So now Kate Moss has testified. Very briefly via video link from Gloucestershire, England, to the courtroom in Virginia. She wears a white blouse with a black blazer. Loose hair, clear eyes. And no. Johnny didn’t push me down the stairs back in Jamaica. “We left the room, Johnny ahead of me. It had been raining and when I left the room I slipped down the stairs. I hurt my back and screamed in pain and didn’t know what happened to me.”
But Johnny, the rescuer, was there immediately: “He fell back to help me, carried me to my room and arranged for medical help”. Depp’s lawyer Ben Chew asked the British witness: “Did Mr. Depp push you down the stairs in any way?” Moss replied “No”. After a few minutes, the prominent witness was released after just a few minutes. Heard’s legal team is refraining from cross-examination.
So far, so banal. A long-ago event in the late ’90s. This was only allowed to become relevant to the process because Amber Heard had referred to it in a statement about a completely different staircase scene. Even then with Kate there would have been violence on the stairs. But it hasn’t. That is established, confirmed under oath.
Once again, Amber Heard is there as a hysterical fib aunt – and the growing Depp Army has always known it. Hundreds of Johnny disciples line the corridors of the Fairfax Justice Center to pay homage to a bad boy who is said to have done no wrong. In an essay on the process, the “New York Times” analyzed that this furore on social media led to the temporary “death of #MeToo”. Across platforms, “a humiliation on an industrial scale” would have set in against Amber Heard. In all its seemingly artificial tragedy, and with all the contradictions, it would be the opposite of the “perfect victim”. Fairfax becomes the #MeToo backlash in the very top cabin.
Heard accused Johnny Depp of domestic violence in her 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post. Without explicitly naming her, she sent his career down a steep descent. Everything fake!? He, really a runt? You, an ambition-eating fabric of lies? Is it about truth or is it about mutual revenge?
The last day of the trial before the closing arguments on Friday will also bring expert reports and counter-reports. Details that can probably only tip the scales of justice.
One would like to wish the two a “Children, let that shit go”. A Solomonic verdict in the truest sense of the word in this bossy slaughterhouse would perhaps boil down this intimate madness back to normal.
The multi-million sums called up correspond to the show character of the entire event. But neither does Depp really need the 50 million defamation damages. Heard will still get 100 million in return. Even in the wild US judicial system, the trial represents a brilliant display of narcissism. It is to be wished for the jury and judge Penney Azcarate that they will take the steam out of an undignified spectacle with a cool placet.