Why the fans on Team Heard and Team Depp are just as blinkered as each other...

Bzzt. Crunk. Fzzttt . . . via the miracles of an internet connection, suddenly there she was, from the English Cotswolds to an American courthouse.

Beamed in from an anonymous room in a place she called ‘Gloucestershire’, Kate Moss raised her right hand, complete with lovely manicure, and promised to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Her voice pealed through the sulphurous courtroom, clear as a Croydon church bell.

Amid the thicket of burly U.S. accents, to the untrained American ear, she could have been a duchess or a debutante or even a flower girl, one who knew very well exactly where the rain in Spain doth fall.

In the closing days of the DeppHeard trial, Kate was giving evidence for one reason only: to rebut Amber Heard’s allegation that Johnny Depp threw Kate down some stairs on holiday in Jamaica in the mid-1990s.

H E DID no such thing, said Miss Moss. Instead, she slipped on a wet step and Johnny carried her back to her room, then sought help. She was direct and clear in her testimony and there was no mistaking her resolve. ‘He never pushed me, kicked me or threw me down any stairs,’ she said.

We have never seen Kate in this light before: earnest and sincere, complete with take-me-seriously pussy-bow blouse and an I-meanbusiness blazer. And while her testimony lasted fewer than three minutes, it had much impact, going straight to the heart of this he said/she said trial.

Why, with no evidence, did Amber Heard not only choose to believe that Depp had attacked Miss Moss, but go on to repeat the lie? And what was her motive for doing so? Well that is something for the jury to chew over.

So well done to Kate Moss for taking part — for standing up and speaking out on behalf of her old friend. Ask yourself this: would you do the same for a man or woman you dated nearly 30 years ago? In the full knowledge that you risked public condemnation, derision or potentially being humiliated in a cross examination televised to the world?

Despite all this Kate Moss did not hesitate. For her pains she was dismissed, more or less, by Miss Heard the following day. the former Mrs Depp argued that there were many witnesses who had come out of the woodwork whose version of events were different from hers, because they wanted to curry favour with Depp and that it was all part of his ‘power’.

Judge, may I recap? thank you. Moss was heartbroken when Depp dumped her in 1998, but clearly bears no grudges. More importantly, she did not just stand up for her former lover but for the truth — her truth — when it would have been easier to say nothing.

Since Heard first made her allegations of abuse against Depp in 2016 — and then wrote the op-ed that is at the heart of this trial — many high-profile members of the sisterhood have rallied to her cause like geese to the golden egg. Unquestioningly, unfailingly and perhaps even unthinkingly. But now the terrible question must be asked: what if the golden goose they flocked to worship is now cooked? What if this woman, who has portrayed and paraded herself as a wronged saint, a bruised icon of male violence, turns out to be the bully and not the bullied? Only time will tell.

Yesterday Miss Heard gave a final, impassioned performance from the witness box. All she wanted, she cried, was to bring a voice to people who don’t have a voice. ‘I have the right... to own my story and my truth. I hope to get my voice back. that’s all I want,’ she said, perhaps overlooking the fact that she has countersued Depp for $100million.

However, my point is that far too many have picked sides in this case based on nothing more than either blinkered, fan-crazed Deppmania, or cherished feminist beliefs backed by fashionable, societal pressures.

F Or a recent article on the British Vogue magazine website, one writer examines his conscience during this second Depp/Heard trial. ‘though I’ve felt myself veering toward it, I can no longer “both sides” this,’ he writes. ‘It’s time to draw a line. It’s time to believe women — all women. It’s time to believe Heard. the British courts believed Depp beat his ex-wife. What’s stopping the rest of us?’

Well, there is the small matter of evidence, for a start. And the creeping realisation that Heard may not have been entirely truthful in the London trial about donating all her divorce money to charity — a key point in the court’s judgment that she was ‘no gold digger.’

Meanwhile in New Yorker magazine, a contributor writes that what Depp is doing is not trying to clear his name, but merely indulging in ‘revenge porn’. He is ‘forcing’ his ex-wife to be ‘complicit in the sharing and dissemination of raw, vulnerable, literally sensational moments for the delectation of an unseen audience’. Is that really justice for Johnny? Or justice denied?

What I really hate is the wilful taking of sides, the blind devotion to team Johnny or team Amber, no matter what. We are not supporting football teams here, but dealing with the terrible rubble of these gilded, ruined lives. to be honest, I loathe the moronic fans who queue to cheer Depp and boo Heard as they drive into the Virginia court each morning.

But equally repellent are the femjustice warriors who champion Heard and purportedly what she stands for, without question. At least Kate Moss did what she thought was right, did it for the right reasons and did it from the heart.