Hello and welcome to another episode of iWay with Jimmy Legemale podcast that has absolutely no time for shame.

I hope you're well. I've been a bit fucked up lately listening to the news.

Looking online, I've kind of had to actually get offline entirely.

Because of the amount that people are enjoying the Johnny Depp and Amber Hurd trial.

Regardless of whatever you think of either of them, I don't think they should have become a laughing matter.

Even if it was made public, I don't think people should have meamed this and become TikTok famous from impersonating moments from this incredibly sad trial about two very unstable people and a very unstable and deeply upsetting and scary relationship.

I don't think people really understand yet how much damage they've done by trivialising it like this.

I don't think they understand the knock-on effect of making this a punchline, of making the name Amber Hurd a punchline.

I'm not going to get to the specifics. I didn't even really follow the trial in any great detail because I found the whole thing.

I'm depressing and inappropriate to be so public. I do think it's good that we have more conversations now about abuse that men can face in domestic violence situations.

I think that's progressive, but I wish we could have just left it there at that progress rather than turn this into cutting someone's head off in front of a crowd.

To vitriolic and to focus only on, of course, the woman's actions rather than also focusing on the man and all the scary text messages he sent and all the things we heard him say in recordings and the fact that both people have been found guilty by juries.

In the UK, Troney Dept was not successful in the US. He was. Essentially what I'm trying to say is just that it's a little bit dark and predictable that only the woman's aggressions and microaggressions and slip-ups and fuck-ups are turned into popular comedy content and a witch hunt.

But we all seem to have such a sympathetic reason behind a man's terrible behavior is always just passionate or he was unstable and sad and addicts and we just have so much of a more sympathetic tone for men.

We should just look at that.

We should look at if we enjoyed the trial, why we enjoyed the trial. We should look at if we enjoyed making fun of Amber heard, why is that so. Neither of them seem okay.

I don't think any of this should have been a laughing matter.

But anyway, speaking of sexism, today I have such an extraordinary person on the podcast. I've been a fan of hers for well over a decade.

I think all of her books have been incredible. I think the movement she had started has been incredible. Her name is Laura Bates. She's an English gender equality activist and an author.

You might know her from the everyday sexism project. She started it back in April 2012 and has gone on to make a whole movement out of it and published several books pertaining to feminism and gender activism.

She's so intelligent, she is so honest, she is so open and she's so unjudgmental.

I think my favourite thing about her is that she's looking for change. She's not just here to explain what the problem is. She's actively spending her own time, her own money in researching a practical and efficient way out of the mess that is misogyny and sexism in the world in which we live today.

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