The Depp Discourse has been a good reminder that most people don't know anything about how to evaluate evidence in a gender-based violence trial. So here's a thread about how everything you learned from true crime is wrong.

First, I want to start with the so-called "gold standard" in cases involving sexual violence: the rape kit.

A lot of people believe that a rape kit can "prove" whether or not a sexual assault occurred and that a survivor's unwillingness to get one is proof she is lying.

In reality, rape kits are pretty useless most of the time. They were designed to use DNA evidence to identify an unknown perpetrator, but usually, a victim knows exactly who sexually assaulted them.

And when confronted, perpetrators who know their victims don't typically say they never touched them. Instead, they insist the sexual contact was consensual.

And DNA doesn't look different based on how it was left behind.

Even photographs of bruising or strangulation marks can be cast by perpetrators as evidence of "kinky sex." The reality is that we're usually asking survivors to submit to the trauma of a forensic exam for nothing.

The most important part of a forensic exam is actually the nurse's interview. They are more likely to use trauma-informed methods than the police and garner much, much more reliable information.

This brings me to the way we evaluate survivors' testimony.

People take a lot of glee in pointing out inconsistencies in a survivor's narrative of what happened to them. But the differences you're seeing probably have more to do with the context of the question than the truth.

For example, countless academic studies have found that cross-examination actually *distorts* the truth in sexual violence cases. The stress of an interrogation with a perpetrator in the room makes it much harder to recall memories.

This isn't unique to sexual assault cases, though. Bystanders of all kinds of crimes struggle to remember details about what they witnessed. It's just more pronounced when trauma is involved.

For example, memories made during a traumatic event are less likely to be linear and we're primed to recall them in different ways. Trauma-informed questioning techniques can draw out the truth, but a hostile police interrogation or cross-examination won't.

So, in the Depp case, forgetting the brand of make up used to cover bruising isn't actually the slam dunk the true crime TikTokers think it is.

And neither is a victim's laughter or eye roll during testimony. Victims don't have to cry through their testimony for their traumas to be real. In fact, minimizing what happened to them or becoming withdrawn are pretty common defense techniques when triggered.

The last big thing I want to talk about is how perpetrators defend themselves. They tend to use two primary techniques: character evidence and something called DARVO.

For character evidence, perpetrators like to bring people into a case to convince the jury that they are kind, trustworthy people, while their victim is a malicious liar. People like parents or other ex-girlfriends. Football coaches. Pastors.

Unless they directly witnessed an act of violence, none of this evidence is actually relevant. After all, you can call your mom every week or go to church and still be an abuser. But we give this type of evidence *way* too much credibility in GBV cases.

In fact, GBV cases are one of the only contexts in which this type of evidence is even considered admissible. Usually, character evidence is thrown out for other crimes. It's astonishing that we make an exception for GBV.

Perpetrators' other main defense is DARVO. It's an acronym for their rhetorical tactics and it stands for: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

In practice, it looks like a very real perpetrator insisting not only that they were never (illegally) violent, but that they are the true victim.

They might co-opt victimization with things like:
- The allegations have ruined my life
- My victim is the *real* abuser and I was only defending myself
- I was violent, but it was justified because of the victim's behavior

To put it another way, DARVO is how perpetrators gaslight society--just like they gaslit their victims. And if they *did* successfully gaslight a victim, they're likely to use a victim's confessions of being "the problem" to bolster their case too.

The common thread across all of these myths in how we evaluate evidence is that we scrutinize victims a whole lot more than we do perpetrators. Our gendered biases can lead us to completely misunderstand what is playing out before our eyes.

And the American legal system has its own patriarchal inequalities that uniquely advantage perpetrators in GBV trials. As onlookers, it's crucial that we do our best to keep them in mind (and support structural reforms to make cases more fair in the future!)