The verdict in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial happened back on June 1. He was awarded $15 million (which was reduced by state law to just over $10 million) and she was awarded $2 million. But as I wrote at the time, there was a great disturbance in the feminist force over the results of the trial.

The fact that the jury found fault with both sides while clearly siding more with the man has been very upsetting to a number of writers. Buzzfeed did a story on all of the celebrities who liked Johnny Depp’s post-trial statement. It included a lot of people who probably aren’t closeted Republicans though that didn’t seem to matter to the people citing it.

Media Matters did its thing and produced a list of people on the right saying the trail verdict was the end of #MeToo, at least a version of #MeToo that insisted women were always to be believed.

The Washington Post‘s Taylor Lorenz promoted this article which sided with Amber Heard and wildly misstated Johnny Depp’s claims in the case…

Vox published a story titled “The Me Too backlash is here” which basically agreed with those people on the right saying that #MeToo was over…

Not to be outdone, Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece for the NY Times titled “The Amber Heard Verdict Was a Travesty. Others Will Follow.”

You get the idea. Women on the left didn’t like the tone of Johnny Depp’s victory or of the people celebrating it. But even at the Washington Post and the NY Times there were readers who disagreed with all of this. I quoted some of them.

I am really starting to get sick of these partial articles, of the cherry picked facts, of the caveats and concessions for Amber’s side when presenting this trial in the media.

I am a progressive, a feminist, work in human rights. I am not a conservative or a wild Johnny Depp ‘tik tok’ fan. I watched the whole trial. I was on Heard’s side, for years. But it was clear as the trial went on, that it is very likely that Heard has fabricated the allegations – something absolutely heinous to do, to destroy someone else’s life.

Please Michelle [Goldberg], don’t be dishonest here. Everyone watching the trial could see the facts as they were presented; most people are smart enough to infer their own conclusions that Heard acted with malice.

Eventually we even heard from one of the jurors who told Good Morning America why Heard essentially lost the trial:

“It didn’t come across as believable,” he said. “It seemed like she was able to flip the switch on her emotions. She would answer one question and she would be crying and two seconds later she would turn ice cold. It didn’t seem natural.”

Depp, he said, “just seemed a little more real in terms of how he responded to questions.”…

“They had their husband-wife arguments. They were both yelling at each other. I don’t think that makes either of them right or wrong. That’s what you do when you get into an argument, I guess. But to rise to the level of what she was claiming, there wasn’t enough or any evidence that really supported what she was saying,” he said…

He blamed Heard’s legal team for giving her poor advice, such as looking directly at the jury when responding to questions. “All of us were very uncomfortable” at that, he said.

But while all of this was happening in the national media, most feminist groups remained conspicuously silent. But not anymore. Now a collection of feminist organizations have signed an open letter backing Amber Heard.

More than 130 people, including Gloria Steinem, and organizations in the field of women’s rights advocacy and domestic violence and sexual assault awareness have signed an open letter to support Amber Heard, who lost a defamation suit this year brought by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, for an op-ed in which she said she was a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”

The letter, which was exclusively shared with NBC News ahead of its public release Wednesday, was signed by groups like the National Organization for Women, the National Women’s Law Center, Equality Now and the Women’s March Foundation. It was written by a group of people who identify as domestic violence survivors and supporters of Heard.

Heard filed a brief last month laying the groundwork to appeal a seven-person jury’s decision in Virginia’s Fairfax County Circuit Court to award Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages in June. Heard, who had countersued, was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages but nothing in punitive damages…

A spokesperson for the group behind the letter, who asked to remain anonymous because of the online harassment she has faced for posting in support of Heard, said she believes that after the trial “individuals were afraid to speak out because they saw what was happening to the few who had.”

The full letter is here along with a list of signatories. It’s not very long and doesn’t bother to include any evidence to back up the allegations it makes:

Much of this harassment was fueled by disinformation, misogyny, biphobia, and a monetized social media environment where a woman’s allegations of domestic violence and sexual assault were mocked for entertainment. The same disinformation and victim-blaming tropes are now being used against others who have alleged abuse.

In our opinion, the Depp v. Heard verdict and continued discourse around it indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of intimate partner and sexual violence and how survivors respond to it. The damaging consequences of the spread of this misinformation are incalculable. We have grave concerns about the rising misuse of defamation suits to threaten and silence survivors.

Generally speaking I’m not a fan of the mob, whichever side of an issue the mob is on. So I’m definitely open to the idea that a mob of people acted badly. But in this case I think there’s pretty good evidence that the people who watched the trial closely, including the jury, came to the conclusion that Amber Heard’s case was not very credible.

And that’s the core problem with this letter. It not only doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that Heard lost for good reason, it doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that any case brought against a woman accuser might be warranted.

Vague allegations followed by a list of famous signatories will be enough to convince some but I don’t think it’s going to win over skeptics who paid close attention to Amber Heard’s allegations and her behavior.