“Mocking” Domestic Violence

Image description: Thumbnail depicts front of a court of appeals courtroom, with seal on the wall.

Content note: discussion of domestic violence and sexual violence

Many law schools across the country have trial teams: groups of law students who compete in mock trials. Like real trials, mock trials have juries, judges, attorneys, and witnesses. Law students play the part of the attorneys for their (usually) fictitious clients, argue their case in front of judge and jury, and question witnesses. The cases for these competitions are about real laws, but the clients and specific details are not meant to be about real people.

This year, a prestigious mock trial competition, the Tournament of Champions (TOC) hosted by UCLA, used a case that wasn’t made up. The TOC case was the high-profile Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard case, with a few minor changes. The case packet, written by Matt Woodham, director of trial advocacy at Cumberland School of Law, disclaimed that the “characters [and events] in this mock trial competition are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.” The “fictitious” case, “Widmore v. Addison,” was about Widmore, an “eccentric” actor famous from their role as Captain Crowe, a “drunk pirate,” in the Magical Buccaneers franchise. Widmore was suing their ex-spouse, Addison, for defamation due to an op-ed Addison wrote about being a survivor of domestic abuse; the op-ed did not name Widmore. Widmore claimed to have been fired from the last Magical Buccaneers movie because of Addison’s op-ed. The case included incidents similar to the Depp trial: Addison was strangled, Widmore’s finger was sliced, and the record suggests that Addison altered photographs of their injuries.

Survivors, including Amber Heard, don’t need their cases “mocked” by law students. We can’t trust law students to handle these cases with respect, because law students are not lawyers, and they are certainly not trauma-informed lawyers. They often do not understand the ways their actions in a courtroom can hurt domestic violence survivors. Law students work hard to qualify for prestigious competitions like TOC, and in a mock trial environment, the primary objective is to win, even when that is not what true justice requires. Real-world checks, like ethical limitations per the Bar, are not in place. There is little incentive to be empathetic in the adversarial system, and there is all the reason not to be empathetic when it might help your team win. TOC was obviously based on a real case, but there is an unspoken understanding in mock trial that the cases aren’t “real,” because you aren’t representing an actual client and no one suffers legal consequences at the end of the day.

But mock trials about domestic violence do affect real survivors. There is no need to reamplify the retraumatizing, minimizing arguments and stereotypes that came up in Depp v. Heard and undoubtedly came up in TOC. The case included testimony from Widmore calling Addison “unstable,” a liar, characterizing them as the perpetrator and Widmore as the “real” victim. There was testimony from a police officer claiming that Addison did not act like a typical victim of abuse. These are all common arguments weaponized against survivors to invalidate their experiences and reaffirm that no one will believe them. Mock trial doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the TOC case teaches law students how to employ these same arguments against survivors when they become lawyers.

Survivors who compete in these tournaments shouldn’t be subjected to re-traumatization either. It is statistically certain that some of the competitors of any given tournament have experienced gender-based violence. Competitors do not get a choice between cases – they either compete with the case TOC has chosen, or they do not compete at all. This forces survivor-competitors to choose between learning advocacy skills – the purpose of mock trial to begin with – and avoiding being re-traumatized. To make matters worse, in TOC, competitors were also required to play the witnesses in rounds where they were not the attorneys. This means a survivor of domestic violence likely had to testify about graphic incidents of abuse, look at photos of injuries from those incidents, and submit to harmful questioning. It was against the rules of the tournament for a witness to refuse to answer questions. A survivor playing Addison would have to describe the incident where they thought Widmore might kill them. It was Widmore’s attorney’s job to poke holes in Addison’s story, to make them look like a liar, to minimize their experiences – but Widmore’s attorney would also be doing all those things to the survivor playing the part of Addison.

As harmful as the TOC fact pattern was, it was also intellectually lazy and unfair to all competitors involved. Depp v. Heard was a high-profile case that most law students had likely already thought about. Every American who uses social media was exposed in one way or another to this case, most through incredibly biased sources, and survivors have been unable to escape the coverage. Even worse, TOC recruited Johnny Depp’s attorney, Camille Vasquez, to judge the final round of the competition – a person with undeniable bias about what arguments were the most successful and what side should ultimately prevail.

I am a survivor of gender-based violence. If I had been assigned to Berkeley Law’s TOC team this year, I would have stepped down from the Trial Team instead of competing. But survivors should not be the only people who have a problem with this – any trial team invested in diversity and inclusion and law school invested in the quality of future attorneys should be revolted by it. Members of Berkeley’s TOC team wrote a letter to the competition organizers explaining why the case was problematic, re-traumatizing, and unfair, but their concerns were not addressed. The onus is on the writers of the cases, on the trial competitions, and on the host schools not to use cases that mock, minimize, and exploit survivors’ experiences for sport. And it is on all the trial teams involved – including my own – to speak up.

*Emma Rodríguez is a 2L at Berkeley Law and a member of the Trial Team