Was it really asking too much for Amber Heard to be listened to without prejudice? | Gaby Hinsliff

Johnny Depp's legal team left the jury with a stark choice: believe it all, or believe nothing. Life's not that simple

Believe everything, or nothing. Either every single word this woman says must be true, or nothing is. Having raked for weeks through the bitter ashes of Johnny Depp's brief and frequently ugly marriage to Amber Heard, his counsel, Camille Vasquez, offered the jury hearing the mutual defamation suits only that stark, binary choice: no picking and choosing, no room for ambiguity or complexity or imperfect victims. Either Heard had endured something truly horrific", or she was capable of saying absolutely anything. It was a false dichotomy but a ruthless strategy for chiselling away at any lingering doubts in a trial where the two sides' expert witnesses had repeatedly contradicted each other. And, seemingly, it worked.

On Wednesday the jury of five men and two women reached their bleak conclusion, ruling that the woman we all saw sobbing in the witness box had lied about being a victim of domestic and sexual violence. The jurors had seen mobile phone footage of an enraged Depp smashing his way round the kitchen, and read the texts he sent a friend about wanting to drown or burn Heard and fuck her burnt corpse". They watched her break down describing an alleged sexual assault. And seemingly, they believed nothing rather than everything.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist