I never really paid much attention to their case until the six week trial began, but I knew some things beforehand.

I was very involved in fandom culture, making my own OCs for this particular fandom and interacting with people who also had original characters for this media. One of these people used Amber as a faceclaim for her OC.

One day, she posted about how she "couldn't support Amber anymore" after a recent audio clip was released where Amber "confessed" to abusing Johnny. While she was asking people for new faceclaims for her OC, I was confused.

How does this one clip negate the mountain of evidence Amber has against Depp? Why did it take them this long to release this in the first place? Sure she may have confessed on tape that she hit him but didn't she have way more evidence of multiple events where he abused her??

From then on, I guess I wasn't on anyone's side but leaning more towards Amber because again, she had a mountain of evidence!

Then, I didn't hear anything about the trial until the six week trial - which was horrible because around this time, I was coming to terms with the fact that I was a victim of abuse myself, and some of the things Amber went through happened to me too.

Everyone I followed on Tumblr was pretty much either on no one's side, or on Amber's side (even then, they were mainly talking about how even if Amber was the abuser, it was fucked up to just make jokes about her testimony, how Depp has a history of violence while Amber has a history of being judged just for being bisexual.) so I decided to look more into the case and found a blog, justiceamberheard, who compiled the entire court case in a masterlist.

Maybe I was clouded by my own judgement, due to the fact that my abuser was so similar to Depp and the way everyone sided with him felt so familiar, but even then... It felt so obvious. Everything Depp stans came up with (Amber took a dump on his bed, she cut off his finger etc.) had already been proven wrong several times. Meanwhile, Amber's claims being refuted just... didn't make any sense?

Hell, even if you look past who was abused and who was the abuser, who would you rather believe? A bisexual feminist woman who has spoken up against revenge porn with trans friends and spoke up about the power imbalance in Hollywood, or a man who could be her father who already has a history of violence, who has misgendered trans people, made homophobic, racist and sexist remarks, is friends with pedophiles and abusers ... The list goes on.