Johnny Depp’s Spectacular Self-Demolition

I n 1895, Oscar Wilde had his boyfriend’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, arrested for accurately suggesting that Wilde was a homosexual. Forced to prove that Wilde was indeed a “somdomite,” as Queensberry had put it in the misspelled note that sparked a chain reaction of misery, Queensberry’s lawyers lined up testimony from several young men who had had sex with Wilde. The evidence not only vindicated Queensberry but damned Wilde: Though it was seldom prosecuted, gay sex was illegal in Victorian England, and for many years thereafter. Her Majesty’s prosecutors had little choice but to follow through on the evidence yielded by the first trial and put Wilde himself in the dock. Convicted of gross indecency, he wound up in a filthy jail cell for two years of hard labor. By the time he emerged, the prancing japester of the era was a broken husk, and he died three years after that.

The Oscar Wilde of our times is Johnny Depp: a fantastically talented yet unimaginably self-deluding fool who has, for the second time in two years, demanded a trial that he is sure to lose, and which is sure to further disgrace him. Like Wilde, he should have declined to make himself a public spectacle and simply gone back to work. We can only hope Depp’s fate is not as dire as Wilde’s.

In late 2018, when the #MeToo movement was still flooding the media and entertainment with the molten lava of accusations, Depp’s former wife Amber Heard published an op-ed in which she contended that Hollywood had turned against her because she “spoke out against sexual violence.” Four days later, Depp was fired from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie that Disney was then developing. (The movie has still not been made.)

If Depp had simply allowed the moment to blow over, he could have recovered. Hollywood understands better than most institutions that relationships can be complicated. The situation appeared to have been resolved by the couple’s divorce settlement, at which point Heard dropped a restraining order against Depp and the pair issued a conciliatory joint statement that appeared to turn down the heat on the dispute: “Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love. Neither party has made false accusations for financial gain. There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm.”

After a suitable period of benign forgetting, the industry likely would have concluded that people locked in an unhappy marriage sometimes treat each other abominably and let Depp gradually rebuild his reputation. Warner Bros. remained willing to work with Depp on its successor to the Harry Potter series, the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

Then, in 2020, Depp conjured up the most sensational celebrity trial since O. J. Simpson’s. Stupidly suing the London tabloid newspaper the Sun for having called him a wife-beater, Depp appeared on the stand, as did Heard, and the two of them peeled back the veil on their tempestuous association with a series of shocking, humiliating, degrading, and not infrequently hilarious revelations. One of the world’s biggest movie stars made himself a laughingstock. British libel laws are much more favorable to plaintiffs than American ones, but even so, the judge could hardly do otherwise than rule the Sun vindicated. By bringing his sordid story out of the realm of tabloid gossip and into the bright light of official acknowledgment in London’s High Court, Depp made the situation a hundred times worse.

Depp came out of it as badly scarred as Edward Scissorshands with a case of full-body eczema.

Immediately after the judge’s decision, Warner Bros. fired Depp from Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore (which is just now hitting screens), replacing him with Mads Mikkelsen. Depp has not worked on a major studio project since playing the title role in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018. Last year, he told the Sunday Times (the Sun’s sister newspaper) that he was thinking about “Hollywood’s boycott of, erm, me? One man, one actor in an unpleasant and messy situation, over the last number of years? . . . But, you know, I’m moving towards where I need to go to make all that . . . to bring things to light.”

Bad idea. Really, spectacularly bad idea. The shade of Oscar Wilde screams: “Don’t ‘bring things to light’ that are better left in the dark.”

This week, Depp is appearing in the Fairfax County Courthouse in Virginia to sue Heard for defamation. His chances of success this time are negligible. Depp’s claim that Heard libeled him in a Washington Post op-ed is absurd. The piece in question not only didn’t mention Depp, it didn’t even discuss him. The closest thing to a reference to him is this sentence: “Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” It’s clearly true that she “became a public figure representing domestic abuse,” and Depp won’t be able to demonstrate otherwise. The rest of the piece is about Heard’s experiences before she met Depp, her complaints about the entertainment industry, media persecution, Donald Trump, federal legislation, etc. Proving that Heard was making a false and malicious claim about him will not be possible. His prospects of winning the case are roughly zero.

And the chances that even more salacious and embarrassing gossip about him will emerge? One hundred percent. Heard’s list of exhibits includes texts between Depp and his friend, the actor Paul Bettany, in which the pair made ghastly jokes (previously made public in the London proceeding) about murdering Heard. In court, dark jokes about burning and drowning people tend not to come across as amusing.

Depp’s suit predictably caused a Queensberry-like counterattack. Heard launched a suit of her own against Depp while her lawyers alleged that he “regularly abused Amber Heard — both physically and emotionally — through much of their relationship.” Depp has ripped open a scab that Heard seemed willing to allow to heal when they announced their divorce.

The trial is expected to drag on for six or seven unspeakably salacious weeks. Like Wilde before him, Depp is stringing up his reputation like a tabloid piñata. J. Ben Rottenborn, a lawyer for Heard, can hardly believe his good fortune: “Mr Depp’s team is going to try to turn this case into a soap opera,” he said in court. “Why, I’m not sure, because the evidence isn’t pretty for Mr. Depp.” Indeed not, as we have already seen in the London trial. For reasons understood only by himself, Captain Jack is making himself walk the plank.