A young woman sits on the stairs, hair scraped back, lower lip trembling. She starts to talk about being slapped in the face, and something about the words is instantly familiar. They’re taken from the actor Amber Heard’s gruelling court testimony earlier this month, describing the abuse she claims to have suffered at the hands of her ex-husband, the film star Johnny Depp. Only now these words are being mockingly rehashed – and not just by this one account, belonging to a Canadian beauty business owner using the handle @sansanjovs, but across the social media platform TikTok.
Exaggerated re-enactments of iconic movie scenes are popular on the site, and the same trick has been used to skewer statements from politicians. But there’s something more disturbing about seeing it applied to a court case involving allegations of domestic violence. Depp is suing his ex-wife in the US for defamation over a newspaper essay she wrote in 2018. Although the Washington Post article named no names, Depp argues it clearly implicated him and that his ex-wife was “not a victim of domestic abuse, she is a perpetrator”; she is countersuing for alleged smears against her.
