Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / Johnny Depp & Amber Heard: Are Domestic Violence Allegations True or False?
Transcript
- Megan Hunter: Welcome to It's All Your Fault on TruStory FM, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you identify and deal with the most challenging human interactions; those with someone who may have a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter, and I'm here with my co-host, Bill Eddy. Bill Eddy: Hi, everybody. Megan Hunter: We're the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California. In this episode, we will discuss the much publicized legal case of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, which is rife with all kinds of high conflict allegations. So, are they true? Are they false? Can we really ever know, and how should we think about it? But first, a couple of notes. If you have a question about high conflict situations or people, send them to us at podcast@highconflictinstitute.com, or on our website at HighConflictInstitute.com/Podcast, where you'll also find the show notes and links. And please give us a rate or review, and tell your friends, colleagues, or family about us, especially if they're dealing with a high conflict situation. We're very grateful. Now, let's talk high conflict. So, this story, Bill, about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Bill Eddy: Yes. Megan Hunter: It's being heard around the world, so to speak, I guess. Bill Eddy: Right. Megan Hunter: There's all kinds of allegations and accusations back and forth. So, I guess the legal case is one of a defamation case that Johnny Depp has filed against his ex-wife, Amber Heard. It's, I don't know, for a large, large sum of money, right? So, the legal case has been in court a few weeks and the allegations have just been flying back and forth just unbelievably. So, they're both accusing each other, as part of it, of domestic violence. I mean, we've heard and seen pictures of a severed finger and pictures of the home they were staying at in Australia that has dents in the wall and a chunk missing out of the marble staircase. And we've seen pictures of Mr. Depp on a couch throwing up and passed out, all kinds of things. It's a tough one. So, domestic violence is very serious, and the courts and people who work in the field are faced with trying to sort these issues out and it's really tough. So, that's what we'll talk about today. So, let's start by discussing different types of DV. Bill Eddy: With what we've seen, and our background's been a lot with family law where there's a lot, probably 50% of family court cases have allegations of domestic violence, which may or may not be true. Majority of them true, of course. But there's four types that have really been identified and helpful to think about in working with cases and understanding them. One is what they call coercive control, which means that one person tries to control the other person's life; that they try to control their social relationships, their finances, may try to isolate them, coerce them into sex, all of these things. And so, there's one person really trying to dominate the other person and the other person lives in fear. It's walking on eggshells every day, every hour of the day, those types of things. And these generally are the more extreme cases where you do end up with people with physical injuries and sometimes visits to the hospital, and sometimes you have serious injury or death coming from this. So, this is the coercive control type of domestic violence. Then there's what they call situational couple violence, which is two people who aren't afraid of each other, but they really lack relationship conflict resolution skills. And so, they may push or shove or occasionally throw something at each other that's not a risk of real harm. You don't usually hear about broken bones or major bruises like you do in the coercive control type. But sometimes there are bruises, but there isn't a sense of fear by either party, and there isn't a sense that one has control of the relationship over the other party, just that they may get a bit wild sometimes. Then there's another type that we see in divorce cases, which is separation instigated violence, which is where there hasn't been a history of violence in the relationship. But when they separate, there may be one or two incidents. I've had cases where the couple's pulling on the same piece of papers, "Hey, that's mine. I need that." "No, that's mine." And I had a case where they're pulling and then the woman falls down and my client, the husband was like, "Oh, my goodness." And so, he just wanted to stay away after that. They were not... and she also said, "There's no history of violence there," but this was a violent incident. She got hurt and broke her glasses. So, those are three. There's a fourth type, and that's what they call defending yourself. It's the protective violence where someone fights back, where you hear about the battered spouse who then shoots and kills her ex or her husband while he's asleep in bed or something like that. It's the reactive defensive violence, and it's very hard to succeed with that in court. There's women who've been in prison for decades because of killing an abusive husband, and it's starting now to be realized that is a problem. Usually what happens is when someone does that defensive violence, they get hurt much worse. And so it's not like, "Oh, this makes things easy." The case of shooting the husband in bed while he is asleep is extremely rare. So, those are four types. Megan Hunter: Yeah. So, that last one you're talking about, is it like the person just finally snaps? Bill Eddy: It's like they really may fear for their life. And so, they're violent back in a way. Maybe they even have a gun and they shoot the person who's been abusive of them while they're awake in the middle of an abusive incident, but that's also where the victim gets killed. The thing is to get away. Fighting back may put your life in danger. Megan Hunter: Right, right. So, in this situation with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the allegation and I guess the genesis of this particular court battle is that Amber Heard had written in a publication something about domestic violence, and it insinuated that it was... I guess, those are my words, that it was Johnny Depp perpetrated domestic violence on her. So, he's filed this defamation suit, and I guess he decided it was worth fighting the battle to try to protect his name. Bill Eddy: I guess the word got out that she had been saying that he was abusive even back in 2016. Apparently he lost his Disney Pirates of the Caribbean series, which made him a really big star, back in 2016. Then in 2018, The Washington Post had an op-ed article that apparently was written, I think by the ACLU. It was helping her as she's trying to come out as a victim's rights person and saying, "I was a victim too," which implied that it was in the relationship with Johnny Depp, and so it was going to harm his future work. So, he filed a defamation lawsuit. And the thing with defamation is there's libel, which is in writing, and there's slander, which is verbally. And so, clearly The Washington Post op-ed piece was in writing and clearly implied it was him. So, he came back with a $50 million lawsuit for defamation. So, they're being heard in a civil court with a jury. So, it's going to be very interesting how this turns out. Because most cases, like in family law, is a single judge who often has substantial experience with domestic violence allegations and so may be pretty realistic at getting an idea of what's going on. But this will be jurors who may be real unfamiliar with this, and so we'll see. It's really an educational opportunity because domestic violence is real, it's a problem, people die from it, it harms relationships, it hurts kids when they're exposed to parents fighting. Even when they're not in the same room, they know this is happening. So, it's an issue. I think the glamor of high society and celebrity on top of this makes it attractive in a voyeuristic way. I guess one of my hopes is what comes out of this is seeing both of them as human beings. There isn't a bad guy and a good guy here. They're just human beings, and we all have some bad things, and we're seeing their bad things which are very bad. I'm curious, in trying to understand the case, what their dynamics are. So, I'm not getting caught up in the testimony. I want to know what the big picture is. Megan Hunter: Yeah. I haven't kept up with a lot of the testimony either, but I've seen bits and pieces here and there and you hear about Johnny Depp saying he came from some chaotic background perhaps growing up. Most of the work that we do has, or a lot of it has some touch of trauma from the past in it, and you looked at person as a wounded person, perhaps that is along this healing process throughout their life. And then we see on the other side, I think some evidence has been presented that Amber has been diagnosed perhaps with borderline and perhaps hysteric personality disorders as well. Did you read anything about that, Bill? Bill Eddy: I read one thing saying that it's been alleged that she had borderline personality disorder, and that could explain some of her behavior, because when someone has borderline personality disorder they often have emotion dysregulation. So, they have extreme emotions. In many of the domestic violence cases we see in family law and family court, people do have that borderline pattern of mood swings, explosion of rage, and then a period of remorse and, "Sorry," and, "I'll never do it again," kind of thing. We see that with men actually, more male domestic violence with that borderline pattern than female, but it can be part of that, and that might help explain and there's treatment for borderline personality disorder. And my hope out of all of this is they both need some help. That part I've become convinced of. Megan Hunter: Right. I mean, he has self-admitted addiction issues. I mean, there's so much here and you just see the perfect storm that has been building from the very beginning. I'm sure it was very wonderful at the beginning, and they I didn't expect it would ever end up in court like this, but the fight is on, here we are. It is sad, and I agree with you that hopefully they will get some healing from this. Hopefully there will be that point of reckoning that they individually could have that would spur them to get some more help, and perhaps even filing the lawsuit is part of that. I don't know. Bill Eddy: Yeah, it's really tricky when people... The thing we see with high conflict personalities are they blame other people 100%. And so, we see high conflict personalities in a lot of legal disputes taking zero responsibility for things that they may be 50%, or even 80% or 90% responsible for. So, I'd really like to get the big picture to see, is this someone who is not taking any responsibility, or is this someone who realizes, "Yeah, I've got stuff to work on, but I also need to clear my name about things that I didn't do that I've been falsely accused of"? Because true and false allegations show up in court a lot, and on the surface they look alike. And so, that's why you really want the full big picture to be able to really get a sense of what is going on here. Megan Hunter: Yeah. I wouldn't want to be on that jury. And speaking of jurors, do you think they will be able to keep an open mind? Bill Eddy: That's a potentially big problem. Because I think if you've grown up in the last, let's say 100 years, you've been exposed to a lot of people's bad behavior and there's also been a lot of gender disputes; what do men do, what do women do, and domestic violence is clearly more of a male behavior. In terms of coercive control, that's probably maybe 85% men, but maybe 15% of women do some of that. And the situational couple violence is pretty much 50/50, men and women do. But there's gender presumptions, and I think a lot of people may have already jumped to conclusions. I read somewhere that Johnny Depp has been testifying, and as of when we're recording this, I think he's only been the one on the stand, that Amber Heard hasn't testified yet. And yet, something like 40% of people think that he's right and they agree with him. 10% think she's right and they agree with her, and 50% say, "We don't know what to think." Well, I would... Megan Hunter: That's fascinating. Bill Eddy: Yeah, and I'm with the 50% because I don't want to prejudge anything like this. We need a lot more information. And frankly, my experience as a lawyer, as a family lawyer having examination and cross-examination in my legal cases is, I don't put a lot of weight on testimony. I want a lot of the outside information. I want to know who's looked at things. And so, I think what you're going to see is there's the risk of people jumping to conclusions, and that's what they call confirmation bias. And this is a research term, but it affects people investigating abuse cases. As a social worker, I got involved with child abuse cases well before I became a lawyer, and I know some social workers were not good at interviewing kids. They had an assumption and they got the kid to agree with it and give them statements that would agree. That turned out to be totally impossible; elephants being slaughtered on the Sunday school classroom floor and stuff like that. Megan Hunter: Oh dear. Bill Eddy: Yes. So, the way you interview children and the way you interview anybody needs to be done carefully. So, you need to have at least three theories, and this is what I like to teach. When someone says someone else is acting abusively, you have to consider first that it may be true. Domestic violence, child abuse, all of this. The second theory is, it might not be true at all, that the person is being falsely accused. It's possible that Johnny Depp really is someone who's a victim and has not physically abused Amber Heard ever, or anyone else. He says, "I haven't been physical. I haven't been physically abusive with anyone." I believe he said that. And that could be true, and we have to keep the door open to that possibility. But the first possibility was that, "No, no, he's done all these things," and that's a possibility too, and you need to protect people from someone acting that way. The third possibility is that both people really are contributing. And in my mind, from what I've heard, I wonder if one of these folks was coercively controlling the other, and it could be either way. Or if they both, if this is a situational couple violence, got wild to the extreme, and I think you really have to seriously consider that theory. What I find though is in family law, that many family law professionals have a presumption about one of these. And they'll say, "When I hear about domestic violence, I always believe it. No one would lie about anything like that. It must be true," and I know lawyers, judges, mediators, and counselors who feel that way. And then I've heard people say, including judges and lawyers, "When I hear about domestic violence in divorce cases, I just assume it's an effort to get an advantage in the case, and so I just... Most of those cases aren't true." And then there's the, "Oh, I always assume it's both people. If one person's doing it, the other is too and everything's 50/50." Well, none of those should be a presumption. You've really got to keep an open mind. And it isn't easy if you've grown up with someone who was abused or falsely accused. So, I really hope they have open minds. Megan Hunter: That emotional persuasion and your own experience, like you said, it can be... Really put a confirmation bias on it and you end up... I just wouldn't want to have a jury in deciding my fate on something like this, but I do love that three theories of the case. I've been talking about it a lot since you taught me about it really. It just helps people so much when they're going through a case to keep actually an entire case structured, even if a court can't keep it structured or the other attorney is really hammering away at something else. If you can, even yourself, keep it structured with those three theories and take some responsibility. Bill, so what would you consider in figuring out if a case is true or false? Bill Eddy: These are things that hopefully will get presented to the jury, and in cases like this, you need someone who's doing some investigation. Now, this type of case will have a lot of investigation because it's such high profile. But the questions to be really thinking about are; what's the pattern of the relationship behavior? What's the patterns? Not did this incident take place or did that incident take place, but what's the pattern? Because the pattern makes me go, "Okay, it's more likely that he's lying, or more likely that she's lying." Or they may honestly believe stuff that isn't true, which is another possibility in here. So, what I would want to know is especially the power and control relationship, if one of them had coercive control of the other person. Did one of them dominate their decision making and the other one go along with stuff because they feared challenging the person? And this could be either one. Celebrities get into abusive relationships sometimes where they're a victim. But there's also the good chance that Johnny Depp may have been the authority in the relationship and that she may have felt she couldn't challenge him, and some of these things were very exceptional. About their relationship with friends. Did they spend time with other people? What do friends say about what they observed? Not friends who just know one of them, friends who've seen both of them together and may be able to say something about what they saw. Unless they're really biased, which is one of the risks. I think there's already been that issue raised in this case, that somebody's a friend of one of them and that's why they're saying what they're saying. But also, who had financial control is... Was this something where one of them really controlled the checkbook and limited the other? And what's interesting, this makes me flash on a celebrity case of Brian Wilson and also Britney Spears, where even though they were celebrities bringing in gazillion dollars, someone else had control. And there's the question of whether Brian Wilson was somewhat emotionally abused by his conservator and whether Britney Spears was emotionally abused by her father as her conservator. So, you really need to see the big picture of dynamics, and you're really going to have to hear from both of them before you even begin forming any kind of really useful opinion, and you've got to consider these three possibilities. Maybe he is the person that's caused all of this and he's just fighting, fighting, fighting to clear his name, even though it's all his fault. Maybe she's the person that caused all of this and he's really a victim. And maybe they both. They got situational couple violence that got more wild than in most cases, and that's sad to say because they're so wealthy that they can get away with getting this deep into difficulty. Most people don't have the resources to get this extravagant in their bad behavior. Megan Hunter: Yeah. Bill Eddy: It's a good educational opportunity, I think for all of us, to stop and think and really be careful about not being as judgemental as we'd like to be. But really, these are human beings, they need compassion, they need help, and they need an open mind. Megan Hunter: I 100% agree, because it's so... We just have such a celebrity obsession in our culture and we just, I think, have this unrealistic perception that they have a worry-free life because they are celebrities, because they have money and fame. I actually see that as... Those are things I wouldn't want in my life. I mean, I would want a lot of money, but I wouldn't want the celebrity and the fame. Those are pressures that I wouldn't want in my life. And I think we want to believe that people don't have pressures when they're at that level of life, and I think they have more pressures in ways that the rest of us don't have. And like you said, we have to keep it human. These are two human beings that just have a different job than the rest of us. We all have different jobs, and we all come from somewhere. We're all a recipe of our whole lifetime, all the inputs, right? And they just happen to take a little bit different career path, but it doesn't mean that two maybe wounded people wouldn't get together just because they're celebrities. They're going to have the same things happen, it's just going to be on such a bigger platform for the world to see. And like you said, to have this as a learning opportunity for others in the world, that hopefully people will get some... Maybe take some feedback from this and put it into their own lives. Like what we've done with the book Dating Radar, try to look at what's happening in your relationship and take the time to get to know this other person while you're dating before you get financially entangled, married, having a child together, starting a business together, living together, all of those things. There are clues, there are little tells that maybe this isn't the right person for me, and we put that all in that book. So, I guess the question, Bill is, do you think that if either of them had read Dating Radar in advance, that they would've had any insight? Bill Eddy: I actually think they may have had insight if they'd read that in advance, because it's clear their patterns of behavior have some high conflict elements, and both of them. And if they had thought about that... We recommend, or at least I recommend that people wait at least a year before making those commitments. That during that year you'll see these patterns of behavior we're talking about, and the high conflict behavior of 100% blaming the other person, all or nothing thinking, unmanaged emotions, extreme behaviors. I always use holes in the wall as an example, and it sounds like that definitely happened here. So, you've got high conflict people. You can usually see that well before a year, but not necessarily just in the first month or two. And so, that's why they should read Dating Radar and wait a year. Megan Hunter: Right. I was at physical therapy this morning and the young man working on my shoulder, somehow we started talking about relationships and he said he'd been in a relationship for about a year before he found out that his girlfriend had multiple personalities and had three different relationships going on and had definitely different personalities going with each one, different tones of voice. She used the same name, but different... It was really fascinating, and I thought it was... I guess I was a little bit shocked that it took a year to figure that out, but maybe he just wasn't looking, and he definitely hadn't read Dating Radar. But that he said his next girlfriend after that turned out had a pretty bad alcohol addiction. And I said, "Well, sounds like you need to read this book. Get maybe a little bit more direction and get your picker fixed." Bill Eddy: Yeah. Megan Hunter: I'll be taking in that book. Bill Eddy: Yeah. Excellent. And that's so... So many people just are caught by surprise, and there's patterns of behavior. And they call that a dissociative identity disorder when someone seems to have more than one personality, and it does seem to be a real thing and there's treatment for some of these things. And so, I want to make sure our listeners know we're not talking about... We're talking about dating to avoid getting into relationships with someone with these problems, but people with these problems should get help and then they won't have these problems, or at least have a ability to manage them. So, we like to have empathy for everyone. Megan Hunter: Absolutely. Bill Eddy: But with eyes wide open. Megan Hunter: Right. Right. And we wrote that book to really help people have eyes wide open and not to be judgemental, but just to be aware and make the best decisions for yourselves, because these can be... It can be really tricky when have a romantic feelings for someone and you're in love and in lust. It really can cause some blindness and you aren't necessarily looking for those things. So, as you and I both know, a lot of the people who've read the book it was done in hindsight after they'd been through a high conflict divorce or just some tragedy or trauma with it. And we really intended it for it to be a preventive tool. So, hopefully more and more people will be taking note. Especially the younger generations. They seem to be more interested in looking out for those things. Anyway. Well, I think what we'll do is see where this case goes over the coming weeks, and maybe have a follow-up episode and see what happens after the jury comes back. Bill Eddy: We should also make sure to mention that we do have a domestic violence video series of six 1 hour in relation to family court, and that's on our website. And I also want to mention that I did a Psychology Today blog on March 31st and title, Does Your Relationship Include Coercive Control? So if listeners are interested in more resources; Dating Radar, the series of six domestic violence videos, interviews with 16 experts, and this Psychology Today article. Megan Hunter: Nice, and we'll put all those in the show notes and you'll be able to find all those very easily. Next week, we are going to continue talking about high conflict divorce with someone who's been there. Now, there are a lot of stories. There are a lot of people that have had high conflict divorces and a lot of stories, but this one is unique in that she was able to be pretty successful throughout the legal case, and because she used strategies that she learned from Bill's book, 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life and some other reading. And she's a very thoughtful person and has really done a great, great job maintaining her own sense of identity throughout this and taking care of her child, putting the child's best interest first, and managing the longer term relationship. She's going to talk about what she did in the court case, and I think you'll find it really enjoyable. So, you'll want to tune in for that. And if you have any questions, remember to send them to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com, or submit them to HighConflictInstitute.com/Podcast. And if you're enjoying our podcast and learning something new, we'd love to hear about it. Please leave us a rate and review. We'd just be very grateful. So until next week, have a great one and keep striving toward peace. It's All Your Fault is a production of TruStory FM. Engineering by Andy Nelson, music by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins, and Ziv Moran. Find the show, show notes, and transcripts at TruStory.fm or HighConflictInstitute.com/Podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.