As celebrities rush to unlike Johnny Depp’s posts, is public opinion shifting in favour of Amber Heard?

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However, they felt it would be a long time “until everyone can look back at this and say society really f[*]cked up,” explaining that “Accepting that you took the side of an abuser and ragged on the victim is something that will not come easy to people.”

Sarah Marshall, writer and host of You’re Wrong About [YWA], is well-versed in critically evaluating society’s treatment of women in popular culture: having written about Tonya Harding, an American figure skater who was banned from the sport due to her alleged involvement in an attack on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan; and hosting podcast episodes about everyone from Monica Lewinsky to Tammy Faye Bakker and Jessica Hahn. 

In a bonus episode of YWA about Amber Heard, Sarah spoke about the discomfort she felt when people began to compare the real-time treatment of Amber Heard to “living in a [YWA] episode,” or looking forward to the YWA episode about Amber Heard in “ten years time.” This rhetoric highlighted an uncomfortable question: are we – as a society – only prepared to redeem seemingly “unlikeable” women long after the damage is done? 

In conversation with GLAMOUR, Sarah theorised why public opinion often shifts too little too late for maligned women, saying, “One of the reasons that it’s easier to look back and think ‘Oh my God, Tonya Harding was done so dirty by the establishment’, or Amy Fisher, or Lorena Bobbitt, or Anita Hill, or so many of the other women that I’ve talked about on You’re Wrong About, is that it’s easier to look back to a past that you don’t feel connected to, or you don’t feel like your own ego is being wounded by the truths that you are altering or overturning in your mind. 

“It gets easier the less it has to be about saying that [you as an individual] are wrong.”

As we watch Margot Robbie star as Tonya Harding and Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker, we’re convinced that – surely – we would have been on their side; we wouldn’t have participated in the gleeful public flaying they endured. As Sarah explains, “Coming back after the fact maybe gives us the illusion that we can balance the scales; it feels less like an open wound; it’s kind of inert by that point.”

Is that the kind of redemption that awaits Amber Heard? Will she really wait two decades before a younger actress is cast to play her in an Oscar-winning biopic and her image is fully rehabilitated? 

For Lucy Robinson, Professor in Collaborative History at the University of Sussex, the answer lies in society’s perception of Amber Heard’s victimhood. Speaking to GLAMOUR, she said, “If Amber can somehow redeem herself – by reinventing herself so that she’s perceived as a more acceptable victim – she might be reevaluated.” 

She adds, “Historically, we’ve never been very good at having anything other than a very black-and-white, gendered understanding of how domestic and sexual violence works. The woman must be wholly a victim and must demonstrate her victimhood by not participating in anything at all – literally just being a passive recipient of violence. 

The notion of imperfect victimhood is something that Sarah Marshall has also been drawn to in her work, telling GLAMOUR, “We at some point came to believe that an abuse claim should be believable to us because we should like and feel sympathy for the victim. And in fact, victimhood does not automatically make you cuter, more lovable, or more obviously deserving of help from the public.”

Even if the tide does turn in Amber Heard’s favour, without a comprehensive reassessment of society’s language and expectations surrounding victimhood, who is to say that another unfairly maligned woman in the public eye won’t be hounded and memefied in the future? 

As Lucy Robinson tells GLAMOUR, “I can imagine that in 10 years, we could have a conversation about Amber Heard and say that [the trial] really should never have happened… And it will be happening to another woman, in our face, at exactly the same time.” 

For more from Glamour UK’s Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.