In an open letter in support of the actress Amber Heard, Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux denounces “the vilification” and “ongoing online harassment” of the actress.Actress-director Assa Maga, actresses Ariane Labed, Zita Hanrot, screenwriter Caroline Deruas Peano, and cinematographer Balthazar Lab were also signatories.
They are the most recent signatories to the ostensibly “An Open Letter In Support of Amber Heard,” which was started by American organisations working for gender justice like Women’s March Action, Refuge, and Esperanza United. After Heard lost the defamation litigation in Virginia that Depp had started and won in response to her 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which she called herself a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” they published the letter in November 2022.
“Much of this harassment was fueled by disinformation, misogyny, biphobia, and a monetized social media environment where a woman’s allegations of domestic violence and sexual assault were mocked for entertainment,” reads the letter. For her work chronicling the lives of women in France from the 1960s on, particularly the abortion drama Happening, which served as the inspiration for Audrey Diwan’s 2021 Venice Golden Lion-winning film of the same name, Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2022.