Smith College sits snugly at the intersection of liberal arts and historically women’s colleges. It values “individual liberty [and] largeness of opportunity.” The department of the Study of Women and Gender boasts an enormous diversity of interests, pedagogies and resources. The recent anonymous gift establishing the creation of the Gloria Steinem ’56 Endowed Chair in the Study of Women and Gender indicates an exceedingly generous alumna dedicated to furthering the department’s goals. It seems apt, then, that coupling the College’s ethos with the collective anti-institutional (governmental, judicial, religious) sentiment often exhibited by Smith students would only form a stronger case for solidarity with Amber Heard.
The defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Heard largely took place after the spring semester had ended. This fall, while discussions explicitly about either individual are seldom, it is difficult to forget the glee with which some of my peers reviled Heard. The case was predicated on Depp’s assertion that Heard’s Washington Post op-ed (“I Spoke Up Against Sexual Violence — and Faced Our Culture’s Wrath. That Has to Change”) prompted significant injury to Depp’s reputation and career prospects. I am not interested in adjudicating what British courts have already decided. In 2020, a judge found that claims in “The Sun” calling Depp a “wife beater” were “substantially true” and Heard had, indeed, “feared for her life.” My interest is not in making Heard’s case but in interrogating why I feel I should.
In fairness, I do not suggest that Smith’s student body has exhibited a vitriol divorced from that of the general public. Instead, I argue that Smith, a community that lauds itself on its capacity for intellectual pluralism, is uniquely situated to assert meaningful solidarity. Historically women’s colleges have long positioned themselves as proponents of forward-facing gendered empowerment, and it is prudent that we, as representatives of these institutions, refuse to allow this moment to pass without explicitly condemning the misogynistic invective that has been repeatedly evoked in the name of objectivity.
Sociologist and expert on interpersonal violence Jennifer Freyd introduced the term DARVO (deny, attack and reverse victim and offender) as a subset of her wider betrayal trauma theory in the late ’90s. It refers to the tendency of those accused of abuse (and their legal teams) to obfuscate blame and depict their accusers as aggressors. Grasping DARVO is also essential to understanding why “mutual abuse” — a term rebuked by experts on the basis that it neglects power imbalances — is not a compelling stance. Onlookers who embrace the mutual abuse myth tend to do so on the basis that neither Depp nor Heard are “good people.” That may be true. But it also doesn’t matter. An allegation of abuse is not rendered sterile by the accuser’s supposed moral decencies which, in this case, tends to be synonymous with her refusal to accept her abuse. To only advocate for the survivors with whom we identify or respect is to not advocate for any survivors at all.
I’ve seen viral tweets and TikToks arguing that women, in particular, ought to support Heard because, should they find themselves in an abusive relationship or situation, it is unlikely that they would receive any gentler treatment from the general public. This notion is well-meaning but misguided. Subscribing to the belief that a survivor must grin and bear her abuse in order to be deserving of support reflects a deep misunderstanding of the realities of intimate partner violence and a quixotic view of victimhood.
The instinct to dismiss the saga as celebrity drivel is also erroneous. There is nothing cerebrally impressive about neglecting an abuse survivor on the basis of her social capital. Jennifer Freyd says of the trial that “there are court cases all the time like this without the fame.” Indeed, to view the Depp/Heard case as a microcosm of the judicial system’s larger failures to protect survivors is to recognize that the cultural ire flung at Heard is because of her fame. Positioning any celebrity of public personality as the face of a social movement or affair, of course, runs the risk of unhealthy engagement in parasociality. But when Judge Penney Azcarate agreed to televise the trial — a decision referred to by Stanford Law professor Michele Dauber as “the single worst decision I can think of in the context of interpersonal violence and sexual violence in recent history” — she fostered an online environment of hate. Social media users whose only knowledge of domestic violence came from YouTube compilations of JOHNNY’S FUNNIEST COURT MOMENTS have been enabled to share their commentary (often viciously misogynistic) publicly, frequently tagging Heard in their diatribes. Because the trial has occupied such significant space in the collective consciousness, its effects will be felt far beyond its conclusion.
The upcoming cases of Evan Rachel Wood and Angelina Jolie have already been met with public conflation of their victimhood with Heard’s alleged lies, including the metonymic use of Heard’s name as a conniving liar who exploits public sympathy — never mind the lack of support she actually received — to settle private scores.
A quick glance at the Confessional (“I think Amber Heard is a psycho”) will reveal anything from explicit vilification of Heard to a pantomimed display of impartiality that gets off on its own victim-blaming masquerading as solidarity. It is incredibly easy to post hateful messages on an anonymous platform about one of the most high-profile abuse survivors of the last few years, but it is disheartening that Smith students feel entitled to do so.
The quantity of scrutiny inflicted on high profile survivors is difficult to replicate for people whose Instagram accounts don’t boast millions of followers, but as Freyd’s DARVO framework reiterates, abusers and their enablers all follow the same playbook. The survivors in your communities — the Smith community, too — simply cannot wait for a Britney Spears-esque coming-to-Jesus-we-treated-you-so-badly moment in a decade. It is not enough to respect survivors in retrospect.
The gap between the critical thinking that we like to think we engage in and the actualities of the rhetoric shared by the community surrounding this trial is enormous. To close it, we must commit to supporting survivors even when (especially when) it is not convenient for us. Because if fighting back is a transgression so unforgivable as to cede any claim to victimhood, then any kind of coalitional feminism will be reserved for a group of women so small — if we let the Heard case teach us anything let it be that “reactive abuse” is extremely common — that they barely make sense to discuss in the first place. Then again, I suppose that’s the goal.
