Featuring the cases of Amber Heard, Brittany Higgins, Colombian journalists at Volcánicas and others, Silenced traces a global pattern of defamation suits used to punish survivors and the reporters who amplify their stories.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
It’s difficult to imagine compounding the deep pain and hopelessness often felt by survivors of abuse and sexual assault—and yet defamation lawsuits that effectively keep women (and others) from talking about their experiences does just that.
Selina Miles’ illuminating documentary, Silenced, an Australian entry into the World Cinema Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, gives a voice to the voiceless and chronicles a troubling recent history of the impact of defamation law.
The documentary begins with a glimpse at a very different outcome to the famous and divisive 2022 Depp v. Heard trial. Unlike the U.S. trial, during which Heard was shamed and villainized on social media for speaking about her abuse, just two years prior in the U.K., Depp lost a libel case against The Sun for calling him a “wife beater.”
What changed between these two cases, the history of defamation law, and the way these lawsuits have been used to silence women is the central subject of Miles’ film.
Silenced seems at first to profile Australian-born (now London-based) human rights attorney Jennifer Robinson, co-author (with Keio Yoshida) of the book, How Many More Women? How the Law Silences Women. Besides advising Heard during the U.K. trial, Robinson also provides extensive commentary as the film tackles the equally intense—but possibly less familiar to U.S. viewers—experiences of Australian Brittany Higgins, whose allegations of rape against a coworker in Parliament led to a multi-year ordeal involving multiple defamation suits against Higgins and news outlets that interviewed her.
While Robinson’s expertise guides much of the narrative framing of the documentary, Miles still reserves vital space to foreground other important cases, as well as advocates of freedom of speech and freedom of the press from around the world. The film also, hauntingly, chronicles how the wave of accusations and solidarity springing out of the #MeToo movement resulted in an equally overwhelming “avalanche” of defamation suits directed at newspapers publishing stories wherein women accuse men of harassment, assault, or abuse. Not just survivors, but also the journalists who publish their stories, are frequent targets of these suits.
It’s a fitting but frustrating coda that Silenced itself faced legal threats right after its festival premiere.
One notable example in the film is the case of Colombian journalist Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, who helped break a story in the feminist outlet Volcánicas in which eight women came forward to accuse film director Ciro Guerra of sexual harassment and/or abuse. Guerra sought and continues to seek legal action against Ruiz-Navarro, her co-author, Matilde de los Milagros Londoño Jaramillo, and the magazine. While the Constitutional Court of Colombia has ruled in favor of the journalists, citing their rigor and the significance of providing a platform for those less powerful to speak out against abuses of power, other suits against them are still being adjudicated.
Silenced also briefly profiles a coalition of feminist lawyers in Johannesburg, South Africa who support journalists and survivors facing defamation. While the film’s attention to these advocates is a bit lackluster compared with the focus on high-profile cases involving white women, the testimony they provide is striking and vital—especially a description of a terrible case where a man’s video confession of killing his girlfriend along with photos of her dead body went viral. While the man, who committed suicide, was widely criticized, some users on social media praised his actions, saying women should learn their place.
This story drives home the point that survivors are so often subject to trials in the court of public opinion regardless of the outcome of their judicial proceedings.
Journalist Alexi Mostrous investigations bring Silenced back to Heard, whom he found was systematically targeted online, with many accounts that appeared to be fakes or trolls. The effect this online smear campaign had on the Heard v. Depp trial in the U.S., in addition to other factors, may account for its very different outcome.
What Miles’ documentary does very well is show how defamation laws are often used against women and journalists, even in cases where the evidence suggests the allegations being made are true. Further, these defamation cases and the weaponization of online misogyny via which survivors and journalists face death threats and doxxing mean that some women decline to come forward with allegations for fear of both legal and extra-legal retribution. It’s a fitting but frustrating coda that Silenced itself faced legal threats right after its festival premiere.
But, Silence concludes, there’s hope. Higgins’ and Heard’s cases have also inspired many survivors to speak out or to, at least, feel less alone. The highly publicized rape trial of Gisèle Pelicot in France, where she insisted on taking the stand in order to speak out for women everywhere, especially those without a voice, ended with 51 guilty verdicts. And both E. Jean Carroll and Blake Lively have had recent victories in defamation suits.
Despite a long legacy of silencing women and its deleterious consequences, Robinson hopes that we’re at the crest of a tide change, even if its progression is much slower than we’d like.
