Noteworthy News

[Rev. Rye]

Honestly, what I want to know is are Amber’s defenders enough of a majority to constitute a consensus in the mainstream media? I do remember that during the trial, there were quite a few defenders with quite a few dubious arguments and they were mainstream enough that Firefox’ little startup menu with news stories recommended an article from the Cut asking “Why Do So Many People Think Amber Heard is lying?” I went down a rabbit hole of anti-Depp editorials with some dubious claims, things like Jezebel denying that reciprocal abuse is a thing; Vox talking about the misinformation campaign led by the Daily Wire to spread false Anti-Heard content, leading people on Twitter treating the whole movement as just another right-wing disinformation campaign (because it’s totally Benny-Boy’s fault Amber Heard got repeatedly caught in lies); at least one article that denied the validity of Heard’s diagnosis of Histrionic Persoanlity Disorder and went as far as drawing a fake etymological relationship between that and medical term with known misogynistic history hysteria (the origin of “histrionic” lies in the Latin word ‘histrio’ meaning “actor”, not the Greek ‘husterikós’ which means “suffering in the womb”); and several articles that basically amounted to tone policing, which is fair enough given how ghoulish the Pro-Depp faction online could get in turning an understandable backlash against Heard into full-on misogyny, but a bit less so when it talked about how people disbelieving Amber Heard could make women feel less safe about talking about their abuse.

Frankly, what I think is happening is less the mainstream media pushing a narrative and more some feminists pushing a narrative, it’s worth noting that things slowed down quite a bit a few days after the verdict, and the talk about the trial had shifted to being very pro-Depp, with some exceptions. I think that those exceptions were more motivated by what I’d call The Noble Lie. In this case, that women don’t lie about this sort of thing or if they do, it’s at an astronomically small rate. Most women don’t lie about it, for sure, but some do. But to them, acknowledging the small percentage that actually do could put the larger movement in jeopardy. I don’t think it should, of course. Even if the rate of false accusers is as high as 10% (I haven’t found stats about rates of false Domestic Abuse accusations, but if they’re like the stats for sexual assault, it’s probably closer to 5%, and as a certain boy genius once said, 95% is still an A), that still means they’re far more likely to be telling the truth than not), but evidently, an all or nothing approach is common enough that some people still ran defense for Amber Heard even after her story kept falling apart. I agree with the majority of feminist thought I read, but supporting the Noble Lie, even when the woman in question’s story is falling apart, is a line I refuse to cross. Why? Because being accused of something heinous when the evidence suggests you didn’t do it really fucking sucks. It sucks if you’re being accused of falsely accusing a man of heinous shit when you’re not, and it sucks if you’re on the other side of the equation and the evidence suggests you’re innocent.



“No one’s interested in something you didn’t do.”