We pick a woman to hate. We find a reason why it's morally justified to hurl any amount of abuse at her.

And then we do it, and a bunch of years later, we're like, hmm, guess we were wrong, and then like two weeks later, we do it again.

Hello, hello, I'm Matt Bernstein, and welcome to a bit fruity, the weekly podcast where we're joined by celebrities, journalists, thought leaders, and experts.

And we really dig into the cultural and political moments that are shaping our lives.

Really quick before we start, if you like the podcast and want to be notified when we release new episodes every week,

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Today, we are kind of jumping straight into the deep end and talking about something that really gripped the nation and the world about a year ago,

which was the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp case.

And I don't just want to sit here and relive the case.

So that's not what we're going to do, but we are going to look at it from the standpoint of how the public's reaction to it,

and how we as a collective kind of failed not only Amber Heard, but women, how we failed victims of abuse, how we misunderstood what it means to be a victim of abuse,

and how we failed ourselves as a kind of post me to society that thinks of itself as one that supports and believes victims when clearly it doesn't.

Today, we're joined by my friend and someone whose work I admire so deeply cat 10 barge is a tech and culture journalist at NBC News.

She's covered influencer culture as well as domestic abuse and celebrity abuse trials and the way that we talk about them.

She was one of the very early and more prominent voices to support Amber Heard and kind of see the trial for what it was from the beginning,

and she got no shortage of backlash for that.

So I'm so excited to be sitting down with you. I couldn't think of a better person to cover this with. Thank you for being here cat.

Thank you so much for having me.

And I just want to say from the beginning of this episode, you can probably tell that we are going to take the position of supporting Amber Heard because we do,

and we're going to get into the nuances of what that means and supporting victims of abuse, even when you don't think that they are perfect people,

supporting victims of abuse, even if you might not like them, supporting victims of abuse who are difficult because that's what supporting victims of abuse means.

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