It's Halloween 2015, and I'm dressed as Patsy Stone, watching as a man dressed as Oscar Pistorius – an athlete who shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp – swans across the dancefloor, wearing a sign that reads: “Everyone loves a few shots… even if they're to the head.” It's funny, right?
Fast-forward eight years, and clearly, I still don't get the joke. Emily Hampshire, best known for her role as Stevie Budd in Schitt's Creek, has apologised for dressing up with a friend as Johnny Depp and Amber Heard for Halloween.
The actor posted (and then swiftly) deleted photos of the costume on social media, showing her wearing fake tattoos, a suit similar to the one worn by Depp during his highly-publicised defamation suit against Heard in 2022, and crudely drawn on facial hair. She also posed with a bottle of wine, a possible reference to Heard's allegation that Depp assaulted her with a liquor bottle (which he denies), and a plastic turd, presumably a reference to Depp's allegation that Heard defecated in their bed (which she denies).
After deleting the offensive post, Hampshire shared an apology, describing her actions as “one of the most thoughtless, insensitive, and ignorant things [she's] ever done.”
You can read the full apology here:
Instagram content
She's not the first person to opt for the ultra-edgy costume choice of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp – but she is perhaps the latest to the party. Last year, several content creators tried out the costume in the wake of the trial. The text on one such video reads, “Bet you didn't expect to see Johnny Depp and Amber Heard together this Halloween,” while one Twitter thread by a pro-Amber Heard account showed a litany of women wearing a ‘poop emoji' costume to poke fun at “Amber Turd.”
As I say, edgy. Last Halloween, Megan Fox shared an Instagram post of her and fiancé Machine Gun Kelly dressed as Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. One of the photos shows MGK with his hand around Megan's neck, accompanied by the caption, “But are these even costumes.”
I sure hope they are just costumes, as Tommy Lee spent six months in prison after pleading no contest to assaulting Anderson.
It raises the question, is it ever OK to dress up as someone who's alleged to have experienced domestic abuse?
Despite being a feminist killjoy, I do concede that there's an important distinction to be made between subversive humour and straight-up bad taste. As many a ‘cancelled’ stand-up comedian will tell you (again and again, probably on an enormous platform), comedy serves an essential societal function, whether it's acting as a valve for cultural anxieties or subverting traditional power hierarchies.
What many of these comedians fail to address is that these critiques usually only apply when “punching up” rather than down. If the butt of your joke is a person/group of people already marginalised by society – e.g., transgender people – you're punching down. If the person you're making fun of occupies a high social position – e.g., Boris Johnson – you're punching up.
Was I naive to think that mocking alleged survivors of domestic abuse would be considered punching down and, therefore, in bad taste?
We investigate.
Regardless of taste – which is, after all, subjective – I worry that offensive Halloween costumes are merely the tip of the iceberg regarding societal attitudes toward survivors of domestic abuse.
It's surely no coincidence that ‘Amber & Johnny’ and ‘Pam & Tommy" cropped up as fancy-dress costumes in the same year that the entertainment industry sought to profit from their respective traumas.
In February 2022, Pam & Tommy – the “true story behind the release of the first-ever viral video in history — the sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee" – was released on Disney+. Multiple sources suggest that Pamela Anderson was against the making of this show, with one describing that she found the show “painful,” adding that "It is shocking that this series is allowed to happen without her approval."
One of the resounding critiques of the series was that it raised awareness of Anderson's exploitation by… exploiting her even more. As Adrian Horton wrote for The Guardian, “Pam & Tommy recreates parts of the tape, has actors mimic Anderson and Lee’s sex noises, includes montages of them having cartoonishly vigorous sex, uses prosthetics to imitate their famous anatomies.”
In addition to watching a fictionalised account of Anderson and Lee's relationship, the world also had unprecedented access to a real-life drama in the form of Johnny Depp's defamation suit against Amber Heard, which was televised and shared widely on TikTok.
Public opinion initially favoured Depp, with many choosing to express their support for him by acting out Heard's courtroom description of being sexually assaulted. In the months after the jury delivered its verdict, Tubi TV (an American content platform) released a cheap dramatisation of the trial titled Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial.
In seeking to dramatise and profit from stories of domestic abuse, the entertainment industry has trivialised it – to the extent that survivors have become the butt of our jokes this Halloween. If anything, that's what we should be scared of.
For more information about emotional abuse and domestic violence, you can call The Freephone National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by Refuge on 0808 2000 247.
What precedent has it set for survivors of domestic abuse?
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
