After ending their chaotic, punch-drunk marriage, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard generously treated us to a pair of legal epilogues. First, Depp sued the Sun for calling him a wife beater, only to have the judge in London accept Heard’s account of his brutality and dismiss his case. He then sued Heard for defamation in the US, where a jury awarded him $15m in damages.
Nick Wallis, the journalist best known for exposing the shameful prosecution of postmasters who took the blame for a faulty computer system, followed Depp’s wrangling with Heard in both courts and has now written up the affair as a contemporary moral fable. Extracting grand conclusions from trivia, his book documents the clash between two “alternative universes, terraformed by subpoenas, depositions and witness statements”, in which truth has become entirely subjective and relative; Wallis defines his chronicle as an “unreal story” because its astral principals long ago lost contact with the reality that tethers the rest of us to the humdrum earth.
As in a romcom, Depp and Heard met cute. After auditioning her for a role in The Rum Diary, he so treasured the imprint left on his sofa by her rear that he wouldn’t let anyone else occupy the callipygian cavity for the rest of the day. Flattered, she declared that he made her feel “like a million dollars”: an unfortunate figure of speech, since she was later accused of being a gold digger.
Having coupled, Johnny and Amber nicknamed themselves Steve and Slim, their homage to the characters played by Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, though they couldn’t manage the wise-cracking camaraderie of their models. In Howard Hawks’s film, Bacall tells Bogart to whistle whenever he wants her, and saucily shows him how: “You just put your lips together and blow.” Heard improvised a variant during a foul-mouthed spat that she and Depp, narcissists to a fault, recorded on their phones. She told him to suck his own dick, then set a further challenge by ordering him to “Suck my dick”. He asked for clarification, as if puzzled by a line reading in a rehearsal: “Suck my dick, or yours?” Wallis spares us the extra “fellatio-ridden invitations” that ensued, but it sounds as if they had already exhausted the available options.
Heard found that the dapper Depp, so adept at impersonating a courtly southern gent, harboured inside himself an obscene thug he called “the Monster”. He travelled with an entourage of security guards whose job was to protect him from this indwelling Mr Hyde; he also employed a nurse who served, not very effectively, as his “sobriety coach”. While scoffing prescription drugs, snorting cocaine and chugalugging vodka, he allegedly kicked Heard, broke her nose, and raped her with a bottle that deputised for his deflated penis. In lieu of any other climax, he peed on the walls and carpets in whichever “luxury compound” he happened to be inhabiting. By contrast with this psychotic mayhem, his antics as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean look positively demure.
All the same, Depp smarmily charmed the American jurors, who took against Heard because she failed to cry on cue when she testified. Further evidence of inauthenticity emerged to damage her case. She purloined the traumas of a confidante and passed them off as her own; a supposedly harrowing essay on abuse was written for her by an employee of the American Civil Liberties Union and timed to coincide with the publicity campaign for her film Aquaman. Even the blood from her broken nose was touched up with nail polish, and a specimen of shit that Depp alleged she personally deposited in his bed turned out to be canine. That incident prompted Depp’s fans to call her Amber Turd, and one of them arrived at court costumed as a faecal Heard in “a revealing copper-brown top, a dark chocolate-coloured taffeta skirt, a blonde wig and a poo-emoji hat”. Others anonymously reviled her on social media as a “scum whore” or hoped she would “die in overdose”. Celebrities absorb the excess emotions that we can’t expend in our actual lives, and while Depp undeservedly soaked up the love, Heard monopolised the hatred.
“The courtroom in this particular case appears to be the world,” said the flustered American judge. To prove the point, some of the world’s worst people slither through Wallis’s book. After her divorce, Heard dated Elon Musk, which left Depp frothing: he called his successor Mollusk, wondered if he had “a pair”, and threatened to “slice off his dick”. Depp’s defence was planned by a lawyer who also represented Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s scowling proxy, and the flunkies who managed his PR included a woman recruited from Trump’s White House. Intriguingly, a website devoted to oozing out Trump propaganda “spent at least $35,000 promoting pro-Depp, anti-Heard content on Facebook and Instagram”. The link is logical enough: Trump and Depp are both embodiments of rampant, ruthless id.
Another walk-on happened too recently to be noticed by Wallis. In March, the morning after Boris Johnson blustered through an interrogation by the privileges committee, Sarah Vine cooed in the Daily Mail that BoJo was “a charming rogue”, the “Captain Jack Sparrow of British politics”. Yes, for a while we had a pirate as our prime minister. Helped by this supplementary cast of villains, Wallis makes the knockout bout between Depp and Heard a digest of the rancorous, profligate times we are living through.
• Depp v Heard: The Unreal Story by Nick Wallis is published by Bath (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
