约翰尼·德普诽谤案与厌女狂热
There are ambiguities in the sordid conflict between the divorced actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, but some things are clear.
已离婚的演员夫妇约翰尼·德普和安珀·赫德之间的丑恶冲突中存在模糊不清之处,但有些事情是明确的。
Depp texted a friend that he wanted to kill Heard and then have sex with “her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she is dead.” There is a video of Depp smashing kitchen cabinets while Heard tries to calm him, saying, at one point, “All I did was say ‘sorry’!” In an audio recording, she tells him to go put his “cigarettes out on someone else,” and he responded, “Shut up, fat ass.”
德普给一个朋友发短信说,他想杀了赫德,然后和“她烧焦的尸体”发生性关系,以确保她已经死了。在一段视频中,德普砸了厨房橱柜,赫德试图让他平静下来,说,“我只是说了句‘对不起’!”在一段录音中,她让他“把烟头按在别人身上”,他回答说,“闭嘴,肥婆。”
He admitted to head-butting her, though he said it was an accident. When Heard went to court to get a domestic violence restraining order against Depp, she had a bruise on her cheekbone from where she said he threw a phone at her.
他承认用头撞她,但他说那是意外。当赫德去法院申请针对德普的家庭暴力限制令时,她的颧骨上有一块淤青,她说那是德普向她扔手机造成的。
In 2018, The Sun, a British newspaper, called Depp a “wife beater,” and he sued for libel. Proving libel is much easier in Britain than in the United States, because there the burden of proof rests with the defendant. Depp lost his case. A judge, evaluating 14 incidents of Depp’s alleged abuse of Heard, found that 12 of them had occurred and concluded that The Sun’s words were “substantially true.”
2018年,英国报纸《太阳报》称德普“打老婆”,德普以诽谤罪起诉该报。在英国要证明诽谤比在美国容易得多,因为英国的举证责任在于被告。德普输了官司。法官在评估德普涉嫌虐待赫德的14起事件后,发现其中12起确实发生了,并得出结论,称《太阳报》的话“基本属实”。
Now Depp is suing Heard in Virginia for $50 million, saying that she defamed him when she described herself, in a Washington Post opinion essay that didn’t mention Depp, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” His case seems absurd, since even if he were entirely innocent, the British verdict was well known, and Heard was referring to what she symbolized, not what she allegedly endured. (She is countersuing for $100 million.)
现在德普在弗吉尼亚州起诉赫德,要求后者赔偿5000万美元,称赫德在《华盛顿邮报》发表的一篇没有点名提到德普的评论文章中声称她自己是“代表了家暴的公众人物”,他声称这是对自己的诽谤。他的案子看起来很荒谬,因为即使他是完全无辜的,英国的判决也已经众所周知,赫德指的也是她所象征的东西,而不是她据称所承受的东西。(她进行反诉,要求赔偿1亿美元。)
If Depp somehow prevails, one can expect similar lawsuits against other women who say they’ve survived abuse. Already, the singer Marilyn Manson has filed a defamation suit against his ex-fiancée Evan Rachel Wood, one of several women who have accused him of sexual violence.
如果德普以某种方式获胜,人们可以想见,其他自称从性侵中幸存下来的女性也会面临类似的诉讼。歌手玛丽莲·曼森已经对他的前未婚妻埃文·蕾切尔·伍德提起了诽谤诉讼,后者是指控他性暴力的几名女性之一。
But Depp needn’t succeed in court to achieve his ends. In a 2016 email to his former agent, Christian Carino, Depp wrote that Heard was “begging for total global humiliation.” Now this televised trial has resulted in an explosion of hatred and derision directed at her. The volatile actress — who at times was violent toward Depp, and who never made good on a promise to donate her entire divorce settlement to charity — is very far from a perfect victim. That made her the perfect object of a #MeToo backlash.
但是德普并不需要在法庭上取得成功就能达到他的目的。在2016年给他的前经纪人克里斯蒂安·卡里诺的一封电子邮件中,德普写道,赫德“上赶着想丢脸丢到全世界去”。现在,这场电视直播的审判导致了大量针对她的仇恨和嘲笑。这位反复无常的女演员——她有时对德普很暴力,也从来没有兑现把她的全部离婚财产捐给慈善机构的承诺——远非完美受害者。这让她成为了反击“#我也是”(#MeToo)运动的完美对象。
Online, there’s a level of industrial-scale bullying directed at Heard that puts all previous social media pile-ons to shame. Countless videos skewer Heard on TikTok; the ’NSync member Lance Bass joined in the trend of mockingly re-enacting her testimony. A makeup brand even took part in the anti-Heard melee, posting a TikTok video meant to contradict her lawyer’s description of how she covered up bruises. Meanwhile, every platform appears to be full of adoring pro-Depp memes. “Why Does It Seem Like the Entire Internet Is Team Johnny Depp?” said a Vice headline.
网络上出现了针对赫德的一轮大规模霸凌,让所有之前的社交媒体围攻都相形见绌。无数视频在TikTok上嘲笑赫德,“超级男孩”成员兰斯·巴斯也加入了这一潮流,以嘲讽的口吻重现她的证词。甚至有一个化妆品牌参与了这场反对赫德的混战,发布了一个TikTok视频,旨在反驳她的律师对她如何掩盖瘀伤的描述。与此同时,每个平台似乎都有大量支持德普的米姆。“为什么整个互联网似乎都是约翰尼·德普的团队?”《Vice》杂志的文章标题写道。
But it’s not just the internet. “Believe all women, except Amber Heard,” Chris Rock joked recently. A “Saturday Night Live” sketch last weekend turned one of Depp’s wildest accusations against Heard into a skit, treating her as a figure of ridicule and him as a charming scamp.
但还不仅限于互联网。克里斯·洛克最近开玩笑说:“相信所有女人,除了安珀·赫德。”上周末,《周六夜现场》中的一个节目把德普对赫德最疯狂的指控之一变成了小品,把她塑造成一个应该嘲笑的人物,把他塑造成一个迷人的捣蛋鬼。
This doesn’t mean that the case is entirely straightforward. Heard has admitted hitting Depp, and has been recorded insulting and belittling him. The couple’s marital counselor testified that they engaged in “mutual abuse,” saying of Heard, “It was a point of pride to her, if she felt disrespected, to initiate a fight.”
这并不意味着此案的是非曲直是一目了然的。赫德承认打了德普,并有录像表明她对他进行侮辱和贬低。这对夫妇的婚姻咨询师作证说,他们“互相虐待”,并在谈到赫德时说,“如果她感到不受尊重,就会挑起一场争吵,这对她来说是一件值得骄傲的事情。”
Some domestic violence experts consider mutual abuse a myth, arguing that while both partners in a toxic relationship can behave terribly, one usually exercises power over the other. But even if you believe that Heard acted inexcusably, the idea that she was the primary aggressor — against a larger man with far more resources who was recorded cursing at her for daring to speak in an “authoritative” way — defies logic.
一些家庭暴力专家认为,相互虐待是一种错误观念,他们认为,在一段有害的关系中,虽然双方都可能表现得很糟糕,但通常是一方对另一方施加权力。但是,即使你认为赫德的行为不可原谅,但她面对的是一个拥有更多资源、身材更高的男人,这个男人因为她胆敢以“权威”的方式说话而咒骂她,因此被记录在案,因此,认为她是主要攻击者的想法是不合逻辑的。
Indeed, one of the most salacious details from the trial — the one that’s been used to jeer at Heard across every form of media — might just as easily fit into a story of her victimization. Depp, you may know by now, accused Heard or one of her friends of defecating in her bed as an act of revenge, and his bodyguard said she’d confessed to a prank gone wrong. Heard testified that one of their dogs, incontinent since eating Depp’s weed as a puppy, defiled the bed. “It was not really a jovial time, and I don’t think that’s funny, period,” she said. “That’s disgusting.”
事实上,审判中最不堪的细节之一——就是被各种媒体用来嘲笑赫德的那个——可能很容易融入她受害的故事中。你现在可能已经知道了,德普指控赫德或她的一个朋友在她床上大便以示报复,他的保镖说她承认是想恶作剧但出了岔子。赫德作证说,他们的一只狗小时候吃了德普的大麻一直失禁,因此弄脏了床。“那真不是什么愉快的时光,我不认为那有什么好笑的,就这样,”她说。“太恶心了。”
If she’s telling the truth, one has to marvel at how thoroughly Depp and his team have sullied her name. When Depp testified, the hashtags #AmberTurd and #MePoo shot across the internet. The image of Heard, a woman whose brand is bombshell blond glamour, is now linked, perhaps permanently, to excrement. If she’s not a psychopath, she’s the casualty of a truly sadistic reputational hit job.
如果她说的是实话,人们不得不惊叹德普和他的团队是如何彻底地玷污了她的名声。德普作证时,#AmberTurd(安珀屎德)和#MePoo(我也屎)的标签传遍了网络。赫德的形象,一个以金发性感魅力为标志的女人,现在被永久与粪便联系在一起。如果她不是心理变态,那她就的确是被污蔑为虐待狂的受害者。
It’s worth noting that in 2020, Bot Sentinel, a group that tracks online disinformation and harassment, was hired by Heard’s lawyers to analyze the social media campaign against her. “Everyone thinks that any activity against them is bots or whatever,” the group’s founder, Chris Bouzy, told me. But in this case, some of it was — Bouzy estimated that there were 340 “inauthentic” Twitter accounts devoted to defaming Heard and amplifying petitions calling for her to be fired from acting and modeling gigs. “A small number of accounts can drive conversations on Twitter,” he said.
值得注意的是,2020年,赫德的律师聘请了追踪网络虚假信息和骚扰的组织“机器人哨兵”,来分析针对她的社交媒体宣传活动。“每个人都认为任何针对他们的活动都是机器人之类的,”该组织的创始人克里斯·布齐告诉我。但在赫德这件事上,有些活动确实是机器人干的——布齐估计,有340个“不真实”的Twitter帐户致力于诽谤赫德,并大量转发关于封杀她的表演和模特活动的请愿。“一小部分帐户就可以推动Twitter上的对话,”他说。
Yet even if trolls and bots helped juice anti-Heard mania, there are obviously plenty of real people participating in it. Some of them are obsessive Depp fans; as Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in The Atlantic, there’s a history of online communities fixating “on theories that the male objects of their fandom were being manipulated and tortured by less-famous, female romantic partners.”
不过,即使喷子和机器人帮助激发了反赫德的狂热,显然还有很多真人参与其中。他们中的一些人是德普的忠实粉丝;正如凯特琳·蒂夫尼在《大西洋月刊》上所写的那样,网络社区一直坚持“他们的男性崇拜对象被不那么出名的女性伴侣操纵和折磨的理论”。
There seems, however, to be a broader misogynist frenzy at work, one characteristic of the deeply reactionary moment we’re living through. “She will hit the wall hard!!!” Depp wrote in the email to Carino. Looks like he knew his audience.
然而,似乎有一种更广泛的厌女狂热在起作用,这是我们正在经历的极端反动时刻的一个特征。“她会狠狠碰一鼻子灰!!!”德普在给卡里诺的邮件中写道。看起来他很了解自己的受众。