I think this is also a really naive way of looking at things as well. It's not, strictly speaking, a matter of labels, but of who we grant relative credibility to. People at Depp's stature usually have fewer bars to entry to the kind of social support that circumstances require. One need only look at the case of, say, Vic Mignogna to see an example of a public figure who actually was a massive predator for all of his life and, despite having a legal case so shoddy that it effectively went viral on account of it (and plenty of documentation, including video under oath, he engaged in the same behavior he was suing for defamation over), got a massive outpouring of support from people. Why?
Because he was a white dude. Even if you demonstrate a lower predilection for unconscious bias in that way than most people, that doesn't change the fact that, like, hundreds of thousands of people live in cultures in which this sort of credibility or assumption of good faith specifically for white dudes is normalized.
This absolutely makes a difference when examining these cases with questionable evidence, because, again, many abusers are very good at controlling the flow of information about their behavior. Knowing Depp's history of issues with substance abuse was actually part of the reason why I was dubious of claims of his innocence, for example, as
many people use drugs, alcohol, etc. as a means to engage in abusive behavior. Were it the case, he would also not be the first abuser to try to reverse claims of behavior -- common enough that there's a
fairly mainstream acronym coined to refer to that pattern of behavior. Of course, go figure that it seems like Heard did that very thing herself.
And beyond this matter -- that our identities necessarily exist in cultural contexts we as individuals are not fully in control of -- I think another important issue is that, like declaring one's self a rational being, that someone is rarely a good analyst of their own biases. People who try to fight the way cultural programming influences our biases are generally pretty clear about how you do that -- it takes a
lot of work, a
lot of counter-programming, and there is no point that you can stop and say "Well, I'm done. My biases are fully flushed away!" Doubly so because
none of us have perfect information about the state of the world. In practice many times we can do little more than replace our currently held unconscious biases with different, ideally more conscious biases, because those biases inform how we respond in cases where limited knowledge is available. I would say we
do want those biases to be conscious, though, because then it is far more likely that we can understand how they inform our reaction to circumstances in life. (And a corollary to all this is that I don't think it's
necessarily healthy to fully transform one's opinions in the face of pieces of conflicting evidence either. That evidence is never coming free from biases either!)
