did you see j*hnny depp is going to be in rihanna's savage x fenty show?? i'm so pissed, idg how rihanna could do that considering what she's been through
I'm surprised only because Johnny's a bizarre fit for a lingerie brand. His core fanbase isn't the type to invest in lingerie - or care about their appearance at all, really - so it doesn't make any sense. But Rihanna supporting him doesn't really surprise me, even if it's disappointing, and I think it offers a valuable lesson on how we should interpret the behavior of abuse victims.
First, it's worth pointing out how closely her situation with Chris Brown mirrored Amber's. While people during the trial earlier this year held her up as the picture of a perfect victim (one photo circulated on Twitter comparing her bruises to Amber's, suggesting Rihanna was what a “real victim” looked like), at the time many people didn't believe her. Some people still don't, or think she was the one at fault. Like Johnny, Chris, too, played the victim. He said Rihanna was the aggressor in their relationship, taking photos of his imperceptible "injuries" as proof, and his team leaked stories to websites like TMZ about how Rihanna had gotten physical with him in the past, once slapping him during an argument. Other sites played up her "violent past," bringing up an old interview where she'd admitted to hitting her brother with a bottle when they were younger. All of this served to even the playing field - to make the story less a classic Lifetime drama of the quivering housewife walking on eggshells, a la Sleeping with the Enemy or The Burning Bed, that so many people still hold up as the one true image of domestic violence, and more of an ugly, mutually destructive, "there are no winners" kind of toxic relationship that's easier to brush aside. On a lot of gossip sites and forums, pictures of her bruises were analyzed and picked apart (just take a look through the LipstickAlley archives). Others spread rumors that she'd triggered Chris' wrath by giving him an STD, as if battering her then was a justifiable response. Despite the photos of her injuries being plastered around the world, she still went back to him. They reunited soon after, to a great deal of controversy. And like how Amber said that despite the abuse she still loved Johnny (which his rabid defenders use as proof she was lying, since how could you possibly love someone who hurt you?), Rihanna told Oprah in a 2012 interview that she still considered Chris to be the "love of [her] life." They started dating again shortly after that.
Of course, this has all been conveniently forgotten.
And Rihanna isn't the only one. Paris Hilton liked Johnny's victory post on Instagram, despite her going through a similar ordeal with Nick Carter back in 2004. When she was photographed black-and-blue in public after their breakup, Nick denied touching her and his lawyer, Marty Singer, told the press that Paris' bruises were from a rough photoshoot - to suggest anything else, Singer said, would be "defamatory." (Nevertheless, she maintains to this day he abused her.) Denise Richards also liked Johnny's posts, despite her ugly, unending divorce from Charlie Sheen that was pretty much the Amber-Johnny case of the 2000s - when she left Charlie, she accused him of abuse and was immediately called a liar, gold digger, and slut. People simultaneously argued that she was making it all up, or that she "should've known" what she was getting herself into by marrying someone like Charlie (as if the latter argument didn't contradict the former). They brought up rumors that she used to be one of Heidi Fleiss' hookers (much like how Johnny fans love to speculate that Amber used to work as a stripper) and accused her of wrecking her friend Heather Locklear's marriage to Richie Sambora (Star magazine had one cover back then that still lingers in my memory: "Denise Richards - Victim or Vixen?"). Charlie leaked their private emails and fed stories to the press about how Denise continued to reach out to him and had even asked him to use his sperm so she could have another child. If they hadn't already written her off, a fatigued public inevitably resigned itself to the idea that Denise was "crazy," and it wasn't until Charlie assaulted his next wife that people's opinion of her softened. Janice Dickinson liked Johnny's post, too, and I don't have to remind you of what Bill Cosby defenders have said about her.
I bring all of this up to point out that being a victim doesn't necessarily make you an expert in the field, or the be-all end-all voice for victims everywhere. It doesn't give you an extrasensory perception for whether or not another person is "telling the truth," and believing as much just creates a dangerous trend where people use their own experiences to invalidate others'. I can't think of how many people I saw on here and Twitter during the trial who during arguments would pull out the "I was a victim of abuse, so I know what it really looks like!" card as if it was a secret weapon they kept hidden in their back pocket, exploiting it to shut down anyone who believed Amber. It's stupid and dangerous. And when it comes to women like Rihanna, or Paris, or Denise, or Janice, I can also understand why they'd disbelieve Amber. If you were in their shoes and saw a woman like Amber, who'd been universally dismissed as a liar, whose every move was picked apart and used as further evidence of her deceit, then you'd probably want to distance yourself, too, or at least convince yourself that you're somehow different - that you couldn't possibly have anything in common with one of the the most despised women in the world. I'm not saying it's right, but it's understandable. Victimhood isn't a permanent state of being. It's situational. You can be hurt, and hurt others. And being a victim of abuse doesn't preclude you from having bad judgement or being a bad person. You're human; Rihanna's human. And that means she can also be a total asshole.
Conversely, there's been abusive men who've supported Amber, or at least questioned Johnny's story. Mike Tyson, a convicted rapist who abused his ex-wife Robin Givens (someone who's still horribly maligned to this day and called a liar despite Mike quite literally admitting to beating her), said he felt bad for Amber in an interview during the trial. Donald Trump, who reportedly abused and raped his first wife Ivana, suggested Johnny's elaborate tale about the thrown bottle that sliced off his finger from across the room was bullshit ("She must have a Sandy Koufax type arm" is still one of my favorite quotes to come out of this whole thing). None of this proves or disproves anything. They're all just voices, no different from yours and mine.
On another note, it's kind of surreal to think Johnny's been getting these opportunities - his cameo at the VMAs, now this Rihanna gig - only because he beat his wife. At least with men like Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, or Michael Jackson, it makes sense why they'd continue to garner support since they are/were incredibly talented and have iconic bodies of work. Johnny... has Tim Burton? And Pirates? He had a fine run in the '90s as a brooding, pretentious alternative to the cookie-cutter Hollywood heartthrob, but that's about it. His career was already in the toilet before he even got with Amber, so this wave of support he's gotten in recent years is pretty much built on his beating a woman. What a world.
