Amber Heard, the truth will always come out
Did she instigate the fights?
Yesterday, NBC released their full interview with Amber Heard.
It’s heavily edited, which always makes be wary about analysing the words. However, one excerpt struck me as revealing.
Interviewer: I am looking at a transcript that says he says you start physical fights and you say I did start a physical fight. I can't promise you I won't get physical again. I mean, this is in black and white. I understand context, that you're testifying and you're just telling me today I never started a physical fight and here you are on tape saying he did.
Heard: As I testified on the stand about this, is that when your life is at risk, not only will you take the blame for things that you shouldn't take the blame for, but when you're in an abusive dynamic, psychologically, emotionally and physically, you don't have the resources that, say you or I do with the luxury of saying, hey, this is black and white, because it's anything but when you're living in it.
On the face of it, this may seem like a rational explanation. Heard wants to give the impression that, as she was in an abusive relationship. She wants us to hear that she would say things to her abuser that weren’t true because she felt her life was on the line, and she wasn’t always thinking straight.
However, that isn’t what her words say. Look again at her words. She doesn’t say once how SHE felt.
As I testified on the stand about this, is that when your life is at risk, not only will you take the blame for things that you shouldn't take the blame for, but when you're in an abusive dynamic, psychologically, emotionally and physically, you don't have the resources that, say you or I do with the luxury of saying, hey, this is black and white, because it's anything but when you're living in it.
She says how YOU would react in the situation, not how she reacted. Not only is her pronoun usage not matched to what she has been asked, she talks in the present and future tense, so this isn’t about events in the past.
There are two reasons why someone will tell you about YOU rather than I.
It would be a much stronger answer if she spoke about how she felt personally, saying “my life was at risk”, “I took the blame for things I shouldn’t” and so on. But people generally find it hard to use words that aren’t truthful. So, she is asked a specific question about her actions, but gives a general answer about how “you” would act. This is the deceptive reason for using “you” instead of “I”.
Sometimes, the answer comes as to how “you” would react to socialise the response. That is, if you use “you” it makes you think about what you would do in the situation, or it makes you believe that “you” would have done the same thing in that situation.
It’s often hard to determine which of these is the reason that someone is using “you” rather than “I”. It’s tempting to go for the full on deception reason here because well, it’s Amber Heard and she doesn’t have a great track record with the truth.
The truth comes out
I’d like to base my conclusions on more than bias, what can I see here?
Her words get a little rambley towards the end of this answer, as if she knows what she wants to say but runs out of steam as she goes on. Truthful people generally find it easy to keep their words coming lucidly because telling the truth is much easier than being deceptive.
However, the biggest tell is in the words she uses. At the end, Amber would like to give the impression that, as she was abused, her actions may not have seemed logical to others. She says, “you don't have the resources that say you or I do”. There it is finally, an “I”. And it’s a very telling “I” because she is saying that she does have the resources of a person who isn’t in an abusive situation. She goes on to convey that she did have the “luxury” of saying “this is black and white”.
There’s enough here to conclude this answer is untrue and deceptive. This is not what happened.
