Johnny Depp Saving Courtney Love’s Life Actually Has Nothing to Do With Amber Heard

That Love’s very personal account of her supportive relationship with Depp is being weaponized by Depp supporters builds upon a frustrating pattern. Individual women’s testimonies about positive experiences with a man are all too often used to discredit women who say they were harmed by him. Numerous women who went to prep school with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 signed a letter stating that he didn’t assault them, as if their individual experiences with him somehow automatically rendered Dr. Christine Blasey Ford a liar. Last November, Dakota Johnson bemoaned how Armie Hammer and Shia LaBeouf, both accused of domestic violence, had been victimized by “cancel culture,” citing her individual positive experiences working with them as iron-clad proof of their innocence.

The unspoken idea here is that if a man didn’t abuse every single woman he’s ever encountered in his entire life, it then follows that he’s never abused any woman. This “logic” is only ever applied to gender-based violence cases and not any other crime or form of harm.

And of course, it’s not just women’s positive testimonies about men who are accused of abuse that are used to discredit other women’s allegations. Fellow famous men like Paul Bettany to Fantastic Beasts director David Yates have stood by Depp, citing how they, as individuals, have only ever witnessed Depp being a stand-up guy, and have never personally seen him hit a woman. Cool!

All people—men, women, anyone—with personal relationships to someone who’s been accused of abuse might naturally be inclined to universalize their individual experience with them. However, that’s not how the world and human relationships work. As the old adage goes, people contain multitudes; the same person who may have been extraordinarily kind to you, perhaps even saved your life, can be abusive to someone else. It’s entirely human to want to feel like you know who someone truly is—but that should never have any bearing on appraising whether a woman or man who says she or he has been harmed is credible, or whether a woman or man accused of harm is held accountable.

Love’s bizarre commentary insinuating that Heard is using the feminist movement for personal gain is also really… something. Certainly, no one accused the male crew member who sued Depp in 2018 for punching him on a film set of “using feminism” for personal gain. No one blinked at the allegation or had anything to say about the crew member’s history of any mental illness, whether he’d ever allegedly had an affair with James Franco, or his sexual history. Our culture reserves that level of innately sexist scrutiny exclusively for allegations of gender-based violence.

Despite Love’s suggestion that “queer feminist intersectional spaces” have contributed to a society in which women like Heard can lie about sexual violence for personal gain, the real problem remains that sexual violence is vastly underreported. And seeing how women who do come forward about deeply traumatic experiences, like, say, being sexually assaulted with a liquor bottle, are treated by the public doesn’t exactly encourage survivors to report their assaults.