He should lose the case. If he doesn’t, then that won’t be good for reasons outside of their situation.

To be clear, I do believe they were both abusive. Me saying she should win the case doesn’t mean I support either one of them, or one more than the other.

The suit is for defamation. To win he has to prove that she lied in the op-ed article and that the lie resulted in his loss of income.

Here’s the thing. Legally speaking, the fact that she was abusive as well does not make the fact that he abused her untrue. It makes it an incomplete truth, but still true. Secondly, his addiction has been undermining his career for years before Heard came along. A lot of people don’t like to and don’t want to work with him. It’s been known for years that he’s a handful on set. He would have to prove that the article was the driving reason he got dropped, rather than the latest in a long string of concerns. I don’t think he can credibly do that.

Big budget movies are million dollar day productions. You cannot have cast and crew not show up with their A game with millions of dollars of investor money at stake. Like it or not, it is what it is. He would not be the first and will not be the last actor who gets blacklisted for addiction.

Lastly, this is a civil suit, not a criminal trial. She doesn’t have to prove abuse beyond a reasonable doubt. A jury or judge (if it’s a bench trial) just has to mostly believe the claims or believe they’re mostly credible. And he’s not denying what he did to her. He has also lied and made false accusations. He gave a sworn deposition stating that he cut off his own finger and then later testified that she cut off his finger. Regardless of how credible she doesn’t appear, he’s trapped himself in a blatant outright lie. Under oath.

For those reasons, it should go her way. Barring anything new changing things but, coincidentally, I doubt she’ll get the full award.

The good news for Depp’s fans is that the blacklisting doesn’t have to be permanent. Many an actor has been blacklisted, gotten sober, and returned to making movies. Robert Downey Jr, Drew Barrymore, Macaulay Culkin, and Rob Lowe come to mind. There are many others who lost jobs due to addiction and got themselves sober before being blacklisted. There’s a long list who got blacklisted and chose not to return after getting sober. There are also those who died. He has the money to support himself through treatment and reconciliation with the industry. A lot of people don’t. Hollywood is very forgiving. In no way does this mean the end of Johnny Depp (except if he dies from overdose or suicide).

It seems to me that if one was a Depp fan, then one would hope he would get treatment before he ends up another name on that last category because it’s just a matter of time. Instead of whining about what Heard may or may not have done to him, hope it moves him to sobriety. One is not helping him, unless we’re talking about helping him die quicker, by cheating him out of accountability, to satisfy one’s own petty emotional whims.

I wish him well. I’d like to see him drop out of acting for a while, either by choice or force, get sober, get healthy, get stable, get trauma treatment, reconnect with his family, make amends to the people he needs to make amends to (because all addicts do) and then be given another chance like Robert Downey Jr. because he’s a talented man. I hate to see talent wasted, and he’s wasting his, regardless of how padded his bank account is.

I wish the same for Amber Heard, for all the same reasons.