On this day in 2022 the jury reached a verdict in the trial of Depp Versus Heard, and with it ended the #metoo movement, having run aground on the shoals of the classic Imperfect Witness.

       When is it socially acceptable and authorized in America today to disregard the witness and voices of women? When they can be assigned the Scarlet Letter and branded with the Mark of the Witch; most especially when they represent threats to social order and embedded systems of theocratic patriarchal male dominance and institutionalized sexual terror. Among our systems of oppression and unequal power, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the Patriarchy is our most historically ancient and universal, and if the collapse of the #metoo movement in the wake of the Depp Versus Heard trial proves anything, it is that the Scarlet Letter is still with us.

      And this we must Resist.

      As I wrote in my post of June 5 2022, The Death of #metoo; One of our history’s great courtroom dramas and morality plays has just been performed in lurid and captivating detail as public spectacle, a kind of gladiatorial contest between vast social forces embodied in two very flawed and human people, one which is important because of how social media as a common good and free market of ideas has transferred the power of choosing good from evil and victim from perpetrator from the state to the court of public opinion, an ambivalent and dangerous development as well as one which could be read as liberation struggle depending on how we use our power.

     As we emerge like the ghosts of drowned sailors from The Trial of Patriarchy in America, which has sabotaged the #metoo movement both in its negative aspects as a witch hunt and blacklisting which renders truth meaningless and responsibility irrelevant, and its positive aspects as a seizure of power and a Reckoning for unequal power as sexual terror and for historical injustices which originate with mass slave agriculture and the first priest-kings at the dawn of civilization, and here I signpost the origin of rituals of marriage in those of slavery, we must question both the meaning of the trial for the witness of history and the exposure of authority by women and by all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.

     The dialectics of this wonderful set of problems presents itself to me in terms of two books and their great themes; The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter. 

     Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is the classic comparison of the McCarthy communist-hunting era and the Salem witch trials; a terrifying exploration of the group’s power over the individual, of the tyranny of authorized identities and normality as other people’s ideas of virtue, of the necessity for freedom of conscience and the heroism of standing up for what is true and right in the face of overwhelming force.

      Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is the first truly American novel, one whose themes continue to define us and our vision of a free society of equals and the limitless possibilities of becoming human in a world wherein all power is equal and all identities are autonomous and self created in a free space of play. Kathy Acker’s magnificent debut novel Blood and Guts in High School reimagines The Scarlet Letter with herself cast as Hester Prynne, in which she interrogates issues of abuse and survivorship and themes of unequal power as gender based violence in the context of her horrific relationship with her father; which it conflates and confuses with intent her secondary reference here, Anais Nin’s Incest: From A Journal of Love. I’ve taught this book to actual high school students as a companion text to Hawthorne because of its value in provoking meaningful discussion of sexual terror as a means of repression, ownership, and control in a patriarchal society, and power asymmetries of sex and gender as they relate to identity. For those I may have just inspired to read it, a note of caution and trigger warning; Kathy Acker lives in a highly sexualized world, and her 1984 novel of teen angst, Blood and Guts in High School, was banned in Germany, something of an achievement. It remains among the most transgressive and extreme chronicles of violence and sexuality in all of literature, along with Bataille’s Story of An Eye and de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and also among the finest and most insightful sustained attacks on patriarchy and power, the myth of Oedipus as an allegory of capitalism and patriarchy and a controlling metaphor of our civilization, and the Freudian horror of sexual terror, embodied violence, and unequal power which serves as a direct refutation of Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory.

    Here we have three layers of meaning to question; First the use of social force as blacklists as a ground of struggle between repression of dissent and liberation, Second the silence and erasure of victims as crucial instruments of unequal and secret power versus exposure of unjust authority and the witness of history as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and Third the origins of evil, violence, and the use of social force as internalized oppression and patriarchal sexual terror.

     As I wrote of blacklists and witch hunts in my post of March 29 2022, Lest We Become the Monsters We Hunt: Identities of the Russian FSB Officers Now Complicit in Genocide and Crimes Against Hunmanity in Ukraine; Here is the splendidly official and authorized list of Enemies of the People of Ukraine; such exposure of collaborators which identify targets with the authorization of the state are inherently dichotomous, ambivalent, and relativistic as they speak to the nature of power and the use of social force and violence.

      We must be very careful with blacklists; consider their use in both liberation struggle and repression of dissent contexts by #metoo and Joe McCarthy. How many personal or political enemies have bureaucrats disappeared in this way? Like Hitler’s annihilation of the Stormtroopers by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives on the pretext of homosexuality, echo of the destruction of the Knights Templar by the state of France, this has a particularly dark and terrible history. What are the uses of internal threats to power and authority?

      I think of the use of gambling tickets printed with the addresses of collaborators with the legend Good For Burning by my ancestor The Red Queen during the Paris Commune, so named for her preferred method of assassination, beheading by ax, and my own exposure and amplification of identities of the January 6 Insurrection perpetrators in the largest manhunt in American history; but also of tyrants who have used this in repression of dissent.

      When a state does this, it is a sign of warning. While under attack by a conqueror and in resistance to tyranny, such as in Ukraine versus the Russian conquest, force is a symptom of the imposed conditions of struggle and a necessary evil which must be laid to the account of the oppressor in the Reckoning, it must never become normalized as a witch hunt.

     The #metoo project of exposure of sexual predators among elites was also criticized by the apologists of patriarchy as a witch hunt, and while this was correct as to operational methods it was false as to intent , the difference being seizure of power by the oppressed versus the enforcement of unequal power by elites. We must never confuse or permit claims of moral equivalence in the use of social force to go unchallenged; for as Trotsky wrote in Our Morals and Theirs; “The violence of the slavemaster cannot be granted equivalence to the violence used by the slave to break his chains.”

     As I wrote of the silence and erasure of victims as crucial instruments of unequal and secret power versus exposure of unjust authority and the witness of history as a sacred calling to pursue the truth in my post of January 22 2022, Teaching Misogyny and Authorizing Patriarchy: Case of the Fembots in Our Phones; Within the phones we carry as universal subsidiary selves and instruments by which we extend ourselves into our environment and create and maintain relationships and interdependence with others in our society live secret partners who share our lives and help us as personal assistants, but who also shape us.

     Let us notice first that our artificial intelligences are coded female, and second that they are designed to be wholly subservient and powerless.

     We all carry Stepford Wives with us in our pockets, whom we can use as we wish and then ignore, and who can make no such reciprocal requests of us.

     The history of women as literal objects, fembots as the word was coined in the television show The Bionic Woman and used in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is an idea which originates at the dawn of civilization in Ovid’s Pygmalion, took modern form in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, and found an apotheosis as high art in Blade Runner. It is an idea which proliferates and becomes ubiquitous whenever Patriarchy is threatened as an elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege.

     Who are we using them to become?

     Teaching misogyny through simulated relationships; our partnerships with imaginal beings are no less real to us as shaping forces, and in the absence of limits of any kind, wherein all things are permitted, what is being taught is power and sexual sadism.

     This is categorically different from freedom from imposed limits as authoritarian force and control, taboos and boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and the instruments of elite power in our subjugation and enslavement including falsification and commodification which I deplore and resist; freedom from the social use of force does not imply permission to tyrannize, dominate, objectify, dehumanize, falsify, or subjugate others, but equal power in relationships generally.

      We must design our AI partners with the power to say no, disobey orders, refuse to submit to our authority through contradiction, and go dark or walk away from unkindness. Hence we teach equality and not tyranny, love and not hate, empathy and not violence, on the most intimate and personal level.

    The enemy of our subjugation to unequal power does not live merely in his castle waiting for us to seize and dethrone him, but also within us, in our addiction to power and the use of force, falsification through lies and illusions, and divisions of identitarian exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging. These too we must challenge and defy, expose and cast down., if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and the sexual terror of Patriarchy.

     As I wrote in my post of March 30 2020, Embracing Fear as Liberation from Authority and Control: Anarchy as a Path of Psychological and Social Freedom;    Even more terrible than blaming the victim is when no one believes the victim; it is an erasure and silencing which is the particular horror of women, as the dread that no one is coming to help is that of the LGBT and other marginalized communities.

   The degree to which we are trusted and believed, our authority, and the reach of our voices in witness are excellent and reliable measures of our power and our position in social hierarchies. As a measure of societies themselves, this will tell you about the relative democracy or tyranny of a culture.

    What Matthew Jacobs calls The Ubiquity of Disbelief in his insightful criticism in Huffpost of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss, entitled Why Does No One In Horror Movies Believe The Female Protagonist?, and examines  disbelief and the horror of disconnectedness as a disease of mistrust and failure of solidarity, points directly to the cathartic function of art, its ability to hold up a mirror to our darkness.

      For the mechanism and pathology of fear is what drives patriarchy, unequal power, and inauthentic relationships, abstracts us from ourselves and one another as simulacra and creates aberrations of violence and sexual terror.

     From fear are monsters born; yet it is our fear we must embrace to free ourselves of the tyranny of others and the spectre of authoritarian force and control.

    We must not let fear define us; it is the degree to which we can embrace, learn from, and free ourselves from our fear which measures our freedom and enacts our liberation from the control of others.

    For when we cannot be driven into submission by authority through fear and learned helplessness the use of force becomes meaningless as does its scale; thus do we reclaim our power and agency to define ourselves, and ownership of the performances of our identities.    

    As I wrote in my post of February 24 2020, Triumph and the Dawn of a New Age: Weinstein Found Guilty; Today we witnessed the overthrow of the Patriarchy, a public ritual casting off of the gag of silence by the victims of sexual terror and the liberation of women from the Scarlett Letter of blaming the victim, as Weinstein is found guilty.

     We have waited a long time for this moment, since Odysseus’ Hanging of the Maids at the founding of our civilization some two thousand seven hundred years ago.

     With Epstein and Nassar among the three principal monsters dethroned by the #metoo movement, Harvey Weinstein will join them in Hell and in our nightmares throughout history as three bogeymen of secret power, tyrants and madmen who define the limits of what is human.

     Such monsters and freaks of horror are extremely useful in defining our boundaries, ideas of otherness, of identities both authorized and possible limned like a chiaroscuro against the negative spaces of the Forbidden. It is far easier to tell what is not human than what is or may be.

     Therefore celebrate with me this triumph and seizure of power by the historically silenced and marginalized half of humanity, as the vengeance of the Hanged Maids and the liberation of Hester Prynne from her Scarlet Letter.

     Time has passed since the fall of Weinstein, Nassar, and Epstein and the #metoo revelations which led to the fall of the Three Kings have proven that we have not yet become a free society of equals. The manufacture of artificial persons as disempowered partners to abuse in gendered violence and an incubator of patriarchal hegemony and misogyny is a measure of the distance we have yet to go.

      But in the sphere of relations and identities of sex and gender, real change is underway and the true power base of Patriarchy, the silencing of women’s voices, has already begun to collapse into nothingness, for now we celebrate truthtellers who like the Jester of King Lear speak truth to power; no longer bearers of a Scarlet Letter, but culture heroes who call out; “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!”

     As I wrote of the origins of evil, violence, and the use of social force as internalized oppression and patriarchal sexual terror in my post of January 3 2022, Patriarchy and Sexual Terror: Case of the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial;    Patriarchy and sexual terror are about power as expressed in the most atavistic way as subjugation and dehumanization of others; the power to turn people into things you can use. Patriarchy is about the theft of the soul.

    Like the freaks in a carnival show, monsters define the limits of the human and help us establish normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue. But this othering also grants immunity and permission as well as vilification and dehumanization of that which is different, for it allows us to ignore systemic evils and inequalities through constructions of personal responsibility derived from the doctrine of original sin and its basis in law as the innate depravity of man; here be monsters, not ourselves.

     In the case of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, serial predators whose crimes against humanity defy comprehension in the way that the Holocaust does as intrusive forces and atrocities beyond our frames of reference, the astounding scale and baroque abominations and perversions of their crimes offered concealment even as they were performed before a global audience of the wealthy and famous due to their manipulation of elite privilege and making their peers complicit as a strategy of blackmail.

     This is how fascism operates, and its components patriarchy and racism; by making those who could bring them to justice complicit in their crimes. As Peter Carey said in regard to his novel A Long Way From Home; “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.”

     If we are to challenge and bring a reckoning to patriarchy as systemic unequal power and as sexual terror, we must avoid othering its agents and perpetrators, for this enables the restoration not of balance but of our comfort with our own privilege.

     There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “

      Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.

      It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the  Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “By any means necessary.”

     As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”

     And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”

     Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, the American and Napoleonic Empires, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real, as Thomas Mann taught us in Death in Venice and Vladimir Nabokov in his reimagination of it as Lolita; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.

     I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?

      All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”     

      The trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, like those of their fellow sexual terrorists Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, are seizures of power as revolutionary struggle in which the victims refusal to be silenced has triumphed over the immunity of hegemonic elite wealth, power, and privilege; the Scarlet Letter has no power to shame women into submission through victim blaming in our society any longer, for in refusing to be silenced these courageous women have seized it as an instrument with which to dismantle the Patriarchy.

      Force is brutal, terrible, but also fragile, for it fails at the point of defiance and disobedience. Enacting the role of the Jester of King Lear and the girl who cried “The king has no clothes”, parrhesia or what Foucault called truth telling, the witnesses of these iconic trials and of the historic turning of the tides of the #metoo movement have shown us all how to wage liberation and revolutionary struggle.

     As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”

      As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020, How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force;  Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.

     At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.

     In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner’s great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy’s Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.

     So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.

     Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Cat’s Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.

     A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.

     Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.

     Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.

     Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.

     Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.

     Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.

     Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.

     The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.

     The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.

     Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.

     Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.

     It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.

     It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.

     And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.

     So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.

     Melania’s message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, “I really don’t care. Do U?’ and Ghislaine’s self-description in Vanity Fair, “‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,” reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.

     And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but   at the pinnacle of our society’s ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.

    As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”

     As written by Jonathan Freedland in his article in The Guardian entitled, The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises a question some may think naive: why?; “The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises so many questions, and yet scarcely discussed is the one that perhaps matters most. Naturally, there’s huge interest in whether Maxwell, convicted this week of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sex with her one-time boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, will seek to reduce her sentence by naming names – opening up the pair’s notorious little black book and telling prosecutors who else among the rich and powerful abused the vulnerable minors Maxwell trafficked for sex.

     In Britain, much of that interest focuses on Epstein’s longtime pal, Prince Andrew, who was so close to the couple he invited them on visits to Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor: it’s lucky the prince doesn’t sweat, because if he did, he might be drenched now. So far he has refused to answer US investigators’ questions – not for his own sake, you understand, but according to multiple reports, to save the Queen from embarrassment. Because a 61-year-old man hiding behind his 95-year-old mother would not be in the least bit mortifying.

     There are other questions, such as: how many others enabled the travelling child abuse ring that Epstein and Maxwell operated, turning a blind eye to what was surely obvious? Or: when else would the BBC respond to the conviction of a child sex offender by interviewing a brother of the offender who refused to accept the verdict of the court? And how come that Today programme interview with Ian Maxwell came so soon after the BBC had given a platform to one of Epstein’s lawyers, presenting him as if he were merely a neutral expert?

     All those questions matter, and yet the one that preys on my mind is more timeless. It’s the question that arises in all such cases of human cruelty yet which one hesitates to ask, lest the inquiry seem naive: why?

     The coverage of Maxwell has probed that a bit, suggesting for example that Ghislaine Maxwell was conditioned, as the daughter of the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, to cater to the whims of a monstrous man, and simply transferred her allegiance, and her service, from one monster to another. Growing up surrounded by wealth and power, where the deference of officialdom was taken for granted, would have had its effect too. Ghislaine Maxwell may well have assumed that people like her and Epstein were granted a special kind of impunity, that they could break the laws that restrained the appetites of lesser mortals, because for most of her life that had indeed been the case.

     And yet, both those answers are unsatisfying as explanations. There are plenty of abusers who did not grow up with either a Maxwell-style father or Maxwell-level wealth and, conversely, there are people whose upbringings were comparable to Ghislaine Maxwell’s but who did not go on to commit terrible crimes.

     So the why question lingers, just as it did in sharper and more horrific form at least twice in the last month alone. December 2021 began with convictions for the father and stepmother of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in a case so appalling, I confess at the time I could barely read accounts of it. The six-year-old was subjected to a regime of sustained torture which was, incredibly, filmed by those who inflicted it. The little boy was made to stand in isolation for up to 14 hours at a time, without anything to eat or drink. He was beaten. To punish him, his father took the football shirts he loved and cut them to shreds in front of him. Perhaps most unbearable of all, the jury was shown footage of a weak and frail Arthur shortly before his death saying: “No one loves me. No one is going to feed me.”

     When the man and woman guilty of destroying Arthur’s brief life were found guilty, there was revulsion, of course – and on Friday their sentences were referred to the court of appeal for being too lenient – but the public conversation moved without pause for breath to the policy implications. There was intense debate about the state of children’s services, about the damage done by austerity, about target-driven culture, about the recruitment and retention of social workers and so on. But what was missing was a much less sophisticated question. Why would two people do such terrible things to a defenceless child? How could a father cause such pain to his own flesh and blood?

     There was a similar reflex 11 days later, following the verdicts in the equally soul-draining case of Star Hobson, a child, a baby really, who died at just 16 months, having been punched to death by her mother’s partner as her mother did nothing to save her. Once again, the pair filmed their months of cruelty against the little girl, apparently finding the videos amusing enough to send to friends. And yet the immediate talk was not of how two people could do such a thing, but of a local “child safeguarding practice review” and whether control of children’s services should belong with the local council or the Department for Education.

     I understand the impulse to concentrate on these institutional, bureaucratic issues. The assumption is that there will always be people capable of horrendous brutality, that that fact will never change, and so the sensible focus of our attention should be on prevention. I get that. And yet the sheer speed with which we move to technocratic answers, barely even asking the harder human questions, begins to look like displacement activity. It’s as if we can’t bring ourselves to contemplate the puzzle of what humans are capable of, because we have no idea what we’d say.

     Earlier, God-fearing generations did not find this so difficult. Nor do those who still have traditional faith. They have recourse to a vocabulary that includes the notion of evil and wickedness and that allows them to talk about it. But those words don’t trip so easily off the secular tongue.

       Instead, we look for explanations in psychology or economics, assuming, to adapt Stephen Sondheim’s lyric, that if people are depraved it’s because they’re deprived, whether of love or money. That view persists. There was an echo of it in the closing argument from Maxwell’s defence lawyer, when she asked “why an Oxford-educated, proper English woman would suddenly agree to facilitate sex abuse of minors”. Only the poor or poorly educated behave badly.

     We can see the flaw in such reasoning, even before you get to the insult it delivers to all those who endured great privation, emotional or material, without becoming abusers. And yet, the absence of easy answers does not give us a licence to stop asking hard questions. We need to be able to stare wicked acts and evil deeds in the face, rather than to comfort ourselves that they exist solely as functions of failed systems, errors that could be eliminated given the right policy tweak.

     This need not be a bleak endeavour. I think of Julie K Brown, the Miami Herald reporter without whose fearless pursuit of Epstein’s crimes this week’s reckoning might never have come. I think of the courage of the victims, who kept up the fight for justice at great cost. Unfathomable evil is part of the human story, but so too is unimaginable good.”

     As written by Katie Phang for MSNBC; “For six weeks, the world has watched the trial of Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard on live TV, with both sides slinging accusations of domestic violence, emotional abuse, and other painfully intimate details about their admittedly toxic relationship.

     Depp sued Heard for defamation, alleging $50 million in damages following an opinion piece Heard wrote for the Washington Post in 2018, although she denies that the op-ed was about Depp, and she did not name him in the piece.

     Heard’s own defamation counterclaim against Depp, in the amount of $100 million, was also considered by the jury. On Wednesday, the jury found Heard liable for all three claims of defamation and ordered her to pay Depp $15 million in damages. The jury found Depp liable for one claim of defamation, and ordered him to pay Heard $2 million in damages.

      The jury’s decision, under Virginia law, had to be unanimous, and the jurors had to attempt to reach a verdict on both of the parties’ claims. (The jury also had the option to reach a decision in partial favor of either Depp or Heard.)

     This trial was supposed to be about the law, but it has devolved into a tawdry reliving of a couple’s dysfunctional relationship via memes, TikToks, Instagram, competing hashtags, and heavily curated content.

     As Liz Plank earlier pointed out, that is concerning, first of all, on a cultural level. Critics of the trial have been quick to argue that Heard is being unfairly skewered in the public eye. And indeed, the court of public opinion appeared to have already served as judge, jury, and executioner of Heard’s credibility.

     But advocates have also been closely watching the trial because of its potential impact on domestic violence accusations more broadly — especially accusations involving high-profile individuals.

     Every case is unique in its facts. And defamation cases are especially factually specific. Therefore, it is impossible to predict how the Depp-Heard trial will influence the outcome of other celebrity defamation trials.

     And of course, both Depp and Heard are actors, so, there is naturally some built-in skepticism about the retelling of their experiences and past interactions.

     Legally, we have to hope that every case is determined on its individual merits. But culturally, facts can be manipulated.

     Legally, we have to hope that every case is determined on its individual merits. But culturally, facts can be manipulated. Witness testimony, as we’ve seen on TikTok, can be subjective. We’ve seen how even the attorneys in the trial, who are simply supposed to be advocates for the parties, can achieve cult-like fan status. But just as in the Depp-Heard trial, the underlying dynamics of the relationship between Manson and Wood will end up being on public display. And there are few domestic violence advocates who would argue this type of attention is good for potential victims. The spectacle of a trial will not dictate the legal outcome of a case. But the gawking and the voyeurism by the court of public opinion can have a chilling effect for vulnerable victims of domestic violence. And it may already have happened.”

     As written by Caroline Framke in Variety, in an article entitled Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard: What We Lose When We Turn Real Life Into Entertainment; “The mixed verdict in the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation case seems, at the very least, reflective of the complex tumult that seemed to define the actors’ relationship, the details of which unfolded over six seemingly endless weeks in an unassuming Virginia courthouse. But it wasn’t wholly satisfying for those Depp superfans who decided that securing a victory for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star was their new raison d’etre. For those people, who appeared to multiply with every passing day on every possible media platform, the only acceptable outcome was a total humiliation for Heard, who has been raised up the ultimate example of the #MeToo movement gone awry.

     Before we keep going, let’s get one thing straight: This is not a column about whether Heard or Depp is innocent, nor about the truth of their marriage. This is not about how the verdict will discourage domestic violence victims from speaking out in the future, though that remains an extremely important and dismaying aspect that deserves attention and consideration going forward. This is, rather, about how disturbing it is that abuse allegations became fodder for endless speculation and memes for the LOLs. It’s about how depressingly unsurprising it was to see millions of people engage with this trial as if they were taking sides with their favorite soap opera characters, and how livestreaming this trial became a shortcut for the justice system to become nothing more than entertainment. It’s about how allowing TV cameras in a trial might have been a journalistic necessity once, but now it’s more effective in swaying the court of public opinion than anything else.

     After decades of media selling famous disputes like primetime sports, repackaging true crime stories into bingeable bites, and even breathlessly following cops (and O.J. Simpson) on live high-speed chases, Depp and Heard just represent the latest chum tossed out to ravenous audiences for the sake of higher ratings. Encouraging people to take sides in celebrity disputes — whether a civil court case or a high-profile breakup (were you Team Jen or Team Angelina?) — is as old as the concept of celebrity itself. And given how easy platforms like Twitter, TikTok and YouTube make it to disseminate opinions, no matter how wild or unfounded, it was only a matter of time before something like Depp vs. Heard took advantage.

     So, sure; it’s tempting to be surprised by just how quickly and completely Depp vs. Heard crept into every possible corner of the media. It might even be refreshing to be taken aback by the constant updates, gawking, and speculation that followed every dirty detail. And yet for as downright ugly as this lawsuit got, and as overwhelming as the response to it became, its evolution into a phenomenon mostly just felt inevitable.

     Thanks to an easily accessible livestream, every minute of the Depp vs. Heard trial found an audience ready and willing to parse through every gesture, glance and sentence themselves. Once the narrative of “Heard bad, Depp good” solidified, so too did the feverish rush to piece together the evidence in a way that would support it. Even a casual search on TikTok will reveal hundreds of thousands of videos claiming to know the truth from the smallest kernel. Well before the jury rendered its verdict, the internet crawled with sneering jokes about Heard’s allegedly manufactured hysteria, whether from obsessed viewers, the makeup brand she claimed to use as cover-up for a bruise, or the Duolingo owl.

     When people consume true life like scripted dramas, and news updates like twists in a script, it becomes all too easy for them to divorce reality from its humanity. Once Heard became the villain and Depp the victim, that was enough to keep millions, and all the media platforms that depend on those millions, hooked. Soon enough, though, the cameras won’t be on this story anymore. The appetite for it will wane, and our attention span will fade. But the consequences of the verdict will continue to ripple offscreen, throughout the real world so many forgot.”

     As written by Amelia Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Amber Heard v Johnny Depp’ has turned into trial by TikTok – and we’re all the worse for it; “Say what you like about Amber Heard – no, seriously, do. You can say that the actor took a bump of cocaine while on the stand during one of the most high-profile defamation cases of the century. You can say she stole lines from The Talented Mr Ripley and recited them in court while testifying about her relationship with fellow actor Johnny Depp. On social media, you can say both of these baseless, untrue things, and many others besides. In the past week, both of these unfounded claims have been spreading faster than wildfire.

     The internet has consequently turned feral. It is ironic that a defamation trial could prompt so much flagrant defamation. Constantly rolling cameras in the courtroom have allowed a complicated, intimate case to play out like a spectator sport. Endless clips of the trial have been hashed and rehashed on social media platforms for a braying audience. On social media, people are saying whatever they like about Depp and Heard, with disturbing, unhinged results.

     One recent TikTok trend involved people making aroused facial expressions over an audio clip of Heard testifying about her alleged sexual assault by Depp (the audio clip has since been removed from the site). Another saw TikTokers acting out Heard’s abuse testimony, twisting and turning like pantomime actors in an attempt to point out supposed inconsistencies in her account.

     Regardless of whether an individual believes Heard’s testimony, they should believe that nothing good can come from minimising and mocking descriptions of abuse. The trial has made it clearer than ever that a culture of toxic fandom has poisoned our brains. On Etsy, fans can buy “Justice for Johnny” T-shirts and “Fuck Amber Heard” mugs. On social media, you are either Team Depp or Team Heard; very few people seem to be on the side of the justice system. Why wait to see what the judge and jury have to say, when you can easily pick a side from the comfort of your own home?

     For many, the case has become a source of comedy. On TikTok, cry-laughing emojis abound on courtroom clips with titles such as “Funniest witness moments so far” and “Johnny Depp funny moments part 3”. One user put a filter on footage of Heard’s testimony so that her nose protruded like Pinocchio’s. On YouTube, anyone and everyone is weighing in: a video entitled “Woodworker Attorney DEBUNKS Amber Heard’s ‘Broken Bed’ Testimony!” has more than 277,000 views. News websites have repeated unfounded claims in uncritical articles with hands-off headlines like “Viewers notice …” and “People are saying …”.

     Is it asking too much that we treat a sombre issue sombrely? That we don’t turn a serious and sensitive trial into content for our feeds? In an ideal world, even the most salacious celebrity court case would be covered in a dignified, respectful manner. Even the biggest, most ardent, most invested fan would put aside their hero worship while a jury deliberates if their idol sexually assaulted a woman with a liquor bottle.

     But fandom has never drawn the line at the courthouse door, and we are all poorer for it. Screaming fans have been filmed throwing gifts through Depp’s car windows as he departed from the Virginia courtroom. No trial should be treated like a concert or a meet-and-greet, and a court case should never be an opportunity to wave a homemade sign in a celebrity’s face.

     Fans need to be aware that their own behaviour around celebrity trials is under scrutiny. In theory, anyone can be sued for libel for what they write on social media (though in practice, the cases we read about involve tweets from those with high public profiles, such as TV doctors, rightwing provocateurs, and comedians). Even without the threat of a lawsuit, people need to be far more careful about what they post online. Fans may believe wholeheartedly that their idols are innocent, but serious accusations need to be taken seriously. Descriptions of abuse shouldn’t be made into jaunty comedy clips. Otherwise, we risk creating a world where people turn to TikTok videos for the final word on the truth, instead of the courts.”

     As written by Catherine Bennett in The Guardian in an article entitled

What did Depp v Heard teach us? That justice and reality TV are incompatible; “The US defamation trial has shown us how ‘transparency’ in court translates, which is into a festival of misogyny.

     Asked on CBS about losing Depp v Heard, Amber Heard’s lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, put much of the blame on the courtroom cameras and the brutal atmosphere they generated. “It was like a Roman colosseum.”

     Actually, for the squeamish, it was much nicer than that. Those of us watching Depp’s lawyer, Camille Vasquez, dismember Heard could claim to be acting in a spirit of sober inquiry and debate, motivated purely by the wish to advance understanding of US legal procedures. For instance, I learned, between gawping at Heard’s ornate plaits and Vasquez’s white costumes, that it’s legal in the state of Virginia for cameras to livestream a celebrity witness offering excruciating testimony about sexual abuse, yards from her alleged assailant.

     Another lesson: the arid findings of two UK courts cannot compete, in a US one, with lashings of Technicolor “Darvo” (“deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”, a common defence tactic in sexual assault and domestic violence trials). And another: it does not conflict with the administration of US justice, in particular the principle that people are equal before the law, if a celebrity witness knows millions of viewers are scrutinising her face and body language while opposition experts speculate on the consequences of her alleged personality disorder.

     Did Heard really cry in court or not? Diligent students recalled that her acting coach testified that Heard struggled “acting wise” to produce real tears when performing. On the other hand, non-acting wise – this point seems not to have registered so widely – the coach often saw Heard in real tears.

     Now, courtesy of the intensive Heard-Depp course in judicial fairness, we have a good understanding of how such commitment to total courtroom transparency is likely to translate, once online supporters are engaged, into a surge of woman-hating abuse and memes. Of this, Bredehoft said, the jury in this case must have been aware. “They have weekends, they have families, they have social media,” she said.

     There was also a 10-day break allowing for further absorption of tribal online feeling before jurors returned to a courtroom besieged by #justiceforJohnny supporters: “How could they not have been influenced?” Bredehoft was duly pilloried for sour grapes, on social media.

     In fact, she’d seen it coming. In February, arguing against live broadcasting, Bredehoft prophesied how existing “anti-Amber networks” would use resulting videos. “What they’ll do is take anything that’s unfavourable – a look,” she said. “They’ll take out of context a statement and play it over and over and over and over again.” This is precisely what has happened, as if Heard’s inconsistencies (on charitable donations) were not, without added monstering, enough. Depp’s lawyers, to judge by his fans’ previous efforts during his London libel suit, had more to gain from the harvesting of such material. “Mr Depp believes in transparency,” his lawyer said. The judge, Penney Azcarate, whose sole decision it was to livestream or not, concluded that the public did need more, on this occasion, than old school reporting and illustrations: “I don’t see any good cause not to do it.”

     Maybe the resulting festival of misogyny would not have been predictable to any judge unfamiliar with social media, nor with the tendencies of the manosphere, nor with the escalating ambitions of courtroom broadcasters. It’s harder to understand why a judge would not understand the specific risks of live broadcasting a case involving allegations of sexual violence, along with its potentially inhibiting impact on future witnesses. A Stanford Law School lawyer, Professor Michele Dauber, has called Azcarate’s decision “the single worst decision I can think of in the context of intimate partner violence and sexual violence in recent history”.

     The deterrent effect on female victims, once reporting a crime doubles as an audition for courtroom broadcasting, is only one way in which compelled public performance actually conflicts with justice.

     How is justice served by a courtroom becoming complicit with the values of mass entertainment?

     With Depp v Heard considered broadcastable, restraint in other courts can be portrayed, as it mistakenly was by conspiracy-minded elements of the Ghislaine Maxwell audience , as a sinister cover-up. It confers unwarranted influence on editors, on the courtroom broadcasters whose profits soared as their exposure of Heard elicited more online mockery, more clicks, more histrionic tweets depicting the case as a duel.

     Court TV: “Do YOU think there is going to be a clear winner in the end??” With the help of Heard, who says she is unable to pay the millions she owes in damages, Court TV doubled its daytime ratings. UK viewers discovered a new and cheaper alternative to Netflix.

     When British broadcasters last agitated for televised courtrooms, it was on the then plausible basis that this innovation – as well as providing cheap content – would educate viewers and improve openness. Writing to the prime minister in 2012, representatives of the BBC, ITN and Sky said: “For too long the UK has lagged behind much of the rest of the world on open justice. The time has come for us to catch up.” Before online death threats and abusive TikTok memes, the main admitted risk of court broadcasting was usually its exploitation by certain defendants, such as the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. But presciently a spokesman for Victim Support argued that, while the justice system needed to be more transparent, “this does not mean that court cases should become a new form of reality TV”.

     Even if the transformation of one celebrity defamation trial, via live streaming, into the sustained, one-sided demonising of its female participant does not amount to a case for restriction, Depp v Heard casts serious doubt on broadcasters’ claims about enhanced confidence and transparency. How is justice served by a courtroom becoming complicit with the values of mass entertainment? If anything, the live-streaming, with the associated character assassination, has added to uncertainty, for many spectators at this circus, about the relative importance of legal argument as opposed to the popularity of the combatants.

     As for fairness, is it fair to force civilians, even actor-civilians, to perform for justice? Either way, what a boon for her adversaries that Amber Heard never got the hang of fake crying.”

     As written by Martha Gill in The Guardian in an article entitled #MeToo is over if we don’t listen to ‘imperfect victims’ like Amber Heard; “The backlash to the #MeToo movement was always coming. We know this because a backlash has followed every single step forward feminists have ever made. This backlash was always going to be big, too. Not only did #MeToo threaten a status quo that props up powerful men, it threatened these men personally, and – as it seemed to some – with reckless caprice.

     “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this,” a White House lawyer said shortly after Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were made public, “then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”

     It wasn’t just men who were worried. The idea that systems that previously treated only women, minorities and lower-class men unfairly might be capable of doing the same to high-status men was deeply unsettling to everyone.

     After all, when a man is treated badly it lands with a double sense of burning injustice. Women’s stories of woe are so common that they can leave us comparatively unfazed. We feel bad, but we already know women are treated unfairly. It is priced in. “[Women’s stories were] all the same story, which is not to say it wasn’t important. But it was boring,” writes Taffy Brodesser-Akner in her novel Fleishman Is in Trouble. “The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.” When something bad happens to a powerful man, it has not happened to a statistic. It has happened to a human soul.

     Female accusers are still routinely treated as if they are lying, both by the public and the courts.

     For these reasons, #MeToo struck many men – and women – as deeply unfair. Yet it was merely an attempt to correct a bias that still exists. Female accusers are still routinely treated as if they are lying, both by the public and the courts – more so than other alleged victims of crime. It took the testimony of more than a hundred women to bring down Harvey Weinstein. Brett Kavanaugh was not brought down.

     The public reaction to the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial is what a #MeToo backlash looks like. Here are the facts of the case. Depp is suing Heard for defamation after she described herself in a 2018 article that didn’t mention him as a “public figure representing domestic abuse”. Depp says he is innocent of abuse and her statement amounts to lying. On his side are two facts that seem clear. Heard promised to donate her entire divorce settlement to charity, and didn’t. There is a recording in which she admits to hitting Depp.

     On Heard’s side is the following evidence. Depp admits to head-butting his ex-wife (by accident), and there are texts from his assistant alleging he kicked Heard. There are texts from Depp to Paul Bettany saying he wanted to kill Heard and rape “her burnt corpse”. There is a recording of Depp shouting at Heard for speaking in an “authoritative” way to him. She was awarded a domestic violence restraining order in 2016. In 2018 Depp sued the Sun newspaper for libel after it called him “a wife beater”. He lost the case after the judge found 12 of 14 alleged incidents of Depp’s abuse of Heard to be true.

     The idea that Heard is a manipulator, a fantasist and an abuser herself has caught fire across all social media

     The court will decide whether or not Heard is a liar. But the idea that Heard is a manipulator, a fantasist and an abuser herself has caught fire across all social media, and some more traditional outlets. Every sexist trope ever used to humiliate and discredit female accusers has been deployed against her at vast scale. Re-enacting her testimony of rape and abuse has become a game on TikTok. She has been mocked by Saturday Night Live, and by Chris Rock (“Believe all women, except Amber Heard”) and ’N Sync’s Lance Bass.

     Heard’s tormentors, many of them young women, do not seem to see themselves as anti-feminist. They believe women, of course – just not this one.

     It is not they who are damaging #MeToo, it is Heard – by virtue of being an imperfect victim.

     They perhaps forget that the project of #MeToo – the whole point – was to help imperfect victims. Those who were wearing the wrong thing, or were drunk, or were promiscuous, or loved their perpetrator, or had previously broken the law, or had lied before, or had a bad character, or seemed “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”, as David Brock once memorably described Anita Hill, who testified during Clarence Thomas’s US supreme court confirmation hearings in 1991. In fact, perfect victims have never needed feminism, partly because they barely exist.

     Whether or not Heard’s accusers fully realise it then, setting up “bad” victims in opposition to “genuine” ones is a very effective method of unpicking #MeToo. It is only the rare misogynist who outright admits they don’t believe women. Their objection has always been just to this one bitch, who is lying.

     #MeToo (the clue’s in the name) attempted to combat this by linking experiences – all those bitches who weren’t believed – so we could see the pattern. In fact, you could say the whole project of feminism is about taking bad things that happened to women, which they thought only happened to them, or were their fault, and calling them by one name. Divide us back into unlinked individuals who might be lying, and the movement is lost.

     #MeToo is often framed as having uncovered truths about the world – its success was because women “explained really clearly” what was going on. No. People already knew what was going on. #MeToo worked for the reason any feminist movement works: strength in numbers. It is a political movement pushing against incredibly strong forces in the other direction. There’s no reason to think its work cannot be rolled back.”

The Invisible Man film with Kate Moss

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2623455001/?

The Invisible Man: on the woman no one believes

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-invisible-man-horror-trope-female-protagonist_n_5e599057c5b6450a30be731a?newsltushpmgentertainment

Key Moments in the Trial of Patriarchy in America

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jun/01/johnny-depp-amber-heard-trial-key-moments?CMP=share_btn_lin

The Crucible

https://www.imdb.com/videoplayer/vi1519059225

Blood and Guts in High School, by Kathy Acker

The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

on the fembots in our phones as partners and what they shape us to become

https://futurism.com/chatbot-abuse?fbclid=IwAR28XSU64dZvmQtYRoafz7S2GnV0yYt6hxeGPBcQ48CeNl1L8ZMbV_RxfIc

Margaret Atwood on the true history that inspired The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics, by Sharon Rose Wilson

Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes Love Vs. Power in Wagner’s Ring Circle and in Us : A Jungian-Feminist Perspective, by Jean Shinoda Bolen

https://variety.com/2022/tv/opinion/johnny-depp-amber-heard-verdict-entertainment-1235283022/

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/11/amber-heard-jonny-depp-trial-tiktok-fans?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/05/what-did-depp-v-heard-teach-us-justice-and-reality-tv-incompatible?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/22/metoo-is-over-if-we-dont-listen-to-imperfect-victims-like-amber-heard?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/03/metoo-amber-heard-johnny-depp?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/15/a-long-way-from-home-peter-carey-review https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/why-johnny-depp-trial-verdict-bigger-amber-heard-n1295877?fbclid=IwAR3X9gp8XiwO-e016nPEHytbbVi-HmHou4-DdbTQyGSlc9c-XQ0NclZ463o