Hopefully I wasn’t the only goofball mesmerized by the fiasco of the trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
Social media is abuzz with millions of opinions and people have clearly taken sides, YouTube was alive with commentaries, TikTok was brimming at the seams with #AmberTurd memes, Facebook groups and pages were formed to debate the merits of the trial.
So I’m going to try to explain some of the points that some folks don’t seem to understand.
This was a civil trial not a criminal trial so proving your case can be easier than in a criminal trial where it has to be beyond a reasonable doubt. Civil trials can consider reasonable doubts.
It is also interesting that the trial was held in Virginia where it is much harder to win a defamation trial than in most states as evidenced by the cap of 350K on the punitive damages.
Based on what we heard throughout this trial if it would’ve been tried in Washington state they both would’ve lost because our DV laws do not only include physical violence, they include verbal abuse and threats of harm.
Now the threshold as I said in Virginia is much higher, all of the jury had to believe that all of Depp’s evidence was true or none of it would matter.
When my kids were in school, my son had a game I couldn’t attend so I asked him how the game went later at home and he said the coach said that it wasn’t if they lost or won, it was how they played the game. I told my son that is something that losers say and you can best believe I got called into the principal’s office when my son said that back to his coach.
Don’t care, I wasn’t raising a bunch of “participation trophy” kids, my children were going to have to face this world alone someday.
So now the Heard Team is squawking like the losers they are about how this pushed women’s right back 100 years. Any real victim of domestic violence knows this is hogwash.
What is happening is that the world is seeing that men can be victims too and that sometimes women lie about it to suit their needs.
In Washington state the oldest trick in the book is for a woman to file for a DV order to get their husband’s out of the house and retain custody of the kids, with not a single ounce of “proof” and it will remain that way until the laws change.
Again the trial was a civil case, not a criminal case so it will not, and can not, affect case law. It’s basically a he said/she said scuffle with a judge and jury of referees.
Even if Depp would’ve lost, he still would’ve won in the court of public opinion and add to the fact that he got so much information out to the public that he was not allowed to present in the English Courts so everyone had a front row seat to their crazy marriage.
The Heard team keeps beating that dead dog to death as well and that case was something else completely. Depp was suing the Sun for calling him a wife beater and they wouldn’t allow Depp’s evidence just Heard’s.
So no the court did not find him guilty of 12 to 14 counts of assault and rapes, it found that the Sun wrote what it wrote based on what a liar told them. It wasn’t a criminal trial and they wouldn’t have had jurisdiction to prosecute it anyways even if was a criminal matter.
Now we’re coming up on the January 6th hearings so there will be something of substance to watch and hopefully those two can just move on and up in life from this point forward.
