Monica Lewinsky’s Verdict on the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard Trial: We Are All Guilty

 

 

"This blurring of public figures and private lives can do a number on us—as bystanders, as an audience. We end up being torn between our parasocial relationships with celebrities (we identify with them; we pretend that, gee, we actually know them) and our need to see public personalities taken down a notch or two—and taken down publicly—so as to make our wounded selves feel better in comparison. As Aldous Huxley put it in Brave New World, we are hooked on soma, a drug that we think is making us feel better but is actually numbing us. (Huxley, of course, wouldn’t blame us as we go about braving our new world of COVID variants, monkeypox, Ukraine, politics, and mass murders.)

And courtroom porn does just the trick."

read article ny MONICA LEWINSKY