It’s a strange contradiction. Knox spent years insisting that her own innocence was a hard truth. Afterwards, once the world began to agree with her, she became a tenacious advocate for the rights of the wrongly accused. Yet she’s also an example of the way truth has increasingly become privatized in our society, especially when it comes to the trauma narrative. We each have our “own truth”, and the more shapely and compelling the story — and the slicker the redemption arc — the better. It used to be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. But that old judicial motto has been replaced by another: “lights, camera, action.” A new genre is emerging. Call it the age of the trauma blockbuster.

As the Knox show dropped, there were also developments in the Menendez brothers’ case, a kind of first test of whether a television redemption can translate into a judicial one. Lyle and Eric were convicted of the brutal murder of their parents in 1993, and the trial was one of the first to be broadcast live. Millions tuned in to watch the prosecution paint the brothers as spoiled rich kids, and the defense lay out the years of sexual abuse the brothers endured at their father’s hands. They expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison, until Ryan Murphy’s sensationalized account of their life, Monsters, aired on Netflix last year. 

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The brothers’ family objected to the retelling, it featured grotesque re-enactments of the brothers’ abuse, as well as the implication of incest (in a soapy shower scene). But Murphy was right when he proclaimed his own series “the best thing that has happened” to the brothers in decades. They have a chance at freedom now. Though their requests for parole were denied, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is now considering the brothers for clemency, and their lawyers are pursuing promising other legal avenues. Since O. J., since Lorena Bobbitt, since Casey Anthony, justice has been a spectacle. But now spectacle is justice.

The Menendez brothers “own truth” — that their moral compasses were mangled by the repercussions of sexual abuse — wasn’t enough to lessen their sentences in 1994. But it might be now, under our new shared understanding of trauma. If criminality requires  a guilty act and a guilty mind, we are now inclined to absolve the minds of the traumatized. The reasons some might kill are complex, personal and potentially exculpatory.

Certainly, the Italian authorities didn’t have much understanding of these wider contexts at the time of Knox’s trial. Her conviction rested significantly upon the weird “vibe” that she gave after her friend Meredith Kercher was found murdered. Knox took a shower after mistaking blood stains for period blood, and kissed her then-boyfriend Raffealle Sollecito at the crime scene, who was also convicted and then acquitted of the murder. The Italian detectives took her behavior as signs of her guilt, but the less complicated answer — that she didn’t understand what she was seeing, and that she didn’t process it afterwards — also required the abandonment of certain assumptions about what shock, horror and grief should look like. 

Sollecito, who also served four years in prison, never garnered the public shaming or subsequent fame that Knox did. According to Instagram, he’s now a “vegan yogi”, and had no part in the Hollywood retelling of his story. We might wonder if he is better off than Knox — unable, or maybe unwilling, to capitalize on his trauma or rehearse the unfairness of his story. 

Our culture’s love of the trauma plot line risks telling the version of events that feels truer not because it is more accurate, but because it is more emotionally satisfying. When Johnny Depp and Amber Heard faced off in court in 2022, I listened to some of my devoted feminist friends call Heard a “liar” who was betraying women. The harrowing details of her allegations ceased to matter, the “truth” had been rendered irrelevant in the algorithmic court of public opinion. Heard and Depp were flattened into TikToks, memes, and YouTube supercuts.

Meanwhile, that same year, the Netflix show Inventing Anna transformed Anna Delvey from a convicted fraudster into a media darling. The internet reappraised her as a kind of camp icon, who walked fashion runways and sold her own merch. It seemed we didn’t mind her stolen money, or her imprisonment — not if she was willing to sashay on Dancing With the Stars. Depp returned to the silver screen; but Heard, broken, faded into oblivion. Maybe she’s found peace there, but her case demonstrates that there are certain rules for women, and then there are exceptions, mostly made for those who bleed on cue, according to the rules of TV.

The Knox series is unusually forthright about the power dynamics involved. Knox’s creative control and the imprimatur of fellow trauma star Monica Lewinsky, who executive produced the series, are designed to reverse a decade and a half of tabloid mythmaking (“Foxy Knoxy”) by monetizing empathy. It’s a defensible project, an exonerated woman insisting on her version of her life, but the meta-move matters. The claim isn’t simply “I am innocent”; rather, it’s “my authorship is innocence’s proof”. The show’s authority comes not from a judge’s final opinion, but from the right to tell and sell one’s own story in the most persuasive medium of our time. 

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The medium has no interest in arbitrating fact from fiction; it rewards sexiness and the appearance of truth. There’s a reason why the Menendez show cast two very good-looking actors as its protagonists and had them shirtless often. Ditto with Knox. Our appetite for watching alleged criminals is driven by their undeniably seductive power. Perhaps we all become trauma stars in our own minds.  

Justice used to borrow the theatre’s stage, now it borrows its logic. For 30 years, we’ve lived with “trial as show”, from the Menendez brothers on Court TV to O. J., then the Depp-Heard livestream. But the true-crime boom has completed a cultural inversion: television isn’t the shadow of justice anymore; it’s the forum where guilt, innocence, and redemption are negotiated and sometimes won. 

The form’s best ambitions shouldn’t be dismissed. If a series helps us understand how an interrogation breaks down or how misogyny distorts a case, that’s a public service. If clemency for the Menendez brothers reflects a better grasp of youthful culpability, good. The trouble is the genre’s gravitational and manipulative pull. The Greeks knew that drama purifies through pity and fear; today we purify through pity and fandom. Truths — whether “own truths”, or the actual kind — tend to be erased in the white-hot glare of the public appetite. And Knox, at least, should know better. The “mystery” of her guilt was always a narrative contrivance: Italian prosecutors, the tabloids, and then Hollywood all found the beautiful American exchange student a more compelling protagonist than the obvious culprit. The trauma industry, no surprise, is good for no one.

It’s true that men are more likely to let abuse and stalking continue longer than women before they seek intervention by the police, and anecdotally the reasons they give are fear of being seen as unmanly or fear of not being taken seriously. (Although, of course, of course, victims of interpersonal violence of any gender have long been frustrated by their attempts to seek justice or assistance.) And it’s also true that men are less likely to be acknowledged as the victims of violence in interpersonal relationships, heterosexual or otherwise.

But the new Men’s Rights Activist, the online version, goes beyond pointing out these troubling structural realities, which stem from all sorts of societal stereotypes about men’s strength, physical and emotional. Instead, he points the finger of blame — publicly doubting accusations against prominent men while escalating every perceived harm done by a woman.

And so, of course, Johnny Depp has become a hero in the eyes of the MRAs. One of the biggest priorities for the movement is to prove that women make false accusations of rape and abuse against men, and that making such an accusation is a way of getting attention, fame, and protection. Depp’s decision to sue ex-wife Amber Heard and the newspaper The Sun for their claims that he abused her has given a platform to their crusade. Many see him as serving this larger cause, proving not only that men can be victims of domestic violence, but also that women make false accusations.

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Amber Heard, in their eyes, is a “witch”. Turning the language of online feminism on its head, the MRAs accuse her of “toxic femininity”. Just as the phrase “toxic masculinity” was created to explain how traditionally gendered behaviour by men — aggressiveness, callousness, sexual transgressions — were actually harmful rather than something that should be nurtured and rewarded, “toxic femininity” suggests that traditionally female sins — playing the victim, lying, crying to manipulate — have been tolerated for too long. Amber Heard, sobbing on the witness stand, represents the red-pilled man’s most cynical fantasies of womanhood.

The first generation of the Men’s Rights Movement grew out of men feeling demonised by feminists, and the same is perhaps true here. In recent years, the discourse around toxic masculinity has been intense — and often pretty meaningless. Depp’s case has become a rallying cry for all the presumed men “suffering” this discourse — the men whose strength, assertiveness, and sexual prowess was now deemed problematic, the Depp trial has been a platform for aggrieved men to hold forth on “toxic femininity”.

The social media edition of the gender wars depends on gross generalisations. On Twitter, hashtags like #MenAreTrash go viral for any variation of betrayal and violation — from rape to not texting back to taking up too much space in public. MRAs have responded by co-opting and reversing the accusations — not only has toxic masculinity become toxic femininity, #MeToo has become #MenToo.

And sometimes this raw display of heteropessimism intersects with celebrity breakups, especially when “toxic femininity” is on display. This is the result of a parasocial “stan” culture, in which the traditional one-sided relationship people have always had with the powerful or the famous gets twisted into a fantastical attachment, where a celebrity becomes both an imaginary friend and a stand-in for their fan’s own identity. The idea is that, if good things happen to this person, those good things are or could possibly happen to me; if this person is vindicated I, too, will be vindicated; and if bad things happen, like a romantic break-up or some other problem, this is proof that my life will suffer similar indignities. Certain figures — Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Warren — have become notorious for their online fanbases, who will harass their exes and their critics on their behalf.

Johnny Depp, meanwhile, has become a stand-in for every man who gaslighted, rejected, or abused; Amber Heard a representation of every woman who has feigned hurt, made false accusations of abuse, or lied and cheated, whether real or imagined. This isn’t Depp against Heard; it is man against woman.

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And it’s worth noting that the case taking up so much media and online attention is not about what Johnny and Amber have actually done to each other, it’s about the stories they’ve told. It is not a criminal trial meant to adjudicate the abuse accusations made by both Depp and Heard against each other over the years. It’s a defamation trial centred around a personal essay Heard published in the Washington Post about abuse she suffered at the hands of an unnamed romantic partner.

That essay landed at the height of the MeToo movement, as accusations against figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh and Louis C.K. saw powerful men being sent to trial, investigated in the press, or fired from work. The rhetoric at the time was that it was important to “Believe Women” when they accused men of abuse. Heard got a lot of media attention — which was exactly what she wanted: she’d been asked to write the essay by ACLU to promote the cause of domestic violence, and she in return asked that the essay be published in time to promote her film, Aquaman. What benefited her career harmed his: despite not naming Depp directly in the initial essay, it was widely assumed to be about him, and Depp was, like many men accused of abuse against women, suddenly dropped from projects, most notably the next in the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the Fantastic Beasts series.

This is, I suppose, what some men would call “toxic femininity”. It is an inconvenient reality that famous women can sometimes monetise their personal stories of abuse and survival. Many feminist activists have tried to deny or downplay the professional advantages of victimhood, for fear that misogynists and abusers will use it to downplay accusations. But those denials can often have the opposite effect, creating a backlash effect.

Even as some of Heard’s accusations began to fall apart, many online feminists supported her side of the story and used her essay as a jumping-off point to either talk about the abuse they themselves had suffered or to draw attention to the serious harm done to women in romantic relationships every year. If Heard was seen to be lying or exaggerating, it would be “bad for women,” as if one false accusation by a celebrity calls all accusations women make against their male partners into questions.

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Everyone, in short, is making this case about themselves, and ignoring the obvious fact that these two individuals have obviously both done terrible things to each other. We are, of course, more used to seeing these individuals on our screens as characters, rather than real humans. People are watching the Depp/Heard trial like a film; they’re there to be entertained. And in television shows — including documentaries — victims are predominantly shown as being passive and naïve like in so many Lifetime movies, or sexually stimulated by the violence as in Big Little Lies, or as meek women who are pushed into warrior mode with a need for vengeance like in The Burning Bed and the very many rape revenge horror films. There are many ways to control, dominate, intimidate, and violate in romantic relationships, and it’s often more complicated and messy than your average television show is willing to depict.

On social media, too, one person has to be a clear victim and the other a clear aggressor. But the legal system is ill-equipped to deal with this. It aims to prove one person guilty and the other innocent. Perhaps that binary is inevitable in any public forum. But activists serious about addressing the problem of domestic violence should resist it, not fuel it.

When an anonymous account only takes an extreme position — “all women are deceitful liars” or “most rape accusations are made by women who consented but then experienced regret”, it’s tempting to swing to the other extreme: “actually, women are perfect angels who would never lie”. But while propaganda might be useful in radicalising the people who already support you, it will do nothing to convert your enemies. Trying to turn Amber Heard into a role model will only come back to bite feminists.