Depp comes up smelling of roses despite defamation trial’s catalogue of misogyny

Here’s Johnny! The king of Cannes and cologne

Johnny Depp seems to be on top of the world. Almost one year after he won a messy defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, the actor’s career is going gangbusters. His latest movie, Jeanne du Barry, opened the Cannes Film and received a seven-minute standing ovation. His face is plastered all over Paris billboards advertising the film. And, to top things off, he’s just signed a record three-year, $20m deal to remain the face of the Dior men’s fragrance Sauvage. To put this deal into context, Robert Pattinson got $12m to serve as a spokesperson for Dior Homme, according to Variety – and most A-listers with fragrance deals reportedly earn about $2m-$4m a year. So Depp is very much the king of cologne.

What has Heard been up to since the trial? Keeping a low profile, basically. After receiving relentless abuse from Depp fans and conservative media outlets throughout the legal proceedings, it seems Heard relocated from the US to Spain. She is reportedly taking a temporary break from acting. And, as far as I can tell, nobody has given her $20m to promote perfume.

So, to recap: a man has emerged out of a trial concerning allegations of domestic abuse with his career not just intact, but flourishing. The woman at the centre of the case, however, has ended up fleeing the country after vicious abuse. Sounds like an incredibly familiar story, doesn’t it? Sounds like a story as old as time.

If Depp had lost the defamation case would things be much different? Would Heard be the toast of the town and would Depp be hiding out with his reputation in tatters? I doubt it. Let’s not forget that the actor lost a UK libel case against the Sun in 2020 after the newspaper described him as a “wife beater”. (The UK, by the way, is famously plaintiff-friendly in cases of defamation.) In the ruling, the judge, Mr Justice Nicol, said: “I have found that the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms Heard by Mr Depp have been proved to the civil standard.” He added that he accepted Heard’s evidence that the allegations she made against Depp “have had a negative effect on her career as an actor and activist”.

The fact that Depp was basically labelled a “wife beater” by a UK court didn’t hurt his relationship with Dior Sauvage, who have stood by the actor since 2015. And the US lawsuit clearly only strengthened their partnership. Three months after he won the defamation suit the fragrance brand was busy sharing posts on its Instagram with captions like: “Profound and authentic. Johnny Depp embodies the heady magic of Sauvage.”

Profound and authentic? Depp may have won his US lawsuit but who can forget the misogyny that ran through it? Who can forget the viciousness of the text message he sent to a friend in 2013, joking about killing Heard? “Let’s burn Amber,” he wrote in that text. “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! I will f–k her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.” This wasn’t some one-off joke made in bad taste; Depp routinely described women in crude, misogynistic terms. In texts that were shown to jurors, Depp described women as “sluts” and “fat ugly whores”. In one text he called Heard a “filthy whore” and said he’d “smack the ugly cunt around” before he let her in; in another, he described his former partner Vanessa Paradis as a “withering cunt”. And then there was the time he referred to Heard as a “gold-digging, low-level, dime-a-dozen, mushy, pointless, dangling, overused flappy fish market”. Profound and authentic!

Do you think that if a woman had made all those comments a perfume company would be throwing money at her? I’ve got a funny feeling the answer is no.

It would be wrong to say that Depp has emerged from his lawsuits with his reputation entirely unscathed. He was dropped by US film studios after the “wife beater” case, and his presence at Cannes has caused controversy. Still his overall reception at Cannes and his Dior deal have made it very clear that his career will be just fine and he will almost certainly be completely rehabilitated. And that should come as a surprise to no one. As we’ve seen time and time again, misogyny and allegations of abuse are rarely a detriment to a man’s career. Allegations of sexual misconduct didn’t stop Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh from becoming supreme court justices. They didn’t stop Donald Trump from becoming president – indeed they may have even helped. During E Jean Carroll’s defamation trial against Trump she was asked why she hadn’t gone public with her allegations when Trump first ran for president. “I noticed that the more women who came forward to accuse him, the better he did in the polls,” she answered. Misogyny rarely ruins a man’s career; often it supercharges it.