The prominent playing-out of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's feud will end the career of the one the public don't side with, Judith Wood writes. Photos / AP
The prominent playing-out of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's feud will end the career of the one the public don't side with, Judith Wood writes. Photos / AP
OPINION:
If you don't want your faith in marriage torpedoed, look away now. If you want to keep your last meal down, then log off. If you feel under assault from the sort of horrendous detail you can't unhear, change the channel immediately.
Nothing to do with the war. The real war in which civilians are being starved and tortured and butchered. The war that desperately matters for the future of bloodsoaked Ukraine, of a quaking Europe, of the world held to ransom by a Russian madman with a nuclear arsenal.
I'm talking about the thermobaric slurs being unleashed in Virginia's Fairfax County Courthouse by Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Did she deliberately empty her bowels onto the marital bed? Did he insist on searching her internally for cocaine?
There's airing dirty laundry and there's rubbing our faces in the rank, fetid underbelly of a cataclysmic relationship breakdown mired in aggression, alcohol and drug abuse. It's a wonder the jury aren't provided with wet wipes and medieval plague doctor masks just to sit through this seemingly never-ending defamation trial.
I cheerfully admit I'm no slouch when it comes to a spot of salacious gossip – it's practically a job requirement in journalism. But every so often the rising tide of sewage spewing forth threatens to overwhelm and poison us all.
And so it is with ex-husband and wife Depp, 58, and Heard, 36, who have jointly jettisoned dignity, propriety and decorum in an orgy of mutually assured destruction. Vanity Fair reports that Court TV, which is broadcasting proceedings, has doubled its daytime ratings as a result.
Whoever wins, theirs will be the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory; I struggle to foresee how either of these film stars will crawl from the wreckage with even a shred of reputation left. What remains of their tattered characters will surely be stained forever in public perceptions.
Technically the pair are locked in a defamation trial over a newspaper article but it has long since spiralled into a battle for the hearts and minds of cinema-goers; which party do they believe?
Whoever they side with will continue to be employed by the big studios. The career of the other will disappear in a puff of manufactured censure. If the great American audience decides one is as toxic as the other, they will both be cancelled.
The nub of the issue is that in one corner we have Hollywood A-Lister and unwashed heartthrob (People magazine named him the Sexiest Man Alive, twice) Depp, who made his name in such blockbusters as Edward Scissorhands and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
He met ingenue Heard, 20 years his junior, on the set of the 2011 film The Rum Diary, which marked a new phase of her career trajectory. They both had partners at the time but by 2012 they were single and began dating, before marrying in 2015.
A year later, in May 2016, she filed for divorce. After it was finalised, Time magazine recalls they released a joint statement saying, "Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love."
But then Heard wrote a 2018 article in The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as "a public figure representing domestic abuse". Depp filed a US$50 million ($78m) lawsuit against her for defamation.
Though she didn't mention her former spouse by name, the timeline Heard described in the piece matched up with the timeline of the couple's divorce two years prior, in 2016. He credits the piece for prompting producers to drop him from the sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film.
The prominent playing-out of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's feud will end the career of the one the public don't side with, Judith Wood writes. Photos / AP
"I would be a real simpleton to not think that there was an effect on my career based on Ms Heard's words, whether they mentioned my name or not," he said.
Heard then countersued Depp to the tune of US$100m, alleging he defamed her when his former lawyer released statements saying her allegations were "a sexual violence hoax".
The current case in Virginia follows a 16-day trial here in Britain in the summer of 2020, when Depp sued The Sun's publisher for libel over a headline calling him a "wife-beater".
Heard testified in the trial, making 14 allegations of abuse against Depp, who denied them all. But the judge ruled that 12 had been "proved to the civil standard" and that The Sun's headline was "substantially true".
Yet still the legal juggernaut rolls on and each day brings more lurid claims than the last. I can't help feeling this narcissistic feeding frenzy of obscene accusation and gross counter-accusation has gone on long enough – will somebody please pull the plug on the prurient newsfeeds polluting our airwaves?
Of course, nobody will. Celebrity mudslinging will always find its front-row viewers; bad behaviour fascinates those far removed from the (ostensibly) gilded lives of the rich and powerful.
Is there a moral message to take away from this awful vituperation? I only wish there were but I can't find one.
In truth, it's not a surprise to discover that privilege is no shield against personal unhappiness and that millions in the bank and being twice declared the Sexiest Man Alive doesn't guarantee any sort of Hollywood happy ending.
Most, if not all, of the performers we place on pedestals have feet of clay (although maybe not Ryan Gosling and definitely not George Clooney) and consider themselves lucky if we don't find out. But once the doors are closed the acting stops.
It stands to reason that even the stars of the silver screen are not immune to domestic conflict. The only tangible difference between them and us is that they scream abuse across much bigger and better kitchen islands.
But enough is enough. I want no more tawdry revelations; just tuning in feels like an act of self-harm. The moment has come to call time on the unedifying spectacle of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, once tumultuously together, now tearing each other apart.
• Judith Woods writes features and a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph on politics, health and opinion.
