🧵: The “false allegations of rape” storyline is one of society’s most successful conspiracy theories and one of our most pervasive moral panics. Of course, it happens. All humans are capable of lying. But the number of false allegations is NOT statistically significant. 1/4 The false allegation narrative cannot, numerically, be considered a trend in the way it is currently being portrayed. The ONS puts the figure for false allegations of rape at 0.5%. That means men as *as likely to be falsely accused of rape than they are to die of the common flu.*

I’m home after 30 much-needed days in a specialist in-patient treatment centre for PTSD. Here are some things I learned, or re-learned, or consolidated (and yes, I watched Good Will Hunting for the first time in rehab):

1. Really bad things happen to really, really good people. When I arrived, a therapist told me that it takes a village to recover from trauma. “Here is your village,” he said, motioning to the other patients.
And what a village they were. It astounds me that people can be so kind and caring in the face of their own unbearable suffering.

THREAD 🧵: When Virginia Guiffre settled her sexual abuse lawsuit against Prince Andrew for £12 million, he forced her to agree not to speak about the allegations or the settlement until the end of the year. That’s reportedly because the royal family really didn’t want anyone talking about these sexual abuse allegations, or the fact that Prince Andrew settled them, during her jubilee.

Wow. I’ve only just come across this piece by IO Tillett Wright, Amber’s friend who called 911 that night, from 2016:

“I called 911 because she never would. Because every time it happened, her first thought was about protecting him.”

refinery29.com/en-us/2016/06/… “We all loved him, but especially, especially her, and she wanted to believe that the behavior wasn't going to last. The reports of violence started with a kick on a private plane, then it was shoves and the occasional punch, until finally… she described an all-out assault.”

#CamilleVasquez on rebuttal on behalf of Johnny Depp:

"The time has come for those lies to come to an end. The time has come for you, the jury, to decide the truth."

#DeppHeardTrial #JohnnyDeppAmberHeardTrial "Ms Heard has no right to tell the world that Mr Depp physically and sexually assaulted when that isn't true... That isn't protected speech."

Heard’s closing:

“Think about the message Mr Depp and his legal team are sending to Ms Heard and, by extension, all victims of domestic abuse: If you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen. If you did take pictures, they’re fake.” “If you didn’t tell your friends, you weren’t injured. If you did tell your friends, they were part of the hoax.”

#JohnnyDepptrial #JohnnyDeppAmberHeardTrial

Another huge day in court yesterday. Here’s what happened:

#DeppHeardTrial #JohnnyDeppVsAmberHeardTrial #DeppvHeard #deppvsheardtrial Amber Heard returned to the stand. Her lawyers asked her how this trial has affected her, and tbh it was heartbreaking. I know people are saying that they don’t find her emotion credible but personally I don’t see that; I see a very distressed person.

I'm seeing a lot of people say that because Heard mentioned on the stand that the op-ed was about Depp's power, that this is an admission that the op-ed is about him and is enough to prove malice, and therefore he wins. That's not right. An explainer:

#JohnnyDeppVsAmberHeard I see this mistake a lot so I think it's important to clarify how the law works here. Malice on its own is not enough to prove defamation; it's a secondary question for the jury. The first question is whether or not the statements in the op-ed were "false".

Wow. Absolutely huge day yesterday. I’ll do my best to summarise. #DeppHeardTrial JD returned to the stand. I thought this was going to be very narrow in scope, just confirming that he didn’t know about the Waldman statements – in the end it was anything but. As before, JD was (for the most part) a very personable witness. He’s friendly, polite, makes jokes

A thread on yesterday’s rebuttal witnesses in the #DeppHeardTrial.

Interestingly, most of rebuttal so far has been focused on the specific question of calculating damages for Heard’s counterclaim. So, a quick note about damages. For claims that are defamation per se, which both the claim and one of the counterclaims are, the plaintiff doesn’t have to prove that the statements were damaging. So, they don’t have to call witnesses to say, for eg, what an ordinary reader would think of an abuser or a liar.

Me again, your friendly neighbourhood legal correspondent, with another little thread about some of the legal issues in the #DeppHeardTrial: Depp has alleged defamation “per se”, which means that the statements are presumed to be defamatory, without requiring them to be put in context/use of external facts. Defamation per se applies to implications that are particularly serious, i.e. the commission of a crime.

Let's debunk some horrendous #DeppVsHeard misinformation that has been flying around the internet and that countless people have cited to me as evidence.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion on this case, but no-one should base that opinion on things that simply aren't true. MYTH 1) The UK case, in which a judge ruled that Depp has physically abused Heard 12 times, was a "sham", that Depp wasn't allowed to present evidence, that the judge didn't hear the same evidence as in this trial, or that it's very hard to win a libel trial in the UK.

#BREAKING: Ghislaine Maxwell's motion for a new trial was unsealed at 1am ET this morning. It is **not** about the jurors who told the press they had been victims of sexual abuse. It does not contain a single reference to these jurors. #GhislaineMaxwell #GhislaineMaxwellTrial Instead, the motion for a new trial relates ENTIRELY to things that happened *during* the trial. It is a challenge to rulings that Judge Nathan made during the trial and instructions she gave to the jury before they went out to deliberate. More on that momentarily. But first...

#BREAKING: Judge Nathan has DENIED the defence’s request to keep their motion for a new trial for #GhislaineMaxwell secret. She will allow them to make narrowly-tailored redactions to protect privacy but said there is no legal reason to keep the entire motion sealed. Firstly, and importantly, Judge Nathan confirms in her order that “much of the information relied upon in the Defendant’s motion and the Government’s response is publicly available.”

BREAKING: The jury in the #GhislaineMaxwellTrial has just sent a note to Judge Nathan requesting the transcripts of FIVE additional witnesses: Elizabeth Loftus, the witness we are calling “Shawn” to protect his privacy, Amanda Young, Cimberly Espinosa and Jason Richards. Elizabeth Loftus is the defence’s expert witness who testified about the science of “false memories”, and about the potential for human memory to be contaminated by suggestion or “post-event information”.

It’s 5.21am in New York and I’m here at the federal courthouse ready for another day of jury deliberations in the #GhislaineMaxwellTrial. The jury has been asked to stay later than usual tonight, so maybe we’ll have a verdict sometime today??

#BREAKING: the jury in the #GhislaineMaxwellTrial has sent another note to the judge asking for the transcript of Matt’s testimony. Matt was Jane’s ex-boyfriend and was called by the prosecution to corroborate her story. Matt testified that Jane told him about *both* Maxwell and Epstein while they were dating. He said Jane described Epstein as a “godfather” like figure who helped her mum pay the bills. But, importantly, Jane told Matt at the time that “the money wasn’t for free.”