Yeah, it’s not really a question of what WashPost Media Critic dude Erik Wemple had been drinking, but rather how much, and, judging by his recent offering, Depp-Heard case hinged on the world’s worst #MeToo op-ed, I’d say a good two liters at a minimum.
It’s true that I beat Erik to the post, so to speak, by almost a month with my piece Who got f*cked the hardest in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation suit, the Washington Post, Elon Musk, or the ACLU?— taking a bit of a risk, if I do say so myself, by running the article before the verdict on the latest Johnny/Amber set-to took place—but by waiting, Erik was able to take advantage of the adverse verdict—adverse to poor Amber, of course, who, by “writing” the post ended up shitting her own bed, so to speak, as did the Post by publishing it. And take advantage of it Erik did, writing with what one can call almost obscene relish while depicting his employer’s journalistic humiliation in painful detail, sneering at the Post for running an op-ed from a celebrity describing herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse” without ever claiming, in the article, that she had suffered domestic abuse:
The op-ed underlying all this madness [at the trial] was an assault, too — against journalism. It embraced a cliched op-ed design, that of deploying public figures to braid their personal experiences with policy prescriptions. “I was exposed to abuse at a very young age,” reads the piece’s opening. “I knew certain things early on, without ever having to be told.”
In other words, she knew things without ever, you know, “knowing” them? Say what? The purpose of all this innuendo, Erick points out, is that Amber, the American Civil Liberties Union, who actually wrote most of the piece, and the Post itself were all expecting Post readers to know that Amber had, in numerous other venues, repeatedly accused former hubbie Johnny Depp of beating her. But Amber didn’t say that in the Post itself, of course, and neither did the Post. Hey, what’s wrong with a little innuendo at the expense of a major cokehead like Johnny, especially when it’s going to sell papers, and movies (the op-ed came out, surprisingly enough, at the same time as the premiere of Amber’s latest, Aquaman) not to mention maybe rustle up a few bucks for the totally woke (and, according to Lara Bazelon, totally lost) ACLU?
In fact, one can say that Erik does the Post a huge favor by not pointing out that the Post actively cooperated in the promotion of Aquaman by illustrating the December 18, 2018 op-ed with a glamor shot of Amber in an elegant scaly green aqua ensemble with the following caption: ‘Amber Heard arrives at the premiere of “Aquaman” on Dec. 12 in Los Angeles.’ And one can say that he also did Elon Musk a favor by not mentioning that star-struck Elon coughed up $500,000 to help cover for the fact that Amber hadn’t bothered to come through with the $3.5 mil she had “promised” the ACLU after getting $7 mil from Johnny following their breakup, even though, according to one witness, Amber told him she was just “filling space” with Elon. “He wants space? I’ll give it to him!” (Amber didn’t say that.)
I’m afraid that Amber is seriously starting to look like the hustler hustled, though, all snark aside, I can say that I honestly do feel sorry for her. Despite some pretty striking gamesgalship on her part, no one deserves to be the recipient of the sort of neurotic hatred now coursing through the Internet, which will probably set a record for misogynistic stupidity that will not easily be broken. “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” observed Henry David Thoreau some years ago. Unfortunately, these days it’s not so quiet.
