A jury in Fairfax County, Virginia ruled in favor of Johnny Depp’s defamation case against Amber Heard. The Washington Post editorial-page staff published a mea culpa of sorts on Sunday’s op-ed page. An article by their media critic Erik Wemple headlined “The Depp-Heard case hinged on the world’s worst #MeToo op-ed.”
Depp’s lawyer did not sue for the 2018 op–ed. Post.
Heard accused Depp for being a “wifebeater” and Depp denies it. In this case, Heard proclaimed she had become a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Wemple didn’t mince words:
The op-ed underlying all this madness was an assault, too — against journalism. The op-ed adopted a common op-ed format, which was to use public figures to combine their own experiences with policy recommendations. “I was exposed to abuse at a very young age,” reads the piece’s opening. “I knew certain things early on, without ever having to be told.”
…the Heard op-ed raised questions that it never answered. In what way did she “represent” domestic abuse? How specific was the backlash she referred to? What did it mean to see “in real time” how institutions rally around accused men? This is The Post didn’t even include a link in the piece to fill in the context for readers.
Evidently, the PostWe wanted to publish an exciting #MeToo opinion piece, so we relaxed our standards, beginning with the ACLU authoring the article.
Heard, who had obtained a $7 million settlement for her divorce proceedings, pledged $3.5million to the ACLU over ten years. Just months before her op-ed appeared in The Post, Heard became an ACLU ambassador “for women’s rights, with a focus on gender-based violence.” It was a staffer at the ACLU, according to testimony from ACLU general counsel Terence Dougherty, who approached The Post’s Opinions section about publishing an op-ed bearing Heard’s byline.
Through consultation with Heard the ACLU created the initial draft. Four lawyers at the ACLU reviewed it to ensure that it aligned with the organization’s policy positions. Heard’s lawyers separately scrubbed it for compliance with a nondisclosure provision of her divorce settlement, according to an ACLU spokesperson.
So Heard’s celebrity conferred standing at the ACLU, which then leveraged her name into a Post op-ed. The byline was accurate only to the extent that the ACLU tried to craft a piece consistent with Heard’s spoken views. This is, however, not very accurate. Kris Coratti, a Post spokeswoman, says that the opinions section has a standard form seeking attestation from op-ed writers that they actually wrote the work under their bylines, though it’s uncertain whether it was requested in this case.
“We recognize that many writers receive help with their pieces at various stages along the way,” notes Coratti in an email, “and the involvement of the ACLU in the piece was disclosed to us. We also disclosed to our readers Heard’s relationship with the ACLU, as she did in the body of the piece.”
Wemple stated that Post added an editor’s note, but argued it “avoided taking a position on the Virginia jury’s verdict, and amplified the weakness of the piece itself — which was that The PostI took a shortcut to the controversy and forgoed all of the journalistic effort necessary to compile a true #MeToo tale.”
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