, distortions, and biased studies, that female college students suffer from an “epidemic” of sexual assault, the result of a “rape culture … in which sexual violence is treated as the norm and victims are blamed for their own assaults.” In short, feminist falsehoods have resulted in an anti-male lynch-mob mentality at America’s colleges and universities that has dangerously eroded the civil rights of male college students.
The feminist lies and biased studies that have led to the myth of a rape epidemic are thoroughly debunked in the book The Campus Rape Frenzy – The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities. Be sure to read the “The Realities of ‘Rape Culture’” chapter.
But it gets worse. Much worse! The federal government is also complicit in undermining male college students’ civil rights.
Briefly, Title IX is the primary federal law intended to prohibit sex discrimination in all American schools, from kindergarten through graduate school. in April 2011 the gender bullies at the U.S. Department of Education, under the presumed authority of Title IX, issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” to American colleges and universities. This letter directed these schools, under penalty of losing all federal funding, to institute draconian changes to the way sexual assault accusations were to be handled.
The Campus Rape Frenzy describes the result of these changes:
“… the federal government, joined by virtually all colleges and universities, has mounted a systematic attack on bedrock American principles including the presumption of innocence, access to exculpatory evidence, the right to cross-examine one’s accuser, and due process.”
Anyone who still thinks that feminism is a fair movement that only strives for “equality” needs to read Twisting Title IX, a book that documents the outrageous abuses done in the name of Title IX and “equal educational opportunity”. Pay particular attention to the chapter titled “OCR’S Unlawful Assault on Due Process and Fair Procedures”.
Again, the ACLU has succumbed to a warped feminist worldview that allows it to abandon the civil rights of a single group of citizens: male college students.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
I write this as a woman who had to change my phone number weekly because I was getting death threats. For months, I rarely left my apartment, and when I did, I was pursued by camera drones and photographers on foot, on motorcycles and in cars. Tabloid outlets that posted pictures of me spun them in a negative light. I felt as though I was on trial in the court of public opinion — and my life and livelihood depended on myriad judgments far beyond my control.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
I write this as a man who received death threats, most notably from the defendant’s own father! Tabloid outlets that posted pictures of me spun them in a negative light and I was excoriated by our uber-feminist-friendly media.
For example, HuffPost, The Daily Beast, and other media outlets published articles against my being hired as an actor, yet have said nothing since evidence surfaced that the defendant admitted to her own domestic violence against me and was arrested in 2009 on charges of assaulting her then-girlfriend, photographer Tasya van Ree, at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.
I felt as though I was on trial in the court of public opinion — and my life and livelihood depended on myriad judgments far beyond my control.
Amber Heard’s DC Post article:
I want to ensure that women who come forward to talk about violence receive more support. We are electing representatives who know how deeply we care about these issues. We can work together to demand changes to laws and rules and social norms — and to right the imbalances that have shaped our lives.
Johnny Depp’s rebuttal:
I want to ensure that men and women who come forward to talk about women’s violence and false accusations against men receive more support.
We need to inform our foolishly chivalrous — or outright anti-male — representatives who have passed laws like VAWA and others that have gradually eroded the civil rights of men and boys.
We desperately need to work together to demand changes to laws and rules and social norms — and to challenge the feminist-inspired lies, distortions, and imbalances that allow women like the defendant to manipulate public opinion for their own selfish ends.
—– End of Depp’s Rebuttal —–
A final note from the “real” author:
By publishing the Amber Heard/ACLU article, the Washington Post turned Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit from a story about a celebrity divorce into a proxy fight for a much larger story: the decades-long defamation of men and boys by the world’s media and the abject surrender of the Post and the ACLU to a feminist worldview.
