The Depp-Heard Defamation Trial Is Already Getting Ugly
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Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are officially back in court.
Depp’s long-delayed $50 million defamation trial against his ex-wife began in Virginia on Tuesday, three years after he sued Heard over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post where she described being a domestic violence survivor. While the piece did not mention Depp by name, the 58-year-old actor alleges that the piece clearly referred to their relationship—which ended in 2016—and has since “devastated” his career.
“Today, his name is associated with a lie. A statement issued by his former wife,” Depp’s attorney Ben Chew said during opening statements on Tuesday. “You will learn during the trial that Miss Heard’s accusations were prompted by Mr. Depp’s request for a divorce.”
Amber Heard: Johnny Depp Defamation Lawsuit ‘Gives Me Great Pain’
The highly anticipated trial comes after years of legal sparring between the famous actors, who met on the set of 2011 film The Rum Diaries and married in 2015. In various court documents and testimony during their ongoing court battles, Depp and Heard have revealed lurid details about their one-year marriage, with the 36-year-old actress claiming Depp would verbally and physically abuse her during “volatile and violent” episodes.
During opening statements, the actor’s lawyer alleged that Heard made up abuse allegations to “keep” Depp, and later attempted to “recast herself as an abuse survivor, with Depp as the alleged abuser.”
Depp has long denied the allegations of domestic abuse—and instead insisted that Heard abused him during their relationship. Heard has repeatedly shot down those claims, saying she only ever acted violently in self-defense.
“No one, in five decades, had ever accused Mr. Depp of being violent with a woman,” Chew said on Tuesday. “By choosing to lie about her husband for her own personal benefit, Amber Heard forever changed Mr. Depp’s reputation.”
A handful of famous faces are expected to testify at the trial in Fairfax County Circuit Court, including actor Paul Bettany, who texted with Depp about Heard; actor James Franco, who allegedly once asked Heard about bruises on her face after a row with Depp; actress Ellen Barkin; and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who once dated Heard.
Jurors are also expected to see text messages between the couple and some of their celebrity friends during the trial, which could last around six weeks. Elaine Bredehoft, an attorney for Heard, noted to jurors during her opening statement that they will see some “really, really terrible text messages from Johnny Depp on how he viewed Amber Heard,” including how he threatened to “hunt her,” saying she “will live in global humiliation.”
“Let’s burn Amber,” Depp wrote in one text message to Bettany, according to evidence presented at a pre-trial hearing. “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.”
Jurors will ultimately be tasked with deciding whether Heard acted with “actual malice” when she wrote the Post editorial—meaning that the actress knew what she had written in the piece was false—or that she published the piece with “reckless disregard” for the truth about the Pirates of the Caribbean star. The jury will also be asked to review some issues raised in Heard’s 2020 countersuit against Depp for defamation.
“Ultimately, this trial is about clearing Mr. Depp’s name,” Chew added.
J. Ben Rottenborn, an attorney for Heard, said during his opening statements on Monday that their team is going to focus on “the evidence” and not “some crazy conspiracy theory” about the famous former couple. The lawyer also noted that Depp is trying to prove “the words Miss Heard used were about him and were false… and he can’t do that.”
And legal precedent is already not on Depp’s side. In November 2020, a London judge found that there was “overwhelming evidence” that Depp had assaulted Heard repeatedly throughout their marriage, and she was “in fear of her life.”
Depp filed a similar libel case in London against The Sun after the British tabloid called him a “wife beater.” Judge Penney S. Azcarate has not decided whether any aspect of the London trial will be allowed as evidence in Virginia.
At the crux of the Virginia case is the December 2018 op-ed, titled: “Amber Heard: I spoke up against sexual violence—and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.” In the piece, Heard urges victims to speak out against their abusers, noting she “became a public figure representing domestic abuse” in 2016 after she sought a domestic violence restraining order against her ex-husband.
“I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out,” Heard wrote in the piece. “I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.”
Rottenborn told jurors on Tuesday that Heard’s article isn’t about her ex-husband, but “about the social change which she is advocating and the First Amendment protects.”
“Mr. Depp’s team wants to make you think that his opinion piece was made to destroy Johnny Depp… and it wasn’t,” Heard’s lawyer added.
In March 2019, three months after the editorial was published, Depp filed the $50 million lawsuit against Heard, asserting that not only are his ex-wife’s allegations of abuse an “elaborate hoax” intended to hurt his career—but that those claims were self-serving, turning her into a “darling of the #MeToo movement.”
“With a prior arrest for violent domestic abuse and having confessed under oath to a series of violent attacks on Mr. Depp, Ms. Heard is not the victim of domestic abuse; she is the perpetrator,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit also noted that Heard “revived her false allegations against Mr. Depp in the op-ed to generate positive publicity for herself and to promise her new movie Aquaman, which premiered across the United States and in Virginia only three days after the op-ed was first published.”
The lawsuit states that Depp’s “reputation and career were devastated” by Heard’s first allegation of domestic abuse in 2016. Four days after Heard’s op-ed was published, Disney dropped Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, in which he played the main character Captain Jack Sparrow, the lawsuit notes.
“Hollywood studios don't want to deal with the public backlash of someone accused of abuse,” Chew told jurors on Tuesday. “A false allegation can devastate a career. And it can devastate a family.”
Rottenborn agreed with Depp’s lawyer that the actor’s reputation “is in tatters”—but insisted that’s “not Amber’s fault. It’s because of the choices he made.”
Bredehoft elaborated on the alleged abuse and the actor’s bizarre behavior on Tuesday, arguing that Depp hit Heard multiple times while wearing rings, wrote “terrible things” on lampshades, and even attempted to write with urine. The lawyer also alleged that Depp sexually assaulted Heard, including one time when “he penetrated her with a liquor bottle.”
Heard countersued Depp for $100 million in August 2020 for defamation over his lawsuit. While a judge ultimately dropped some of Heard’s countersuit claims, the Virginia jury will hear both Depp and Heard’s claims.
On Saturday, Heard went on social media to say she is dreading the legal proceedings and hopes the former couple can “move on” after the verdict.
“I never named him, rather I wrote about the price women pay for speaking out against men in power. I continue to pay that price, but hopefully when this case concludes, I can move on and so can Johnny,” Heard wrote. “I have always maintained a love for Johnny and it gives me great pain to have to live out the details of our past life together in front of the world.”
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