I tried to blot out the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp defamation trial for as long as possible: it was so clearly a grim spectacle of the very dirtiest of other people’s dirty laundry being squeezed to death for public consumption in the kind of circus only possible in America.

But the verdict, pronounced last week in Depp’s favour made continued ignoring impossible. The carnival had resulted in Depp winning $8 million in damages from ex-wife Heard for a line she wrote in a 2018 article in the Washington Post, in which she referred to herself “a public figure representing domestic abuse”. Depp wasn’t mentioned, but he sued her nonetheless.

As a girl I liked, nay loved, Depp – he was my first Hollywood crush. But it seems as if he is not the man I once imagined him to be. According to court documents, in one set of text exchanges with his buddy and confidante, the British actor Paul Bettany, Depp wrote: “Let’s burn Amber!!!”. Bettany messaged back: “Having thought it through I don’t think we should burn Amber – she’s delightful company and easy on the eye, plus I’m not sure she’s a witch. We could of course try the English course of action in these predicaments ­– we do a drowning test. Thoughts?” Depp replied: “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!!” He then wrote that he would “f— her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she was dead.”

Exchanges like aren’t necessarily evidence of physical abuse  – that, at any rate, is what the jury decided. But they are disgusting. Meanwhile Heard, whom I, like many women, think has now become a victim of dark woman-hating passions if she wasn’t before, hardly seems a likeable character either. She is certainly deeply troubled.

The whole thing was, and is, grotesque. But then, since the revelations of what Harvey Weinstein did to women, tacitly supported or ignored by armies of complicit cronies male and female, we have become all too aware of what is taken as normal in the strange, gilded, brutal and utterly amoral culture of Tinsel Town.

What roils the stomach, though, is the hypocrisy of it all. It’s the anti-Semitism that hides in plain sight while bigwigs – from stars to directors – make grand statements about diversity and anti-racism at every opportunity. It’s the endless hectoring about the environment, or this or that progressive cause – only for those same preaching zealots to jump on their private jets to go on holiday.  

It’s the naval-gazing absorption in therapy and wellbeing culture, all that gobbledegook about personal growth and feelings and needs – and then the reality, which is emotional brutality, the total lack of kindness and decorum that enables the horrid crudeness in Depp’s communication.

It is surely ironic that in one of the most self-obsessed, therapeutically-bolstered communities on earth, so many women are manipulative narcissists and so many men behave like thugs and gangsters. I can’t help but think of how in Hollywood terms, Armie Hammer still qualifies as a veritable nice guy, for only sharing cannibalism fantasies with the woman he was cheating on his wife with. Perhaps Will Smith is still seen as one of the good guys, too: all he did was go up on stage at the Oscars this year and slap Chris Rock for making a (bad) joke at his wife’s expense.

The past few years have seen particularly intense virtue signalling from Hollywood over trans rights and racism, resulting in counterproductive overhauls of casting and production, that now demand a tick-box approach to talent based on skin colour and sexual identity, rather than fair recruitment of the best.

Yet we find that Disney, whose Reimagine Tomorrow campaign wants 50 per cent of characters to be from “under-represented groups” by 2023, and which has banned the offensive words “girls and boys” from its theme parks, is apparently kowtowing to genocidal Chinese authorities so that they can film in China.

Its 2020 live action version of Mulan was filmed in Xinjiang, the province in which the Uyghers are being systematically killed; the credits (which Disney denies responsibility for) thanked eight government bodies in Xinjiang, including those authorising what is widely thought to be genocide.

The Heard-Depp trial, though, is about gender as much as it is about stars’ malodorous personal relations. And therein lies the rub. Following MeToo, the whole industry convulsed itself, first getting all the vermin out of the woodwork (and then some), and then showing, often pompously, how sorry it was for it all, how feminist it now was.

In typical Hollywood style, the 2018 Golden Globes saw women and men both wearing black to demonstrate how terribly seriously they took MeToo. Male actors ostentatiously apologised after being hit with a cascade of assault and harassment allegations, vowing that they now saw the error of their ways, never meant any harm, and understood that women were people too. It is hard to square this with the tone of support for Depp, among legions of his fans, including celebrity fans.

It’s not that Hollywood has always been some kind of pure moral domain, full of people as pristine of soul as of face. Far from it. But at least in the past, their outsized sense of their own importance, their thuggishness even, was the price that was paid for a parade of fantastic, epoch-shaping movies. Now, hobbled by woke and red tape, there are ever fewer of those, forcing us to wonder whether Tinsel Town is worth having around at all.