The celebrity was called a slut. She was a liar and a trashy. Her most private and difficult moments were treated as farce for public amusement. Making fun of her became a national pastime.
I'm talking about Britney Spears, but I could also be talking about Heard. The trial of Heard for defamation against her ex- husband, Johnny Depp, has become a national obsession. The same things that people used against Spears have been thrown Heard's way. She is a liar, a slut, and crazy. Her testimony about the alleged abuse she suffered during her marriage to Johnny Depp has been mocked and turned into a meme.
There is a difference. The public consensus is that Spears was not treated fairly. After the documentary Framing Britney Spears detailed the tabloid media's coverage of the pop star and her allegedly abusive conservatorship, people in seemingly every corner of the globe began to decry the narrative that had been constructed around her for so long. The reexamination of Spears was a moment of reckoning for the media, and American society as a whole.
How could we have treated a vulnerable woman so badly? We know much better now that that would never happen.
Clearly, we don't. The online harassment of Heard shows that maybe we don't know anything at all. It seems that the medium has not changed. In 2007, readers looked to tabloids for evidence of Spears' troubles, and now people laugh at her court photos set to a song on TikTok and create stan accounts for her. Paparazzi made a lot of money in the 2000s by stalking celebrities and putting cameras up their skirts, and now content creators are trying to strike gold by covering the trial on social media. According to NBC News, an analysis of 2,300 social media profiles surrounding the trial showed that almost all of them were in favor of Depp.
The contrast might make you think differently. As part of a larger trend in modern media, the narrative about Spears changed as a result of reexamining the women of the past. The cultural revisionism industry was described by journalist R.E. Hawley in an article for Gawker last year.
You're Wrong About has devoted several episodes to other once-mocked women, including Anna Nicole Smith and Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky has received redemption through television or film.
These sorts of cultural events have done a lot of good. After the Spears case came back into the spotlight, public sympathy for her skyrocketed, and she eventually won the right to leave her conservatorship. Lewinsky was able to return to the public eye to tell her own story and wrestle back control of her narrative, on her own terms. The You're Wrong About podcast and other revisionist narratives are intended to teach the public that many women were treated unfairly, and that our attitudes toward casual and cruel sexism needed to change.
Heard is not what some people would consider a sympathetic victim. She told the court that she didn't fulfill her promise to donate a portion of her divorce settlement to charity because Johnny sued her for $50 million. Heard has argued that this was in self-defense, and most experts don't use terms like "mutual abuse" to describe partner violence. Heard denied the allegations of defecating in Depp's bed and blaming his dogs in court, but much has been made of the bizarre incident.
An expert told Refinery 29 that all of this is damaging to Heard's public reputation.
It requires Heard to fit into a lot of public expectations of how she should behave in order to be believed.
Content creators have been using the daily updates from the Depp versus Heard trial as a way to go viral and get engagement, just like tabloid writers and photographers used Spears' pain to advance their own careers. The mocking TikTok audio was pulled from Heard's court testimony, as well as commentary and polls asking who their followers believe the most.
Media organizations have profited from their coverage of these women, selling papers and magazines and analyzing their misdeeds on television. They are finding success by giving these women a redemption arc, in Oscar-nominated movies and documentaries reexamining their trauma and the treatment heaped on them by the public. Hollywood is cashing in on the nostalgia of the 90s and aughts with these projects getting greenlit every day. Only when looking into the past can these women be forgiven, but only if we rake them through the coals first.
In a few years, a streaming service will put out a documentary about how Heard was mistreated, using the negative TikTok videos as horrifying archival footage intercut between interviews with experts about how damaging social media is. An up-and-coming actor will get an Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of Heard. The reaction to Heard would never have happened today.
Heard's trial is not a piece of entertainment and yet it has become online. After rethinking how women were treated in the 90s and00s, the principles of fairness are supposed to have been internalized. The cultural revisionism industry is trying to teach us lessons, but not everyone is putting them into practice. Sarah Marshall, the host of the You're Wrong About podcast, said this week that the point of the content she produces is so we don't have to have a reexamination of these women later on, but instead learn and treat them better now. We could look at the facts. We could treat the allegations being thrown around in the trial as serious, and not just a spectacle to entertain us or turn into a meme.
Many of us won't because those things can go viral.
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