What if I'm wrong that Heard has less social and cultural power? Pardon me while I again snort with derision. What kind of imaginary fairy land do you inhabit? And it wasn't her op ed piece that lost him jobs - it was decades of his unstable, clearly substance abusing behavior. That may have been the last straw, but no studio is going to just cut lose a major star because they have a conscience - particularly not on they say so of one rather unimportant woman. C'mon now, you know better than that.
Money is what counts, up to and unless the cash cow becomes such a liability that it no longer pays to keep them around. The complaints of one minor starlet are not enough to bring down the career of a mega-watt star of the likes of Depp all by herself. Reminding you once again that it took 60 women to bring down Cosby and dozens to bring down Weinstein. And you're right, there weren't hordes of men clamoring to support those guys, but there were hordes of men there to demonize and shame the women who accused them (which amounts to the same thing).
Kobe Bryant publicly apologized to the woman that he harmed, and she still got demonized and called all sorts of names, even in the face of his admission of problematic behavior. That's the world we live in - not one where powerful men are routinely taken to task for acting badly.
Heard being an imperfect victim, her potentially having her own issues (which you ought to know better than to try to diagnose from your armchair) - none of that erases or discounts his clearly documented abusiveness. She didn't put those bruises on her own face. If he wants to counter-sue her for abuse, he should go ahead, but what he's suing her for is defamation - for essentially saying what happened to her and that it wasn't true. But it is true - even if she was in turn exhibiting bad behavior at times as well. Her being also being an unstable person does not negate what he did to her.
This fairy story that powerful men have their lives and careers ruined by one woman who falsely accuse them of things just doesn't hold any water in reality -and it's completely misogynistic. We have dozens of examples of how that just doesn't actually happen. Every once in a while there's a case of that happening to an everyday Joe - I'm not saying that false accusations never occur or never have any impact, but they are rare, and they never, ever actually cause anything but a small blip in the lives of powerful men. Within the year, they are back to life as usual even when they admit that they did something wrong.
I've never once said that one of them is good and the other evil. In fact, I specifically spoke out about that sort of zero-sum binary thinking. But when you boil this down, it's him suing her for saying that he did exactly what he did, and that there is ample proof that he did. It's punishing a victim for not keeping quiet, and trying to justify that because she's also got some issues. She doesn't have to be a good person to not deserve to be abused. She doesn't have to have perfect mental health in order to be able to speak about that and how it impacted and affected her. As I've already said, if he wants to try to come after her for ways that she was potentially abusive to him, he should, but that doesn't erase or cancel out what he did.
Her accountability is not achieved by releasing him from his and the fact that you and so many others seem to believe that it is shows a shocking lack of both fairness and understanding of the law. It's not libel if the accusations are in fact true. And based on the tapes of his own words, they are true. That is the only thing that should matter here.
