Are Women Always Victims? — Amber Heard And Emma-Jayne Magson

Two recent court cases involving women are still in the news today; the women concerned are Amber Heard and Emma-Jayne Magson. The former was a civil case, a defamation action brought by Heard’s ex-husband Johnny Depp.  Because Depp is an A List actor and Heard a fairly big star in her own right, the trial broadcast on the Internet attracted wall-to-wall coverage around the globe with lawyers commenting on it live, and reports on it in many languages.

The trials of Emma-Jayne Magson have received a lot less publicity, none worthy of note outside the UK and most of it local. Magson murdered her lover James Knight in March 2016. She was convicted of murder and given the mandatory life sentence, but after a campaign of lies by her supporters, she was granted a retrial. And was convicted again. The case was reported here last year.

In his summing up, the trial judge said he would like to have increased Magson’s tariff  but was unable to, so he set it at seventeen years. Incredibly, Magson’s supporters, principally the misnamed Justice For Women/Centre For Women’s Justice have succeeded in getting her case back to the Court Of Appeal. The hearing was held last week but the decision will not be handed down for some time.

The appeal was reported by the local press and at the weekend by the Sunday Telegraph in a story by the paper’s associate editor: Women are being jailed for their partner’s crimes – Domestic violence victim’s appeal highlights need for reform of how justice system treats females

Yeah, the first apostrophe is in the wrong place, and nothing else belongs there.

The tales of Amber Heard and Emma-Jayne Magson have one thing in common, the feminist victim narrative. After Heard lost her case against Depp, media feminists cried misogyny and her lawyer went on a number of TV programmes to whine about how the verdict was a setback for victims of domestic abuse. Similarly, Magson’s supporters appear to believe in earnest that she had the right not only to stab James Knight through the heart but to sit and watch him die. If you think that is an exaggeration, listen to the call she eventually made to the emergency services.

The common thread here is women are always victims even when they are perpetrators.  For whatever reason, Johnny Depp allowed Heard to push him around, mock him, and on one occasion in an admittedly freak incident, slice off the top of his finger with a broken bottle. Unlike in Depp’s previous defamation action against a tabloid newspaper, the full truth came out in that Virginia courtroom. Among other things Heard was found to have “created” bruises on her face with make-up, lied about donating all the money from her divorce settlement to the ACLU and a children’s hospital, constantly harangued Depp, and on one occasion defecated in his bed, which led to the hashtag #AmberTurd.

Magson never did anything like that, but she is a woman with a fiery temper and a track record for violence, yet she too is being portrayed as a victim.

Camilla Tominey’s aforementioned article is based largely on the flim-flam of Magson’s lawyer because she compares her case with that of Sally Challen, which is in its way even more outrageous because the murder of her estranged husband was clearly premeditated. Challen took a hammer to his home and bashed his head in with it. She had asked a neighbour to spy on him and had hacked his social media, yet he rather than she was said to have practised coercive control.

Tominey’s article goes on to whine about there being too many women in prison, but according to official statistics,  in 2021 there were 75 thousand males in the prisons of England and Wales. Females – would you believe 3.2 thousand?

But it gets worse, you see: “A 2013 study…found 53 per cent of women in prison have survived emotional, physical or sexual abuse during childhood, with 71 per cent suffering mental ill health…72 per cent of women are sent to prison for non-violent offences, such as theft and shoplifting, with three out of five sentenced for less than six months. Nearly half (48 per cent) have committed an offence in order to support the drug use of someone else.”

Yes, you read that right, women are so totally law-abiding that the ONLY reason they ever end up in prison is because of someone else (read a man). Almost every man in prison has a victim narrative too, but they don’t count. This special pleading is really quite pathetic.

Thankfully, the courts tend to take a different view. Amber Heard is now seriously in debt, although she managed to somehow rent a $22,000 a month home for the duration of the trial. She is almost certainly finished in Hollywood, and with her looks fading, she will be lucky if she can generate a few followers on Only Fans, perhaps those who have a scat fetish.

As for Emma-Jayne Magson, there is a woman in Leicester who is hoping the Law Lords do the right thing and reject this spurious appeal so she can at last lay James Knight to rest and help raise her two granddaughters, the daughters her son will never see grow up.