Depp v. Heard and the Current State of English Jurisprudence

Can men get a fair, impartial trial in England if they are accused by a woman?

As the American Civil Liberties Union’s serving ‘Ambassador for women’s rights with a focus on gender-based violence’, we might have thought that Amber Heard was an upstanding citizen. A UN ‘Human Rights Champion’, we could have believed she was a proponent of equality and transparency. Unfortunately for her, she has now been found to have maliciously lied about being abused by her former husband, Johnny Depp. 

The jury’s unanimous proclamation of Depp’s innocence in Virginia on June 1st followed a six-week trial that was broadcast to the world. It was not the first trial of its kind involving the Pirates of the Caribbean star; in 2020, Judge Andrew Nicol of the High Court of England and Wales found that 12 of the 14 incidents of alleged violence against Heard at the hand of Depp—originally revealed by the UK tabloid The Sun—were “true,” despite all being adjudicated last week by the Virginia jury.

The question thus arises as to how something can be judged true in one jurisdiction and false in another, and the answer to that question demonstrates the importance of jury trials. 

As Lord Devlin once explained, trial by jury “is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.” Whereas judges can be ‘trained’ out of common sense judgement, or allow their privileged presuppositions of class and sex to inform their determinations, the jury knows what life is like in the ‘real world’. In the ‘real world’, oaths matter, and once a person has lied under oath they cannot be trusted anymore. 

However, like Mr Justice Caulfield’s favourable treatment of the “fragrant” Lady Archer for her false testimony in her husband's libel battle with the Daily Star, the besotted Judge Nicol in 2020 simply applied the power of his position to injudiciously downgrade evidence ‘against’ and upgrade evidence ‘for’:

“In my view, no great weight is to be put on these alleged admissions by Ms Heard to aggressive violent behaviour … Mr Sherborne [for Mr Depp] submitted that it was significant that Ms Heard had originally given a different date for Incident II and that she and her sister had been caught out in a lie … He submitted that I should therefore conclude that there was no assault by Mr Depp on Ms Heard as she had alleged in Incident II. Mr Sherborne in his closing submissions referred to other alterations in the details of this incident. I was not persuaded by this submission. I accept Ms Heard's explanation for how she originally came to give the date of 8th March. Ms Heard said that Mr Depp inflicted a number of assaults on her in March 2013; only one is pleaded, but I accept that is why in some respects Ms Heard's account was confused … relating to the Judge's rejection of the evidence of an LAPD officer who had attended the scene shortly after incident 14… which contradicted the account of Ms Heard and another witness … The Judge did not accept the officer's evidence.”

Unlike the Virginia jury, who seem to have taken Mr Depp’s frank openness around his drug and alcohol consumption as indicative of his inherent truthfulness, Judge Nicols leapt upon it to infer guilt for totally different crimes:

“There are several instances of Mr Depp acknowledging … that he had been out of control through drink and drugs and had behaved very badly. He does not explicitly admit acts of assault against Ms Heard, but again the Judge regarded the admissions as making it more plausible that he did in fact commit such acts.”

This leads us to the question of how the British justice system has become so vehemently disassociated with common sense. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC’s) woefully biased coverage of the trial accidentally allowed media lawyer Mark Stephens to let the cat out of the bag. He suggested, without any sense of irony, that Mr Depp had employed a strategy of “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender (‘Darvo’),” and UK judges have been trained to identify this. In other words, British Judges and lawyers have been trained to believe whoever makes the first accusation of domestic abuse; counter-claims and even admissions of guilt are inherently unreliable, and the accused’s evidence thus should be treated with disdain:

“In the UK trial, Mr Stephens said the judge recognised that [‘Darvo’] strategy, and dismissed a lot of the evidence that did not directly address whether Mr Depp committed assault or not … Lawyers and judges tend not to fall for [‘Darvo’], but it's very, very effective against juries.”

It became obvious as the evidence unfolded in Virginia that ‘Darvo’ was indeed applied in this matter. In this case, however, it was not employed by Depp, but Ms Heard. As witness after witness was paraded in front of the jury to contradict her evidence, she floundered into making ever-more severe and preposterous allegations in a vain attempt to swim her way out of the quicksand she had created. The Jury was not fooled by this attempt at ‘Darvo’, the strategy of which was described by feminist psychologist Jennifer Frey as:

“The attack will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable ... [T]he offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. The figure and ground are completely reversed ... The offender is on the offence and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defence”

It was not only Ms Heard to be debunked by the evidence presented at trial, but also her ‘witnesses’ (or ‘flying monkeys’, in the vernacular of the domestically abused). Ms Heard’s acting coach, Chrissy Sexton, had swayed Judge Nicols in 2020 with her testimony about the Hicksville trailer park, describing the trailer as “pretty messed up” with the damage encompassing “more than just a broken wall light.” However, the mere $62 damage bill for the light fitting, and the absence of any other damage, was confirmed in Virginia by the testimony of the owner of the park, Mr Knight.

Such ‘Darvo’ strategies by Ms Heard & Co. were clear from the recorded tapes that Judge Nicol disregarded. Far from being trained to recognise ‘Darvo’, Judge Nicol actively suppressed its exposure.

Faced with such negligence, one may presume that judicial training in the UK is either plainly deficient or explicitly biased against men. Between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of domestic abuse is bidirectional, and between 67 per cent and 90 per cent of abused men cite false allegations to authorities as a hallmark of coercive or controlling behaviours used by women against them. Men are far less likely to report the domestic abuse they receive, so it will be inevitable that a female abuser will be the ‘first past the post’ to report abuse. 

With both the revelation that UK Judges have been trained to believe that ‘reporting first’ is indicative of innocence, as Mr Stephens and the BBC helpfully explained, and the fact that male victims are unlikely to report their victimisation until they are forced to rebut a report made against them, we can presume that a male victim of domestic abuse is unlikely to receive a fair hearing in the UK.

The English judiciary has been embarrassed by the US trial and publicly exposed as mere social activists in barrister’s wigs. The experience of countless men is that the English judiciary, Crown Prosecution Service, and police forces are at least complicit and sometimes gleeful participants in domestic abuse cases against men perpetrated by means of false and vexatious allegations.

In the UK, Ms Heard is safe in the knowledge that she will not face investigation for perjury or contempt of court for lying under oath. Unlike the Australian justice system which is pursuing her for her perjury about a different matter, the English Court of Appeals went so far as to reject Mr Depp’s appeal, which contended that her lies under oath had been exposed by the counter-evidence posed in Virginia. The message from the English bench is clear:

“Ladies, please, just lie to us! We are on your side.”