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.
