Why Are So Many Survivors Supporting Johnny Depp?
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Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard has captured an unparalleled amount of attention, with millions of people taking to social media to share their opinions about the case. But they aren’t always taking the side you might expect. Over the past few weeks, many survivors who championed believing women during the #MeToo movement are now some of Johnny Depp’s most outspoken supporters.
Why is this happening?
As much as Heard’s critics might want us to believe that she lost (some) survivors’ support because she is a liar or a “bad victim,” it’s actually pretty common for women to doubt other women, even if they, too, have experienced violence.
To understand this, it’s crucial to remember that survivors are not a monolith. Perpetrators do not select victims based on their political beliefs, and experiencing violence is not always a radicalizing event for women. In fact, one of the reasons violence is such a powerful tool in maintaining the patriarchy is that it reinforces traditional gender norms. This is especially true for women who already hold traditional gender values themselves.
In my own work, I have interviewed a lot of conservative survivors. They are quick to insist I should believe them, but not other victims, especially if those victims fail to meet white feminine ideals like chastity or subservience to men’s authority. Once, a conservative participant in my research emailed me a Jordan Peterson video and urged me to join in his argument that most survivors were promiscuous women who regretted participating in hook-up culture. To her, the injustice of her sexual assault wasn’t a loss of bodily autonomy but rather that a woman like her—a white conservative who had followed the rules—was the one violated. Disbelieving other victims did not conflict with her own narrative of victimization. In fact, she felt righteous in her anger that other women’s stories of sexual assault threatened her credibility.
Survivors who hold these ideologies are often elevated by men’s rights activists. They use sexist women to legitimize their movement, especially against the critique that they are misogynist or hateful. It’s the reason so many of these groups sympathetic to this philosophy are (at least symbolically) headed by women; it is harder to convince the general public that stripping women of our rights is sexist when Betsy DeVos or Amy Coney Barrett is the face of the decision. As a result, sexist women’s voices travel much farther than those of the many survivors promoting feminism. And that power is one of the tangible benefits of being a sexist woman, which conservative women accept as a trade-off for never being equal.
Of course, not all survivors #StandingWithJohnnyDepp are conservative. There are other dynamics at play that span the political spectrum. Specifically, survivors are experts in their experiences, but they are not necessarily experts in all experiences of gender-based violence. Still, many survivors see their own experiences as universal and rank the credibility of other victims’ stories based on how similar they are to their own.
This is a problem. The tactics perpetrators use to perpetrate are varied and often reflect the privileges they—and their victims—hold. Victims, too, react differently to violence based on the resources they have to resist. When survivors universalize their experiences, they struggle to empathize with victims who do not share their positionality in society. We saw this dynamic on display during the #MeToo movement as wealthy white women’s stories dominated the media cycle, as if those experiences represented every survivor. But they didn’t. And the result was that the gains of #MeToo have not necessarily extended to women of color or to poverty- and working-class women whose stories are still untold and whose experiences are still misunderstood.
Even when survivors see elements of their own story in another survivor’s narrative, they may still attempt to distance themselves by looking for tiny differences in how they navigated violence. And to do so, they rely on something scholars call the “just-world hypothesis.”
The just-world hypothesis is the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people—or that the world is fundamentally just. And, strangely, people are most likely to invoke the just-world hypothesis when the reality before them is unfair. It’s a way of denying the inequalities in our society, especially when they make us feel threatened.
In rape trials, women jurors invoke the just-world hypothesis because they are overwhelmed by the ubiquity and unpredictability of sexual violence. It is terrifying to empathize with the survivor because it requires women to confront the possibility that they could be the next victim. Instead, women look for reasons to believe they are different from the survivor as a way to calm their fears and convince themselves that they are safe as long as they make “better choices.” As part of this process, they may also focus their attention on empathizing with the perpetrator, which is less psychologically distressing than reckoning with violence. It is counterintuitive, but it can feel like an act of self-preservation in the moment. When problems feel too big for us to control, we often turn to denial to cope.
For all of these reasons, it isn’t surprising that so many survivors are taking Johnny Depp’s side. It is completely consistent with the scientific literature on how (some) women navigate a patriarchal society in which violence against women is common. But that doesn’t make it any less painful for other survivors whose experiences are mocked and scrutinized in the process.
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