How best to start including men who are victims of abuse by women into the public discourse (Johny Depp vs Amber Heard)

[zapatos]

42 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

What you and I find plausible and what you and I expect may be different.

I know. Hence my request for you to expand on it. Unfortunately rather than address why it is plausible as I asked,  you continue with Red Herrings...

45 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

How you and I define victimization may be different. 

And tap dancing...

45 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

I don't expect a defamation case to get down into the root causes (who started it) of a dysfunctional marriage between two dysfunctional people.

I'll get off the carousel now.

[koti]

40 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

I think that would support a physical abuse case against her. Verbal and psychological abuse are a lot harder to prove, but it sounds like her testimony in the defamation case might help Depp's abuse case... if he decides to pursue it.

So she admited in court to hitting him, failed to prove that he hit her and Johny Depp needs a seperate trial to prove to you that he was abused? How does that work exactly Phi or what am I missing here?

[iNow]

4 minutes ago, koti said:

So she admited in court to hitting him, failed to prove that he hit her and Johny Depp needs a seperate trial to prove to you that he was abused? How does that work exactly Phi or what am I missing here?

How frequent was the hitting? How hard?

What led to it? Was it playful like a swat on the ass? Was this sexual? Had it been done before upon request? Was it violent? Was it provoked? Was it done in a rage?

Was it jab to the ribs? Punch to the kidneys? A slap to the face? A broken bone? Was it repeated or just once? Was it part of a larger pattern of inflicting fear and pain?

Was there any afterward acknowledgment of the wrong done or apologies offered? Was any contrition shown? A willingness not to do it again?

She admitted to hitting him.

She and he need to share a whole lot more details about what that means if you’re planning to continue equating and conflating that word with “abuse. “

[TheVat]

Court cases pivot on careful fact finding, regarding specific charges.  The case was about defamation, by definition a public act of harm against reputation.  A trial on abuse would be focused on private acts of harm directed to the person.  Its rules of evidence would be different, and simply saying you hit someone would not be satisfying any rules of evidence - you would need CONTEXT.  If someone hit someone defensively, while fending off physical attack, for example, that would not be abuse.  Or there could be other circumstances which mitigated the harm - we have court trials to work out these matters, because some random people on a web forum do not have the tools for doing so.

Edited June 8, 2022 by TheVat

[Phi for All]

9 minutes ago, koti said:

So she admited in court to hitting him, failed to prove that he hit her and Johny Depp needs a seperate trial to prove to you that he was abused? How does that work exactly Phi or what am I missing here?

I don't require a separate trial, but Depp isn't trying to prove anything to me.

[koti]

35 minutes ago, iNow said:

How frequent was the hitting? How hard?

What led to it? Was it playful like a swat on the ass? Was this sexual? Had it been done before upon request? Was it violent? Was it provoked? Was it done in a rage?

Was it jab to the ribs? Punch to the kidneys? A slap to the face? A broken bone? Was it repeated or just once? Was it part of a larger pattern of inflicting fear and pain?

Was there any afterward acknowledgment of the wrong done or apologies offered? Was any contrition shown? A willingness not to do it again?

She admitted to hitting him.

She and he need to share a whole lot more details about what that means if you’re planning to continue equating and conflating that word with “abuse. “

33 minutes ago, Phi for All said:

I don't require a separate trial, but Depp isn't trying to prove anything to me.

Thats right, the evidence in court took care of that.

[zapatos]

8 minutes ago, koti said:

Thats right, the evidence in court took care of that.

Would you mind telling the time on the video he begins talking about how she abused him in the marriage?

[koti]

5 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Would you mind telling the time on the video he begins talking about how she abused him in the marriage?

We clearly have a different idea what abuse is because I think every second of this clip is illustrating abuse JD suffered. 

[zapatos]

6 minutes ago, koti said:

We clearly have a different idea what abuse is because I think every second of this clip is illustrating abuse JD suffered. 

I'm okay with calling it abuse. But this is a video of how he felt when he heard what Heard said about him in the article. That was well after the marriage.

[koti]

5 minutes ago, zapatos said:

I'm okay with calling it abuse…

I’m really glad we finally plowed through this. 

[zapatos]

2 minutes ago, koti said:

I’m really glad we finally plowed through this. 

That's never been an issue. The issue had to do with your initial claim about domestic abuse.

[koti]

3 minutes ago, zapatos said:

..The issue had to do with your initial claim about domestic abuse.

Could you explain? Has JD been abused outside of his home hence it's not domestic abuse hence it makes it ok somehow? Whats your issue? 

Edited June 8, 2022 by koti

[iNow]

49 minutes ago, koti said:

Thats right, the evidence in court took care of that.

YOU claimed SHE admitted to hitting him in court. 

YOU claimed HER admitting to hitting him means SHE abused him. 

YOU asked what was different about hitting and abuse. 

I and OTHERS explained that context matters. The concept of hitting and the concept of abuse differ in relevant ways.

Now in response to that YOU posted a video of comments an ACTOR made on camera, not the actor you’re saying admitted to something. 

Can you help me understand why you thought that contribution would be helpful? Can you share what that clip means to you… what you think it brings to the discussion here in context of the above comments leading up to you sharing that video?

Nobody ever questioned what Depp asserts. Your video is like sharing the recipe for chicken soup as a response when someone asks you about the color of the feather in a persons winter hat. 

Edited June 8, 2022 by iNow

[koti]

2 minutes ago, iNow said:

...The concept of hitting and the concept of abuse differ in relevant ways...

Gotcha. I'm sure you have a well informed and well developed insight and opinion on this (as on everything) but I ask you to save it, put in in a file somewehere on your drive and paste it instead of one of your woke rants in a police brutality or rape thread when it comes up.
The abuse which JD suffered was psychological, the physical part was I'm sure irrelevant to him.

[iNow]

25 minutes ago, koti said:

The abuse which JD suffered was psychological, the physical part was I'm sure irrelevant to him.

Okay, but you said she admitted in court that she abused him. 

It’s abundantly clear that you’ve followed this case much more closely than nearly everyone else here, combined. No doubt,

We’re asking to benefit from your greater knowledge and have you share where/when in court she actually did admit this?

It seems to many others here that she did NOT in fact admit this, and my hope is that you’ll stop lashing out like a petulant child, stop calling people names, and with your next post provide evidence of her doing this or a transcript which demonstrates that we’re mistaken in our current belief that she admitted no such thing. 

26 minutes ago, koti said:

put in in a file somewehere on your drive and paste it instead of one of your woke rants in a police brutality or rape thread when it comes up.

Koti, you’re the only one ranting in this thread. 

Edited June 9, 2022 by iNow

[zapatos]

55 minutes ago, koti said:

Has JD been abused outside of his home hence it's not domestic abuse...

Correct. Don't pretend you don't know the definition of "domestic".

 

56 minutes ago, koti said:

Has JD been abused outside of his home hence it's not domestic abuse hence it makes it ok somehow?

WTF is wrong with you?!?! Who, anywhere in this thread, made any such implication?

 

57 minutes ago, koti said:

Whats your issue? 

I don't have an issue. You do. Clearly for some reason you've decided to troll everyone here. 

Since this thread has not been argued in good faith I'm hopeful the moderators will see fit to close it. I'm sure if someone wants to discuss domestic abuse they will open another thread. This one has moved beyond anything useful.

 

[iNow]

57 minutes ago, zapatos said:

This one has moved beyond anything useful.

It had potential, but it didn’t move beyond that point. It started there with his very first non-OP reply. 

[koti]

In case the moderators do decide to lock this thread and I would like to stick to what I said earlier about this thread being my last one, I’d like to say something as I feel its not healthy to leave on a bad note;

I learned a lot from this forum back in the day before Trump when pollitics weren’t creeping in so much and bias didn’t have so much impact on the forums. I certainly got a lot of knowledge on physics and math, the ones who shared that knowledge with me you know who you are and I thank you for your time (many are gone from the forum) I will also remember with a smile our mutual efforts back when I was a regular on trying to enlighten the religious nuts, conspiracy theorists, racists, anti vaxers and other crack pots, both scientific merit and humour were a great thing for me in those discussions 🙂

[iNow]

11 hours ago, iNow said:

We’re asking to benefit from your greater knowledge and have you share where/when in court she actually did admit this?

At least you’re consistent in evading direct questions. 

[Phi for All]

6 hours ago, koti said:

In case the moderators do decide to lock this thread and I would like to stick to what I said earlier about this thread being my last one, I’d like to say something as I feel its not healthy to leave on a bad note;

Bad note? You're extremely angry about something I understand, but don't understand why you condemn my stance so much that you have to leave. I don't feel we're that far apart on this issue, and I've gone into some amount of depth on why I feel the way I do. I've also tried to draw a line between my personal feelings and the kind of evidence required in a court trial, and the legal differences between defamation and abuse. I'm sorry, but I recognize the process of the court system, even if I don't always agree with it. 

6 hours ago, koti said:

I learned a lot from this forum back in the day before Trump when pollitics weren’t creeping in so much and bias didn’t have so much impact on the forums. I certainly got a lot of knowledge on physics and math, the ones who shared that knowledge with me you know who you are and I thank you for your time (many are gone from the forum) I will also remember with a smile our mutual efforts back when I was a regular on trying to enlighten the religious nuts, conspiracy theorists, racists, anti vaxers and other crack pots, both scientific merit and humour were a great thing for me in those discussions 🙂

This is probably where the real problem is. The last several years have blurred the lines between factual and fake, and what you see as bias seems more to me like an effort to stick to the evidence. I'm sorry that's not how you perceive it. All those extremists you mention are still out there, and maybe we're wrong in this approach, but the only effective way to fight the fake is with facts and evidence and sound reasoning.

But you make me question myself on this, and I'll take a step back to see if I'm being too subjective. It was a good thread idea, and I'm sorry it went in this direction.

 

[Peterkin]

Good topic - serious issue. Poor example; too emotionally volatile.

[MSC]

I'm pretty much reserving my judgement until the judicial processes have run their course. To be honest I didn't like the way it was handled. Jury wasn't sequestered properly, they were allowed to keep their phones. The trial was made public and allowed members of the public to be in the courtroom. The jeers, snickers and laughing created a dramatic atmosphere that could have impacted the jury's perception of testimony and evidence.

Now, JD has been in a lot of movies that I have thoroughly enjoyed. I've also enjoyed a number of his performances as an individual. 

That said; his demeanor in court was quite disrespectful and needlessly dramatic. I've seen court rooms where individuals with non celebrity status, have been warned and found in contempt of court, for less. 

I had actually never heard of Amber Heard until a few years ago when this all started coming out. The more this started to unfold, the more biased trash came out about her from various sources where I couldn't read half a sentence without coming across some loaded words or phrases used to describe her. This wasn't even news I sought out. This was the "trending" stuff that I usually ignore when its about celebrities. Obviously during this trial, it became inescapable unless you decided not to open any news apps or better yet just turned your phone off. 

The things that confused me about this trial, were enough to make me question the feelings of defensiveness I get when a person I've only ever been entertained by or had positive interactions with, is accused of something as severe as being a domestic abuser. 

The thing that confused me the most, was finding Amber Heard guilty on three counts and JD on one. I had always been led to believe that it is only defamation or slander, if what is claimed is untrue. So the verdicts confused the issue because it's as if the jury said "they are both untrue claims, nobody was abused, nobody is a liar, nothing to see here." Which sounds extremely contradictory to me. 

When it comes to abuse, I don't believe in mutual domestic abuse unless you have the very rare circumstances of where both of the individuals involved have equal power in the relationship and and social circle. Quite frankly, JD has more wealth, fame and social capital than Amber heard. A power difference it would be extremely easy for an abuser to wield. Which lends a lot of plausibility to AHs claims of being abused by JD.

In similar cases, where neither parties were a celebrity, but financially successful enough to suffer concrete harm to their reputations, the outcome would have likely been very different if other factors were the same. For example, if the person acused of abuse had a problem with Drugs and Alcohol, like JD admitted to having, this would have severely damaged their credibility when claiming they had done nothing of the sort. I've been black out drunk before, to the point where I was told I was banging on the club door after it closed to get more booze and was essentially trolling a taxi driver by telling him to stop every five minutes, to the point where me and my friend got kicked out of the cab. That stuff is out of character for me, I don't remember any of it, but I do believe it. Drugs and alcohol do that to you. Considering how much we know about the effects of drugs and alcohol, to suggest that you are capable of remembering everything well enough to know you did not do what you are accused of doing, is effectively unscientific to the extreme. Anyone with enough self knowledge of their drug and drinking habits, when being honest with themselves about claims of their wrong doing while under the influence, can only know that they don't know. If they claim they do know, they are lying to themselves. 

One of the other things I took issue with was the breaking of the goldwater rule by JDs expert witness with a background in mental health, claiming she had histrionic personality disorder. I also have an issue with the history behind that particular psychiatric label and the circular logic associated with its diagnosis, where any and every behavior becomes a symptom of it because of the underlying assumption that everything that motivates the individual, is attempts to seek attention by any means. That's not to say I don't think the condition does not exist, but I truly do doubt it's claim in the context of having never been an official patient of the expert making the claim. I suppose you could say that a lack of due process in clinical diagnoses severely diminishes the credibility of said diagnoses. For this aspect, even if I was a psychiatrist, having never met Amber Heard and only knowing how she behaves on camera, I'd never suggest she is suffering from x, y or z. If I wanted to know, I'd have to try and gain her as a client/patient and do a thorough psychiatric evaluation and she would be entitled to a second opinion after I've concluded my own evaluation. Of course if that was the case, I could never really appear in court to disclose confidential medical information about her, without her consent. 

I'm not really done listing what I think of the problems this case were but I'll leave it there for now while I carry on trying to catch up with everything that has been said so far.

What I definitely don't believe, is the narrative posited by fans or haters of either JD or AH. Nor the journalists who make a living off of dramatic sensationalism.

 

 

[TheVat]

The term "paid expert" should always arouse our skepticism.  

[CharonY]

17 minutes ago, MSC said:

The thing that confused me the most, was finding Amber Heard guilty on three counts and JD on one. I had always been led to believe that it is only defamation or slander, if what is claimed is untrue. So the verdicts confused the issue because it's as if the jury said "they are both untrue claims, nobody was abused, nobody is a liar, nothing to see here." Which sounds extremely contradictory to me. 

From I understood from a cursory reading is that the jury basically finds Heard's claims in the op-ed to be false (i.e. they do not believe that she was a victim of abuse the way outlined in the article) and the counterclaim was a bit more specific but it reads like they don't believe that she faked abuse in a particular context.

It is one of the reasons why I think that this prominent case is not a great starting point to talk about domestic abuse in general and abuse of men in particular. I think the OP wanted to argue that the claim of abuse is a form of abuse in itself, but did it in a bit of a roundabout way.

22 minutes ago, MSC said:

When it comes to abuse, I don't believe in mutual domestic abuse unless you have the very rare circumstances of where both of the individuals involved have equal power in the relationship and and social circle. Quite frankly, JD has more wealth, fame and social capital than Amber heard. A power difference it would be extremely easy for an abuser to wield. Which lends a lot of plausibility to AHs claims of being abused by JD.

I think that is a rather complicated issue as I think a lot of us have certain notions how domestic abuse "should" look like, but I suspect that there is a lot more to it, if we started digging in literature a bit. The classic domestic abuse hinges on material power differential, and since the husband traditionally has the earning power, they are considered more likely to be the abuser. But since then other patterns of abuse have been found and I would suspect that power differentials can be quite difficult to quantify. In this particular context both are public figures and certain common patterns of abuse (including isolation from social networks) did not seem to happen. Just because one is more famous than the other does not mean that they have direct power over the other. In fact, one could interpret the situation between them as an attempt to assert power. 

I don't think that mutual abuse is impossible as such, as both parties might engage in power struggles, even if coming from a less powerful (but still sufficiently independent) position. But again, I these are all just speculations.

 

[MSC]

22 minutes ago, CharonY said:

But since then other patterns of abuse have been found and I would suspect that power differentials can be quite difficult to quantify. In this particular context both are public figures and certain common patterns of abuse (including isolation from social networks) did not seem to happen. Just because one is more famous than the other does not mean that they have direct power over the other. In fact, one could interpret the situation between them as an attempt to assert power. 

Agreed. +1.

I suppose this leads me to the question; How does abuse between public figures and abuse between ordinary people differ in presentation and what are the commonalities? Definitely a complicated issue as you say.

I definitely don't think this case is a good starting point to talk about domestic abuse or the abuse men face. Maybe the OP would like to cite some different cases for the discussion to proceed effectively?