Amber Heard and Johnny Depp Defamation Suit: What to Know

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp
Photo-Illustration: The Cut. Photos: Getty Images

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp are back in court, another installment in the heated legal volley that began in 2016. This time around, the catalyzing issue is an op-ed Heard wrote for the Washington Post in 2018 identifying herself as a survivor of sexual violence whose career suffered when she named a powerful man in Hollywood as her abuser. Heard did not mention Depp directly, but given how publicly the actors’ divorce played out and how central Heard’s allegations of domestic violence were to the proceedings, most readers would have filled in the blank. Depp then sued Heard for defamation, and she sued back, and now their trial is underway in Virginia’s Fairfax County Circuit Court. Below, a timeline of the current case and how they got here.

Heard and Depp met on the set of The Rum Diary and began dating by 2012, after he separated from his partner of 14 years, Vanessa Paradis, and she broke up with her partner, Tasya van Ree. The actors married in early 2015, and despite many assurances from unnamed tabloid sources that everything was “great” and “they are great together,” Heard filed for divorce 15 months later. Depp greeted this news with a terse public statement: “Given the brevity of this marriage and the most recent and tragic loss of his mother, Johnny will not respond to any of the salacious false stories, gossip, misinformation and lies about his personal life. Hopefully the dissolution of this short marriage will be resolved quickly.”

This was May 2016. The couple had already weathered a whole international dog-smuggling drama by this point, and the gossip magazines quickly got to work on possible motives for the divorce. They floated alleged familial animosity, Ben Affleck, and different life phases (when they got together, she would have been around 25 and he would’ve been about 48) as possible reasons for the split, but the real one emerged in court filings: “There was one severe incident in December 2015 when I truly feared for my life,” Heard wrote in her documents, arriving in court with bruises on her face. (People published photos of the injuries too.) Depp allegedly threw an iPhone at her head during an argument days before, and Heard wanted a restraining order against him, having already filed a police report. And so began a very nasty, very public divorce.

According to Heard, Depp routinely became explosively angry and physically violent throughout their relationship, particularly when substances were involved. Her filings framed the iPhone incident as a repeat event, alleging that Depp subjected her to “excessive emotional, verbal and physical abuse,” as well as “angry, hostile, humiliating and threatening assaults.” Heard said she had photos and video to support her statements — and breaking from its apparent support of Depp, TMZ eventually leaked footage from Heard’s cell phone showing the Pirates of the Caribbean star raging at his wife. Text messages came out, too, in which Depp’s assistant — Stephen Deuters — apologizes on the actor’s behalf for having kicked Heard the night before. “He’s done this many times before,” she wrote back. “Tokyo, the island, London (remember that?!), and I always stay. Always believe he’s going to get better … And then every 3 or so month [sic], I’m in the exact same position.”

Heard also declined spousal support from Depp, emphasizing that, contrary to what his lawyers suggested in the media, the case wasn’t about money for her. And while certain tabloid reports (TMZ’s, for example) seemed to suggest Heard had faked her facial injuries, her friend, photographer and writer iO Tillett Wright came out with an emphatic defense. “BULLS–T,” he wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread. “I’ve had enough. I saw the bruises. Many times. And the fat lip. And the cut head.” Further, Tillett Wright said he’d experienced and witnessed Depp’s rage firsthand, asking: “How much evidence does a woman need to present?! She has photos, texts, witnesses, and filed a restraining order.” And regarding the photos: oh boy.

After issuing his icy statement, Depp avoided commenting on the situation, leaving it to his lawyers to hash out in court. But despite the actor’s silence, there was still a push to discredit Heard in gossip rags: TMZ, for example, published audio from a 2009 court hearing that followed Heard’s arrest for allegedly assaulting van Ree, her former partner. Heard allegedly grabbed Ree’s arm and struck her at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, an incident van Ree said had been “misinterpreted and over-sensationalized by two individuals in a power position” (i.e., the police). Responding to the resurfaced arrest, van Ree said that Heard had been “wrongfully accused,” adding: “It’s disheartening that Amber’s integrity and story are being questioned yet again. Amber is a brilliant, honest and beautiful woman and I have the utmost respect for her.”

In subsequent litigation, Depp stringently denied Heard’s claims, but by mid-August 2016, the pair reached a settlement. “Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love,” they said in a joint statement. “Neither party has made false accusations for financial gains. There was never an intent of physical or emotional harm. Amber wishes the best for Johnny in the future.” Once Depp finally paid her, Heard donated the sum to charity, splitting it between the division of the ACLU that combats violence against women and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. The settlement also required her to withdraw the restraining order and the abuse case with the stipulation that she could never refile it. Unfortunately, though, it did not end the larger dispute.

In 2018, Depp sued News Group Newspapers, Ltd., after one of its titles — The Sun — referred to him as a “wife beater.” As the BBC notes, U.K. law obligates the party accused of committing defamation to prove their claims, which arguably should’ve made the case easier for Depp to win. The trial once again turned the spotlight on 14 instances of abuse Heard says occurred between 2013 and 2016. Depp denied all of it, turning the accusations back on his ex-wife: He said that she, or possibly one of her friends, defecated in his bed. He said that she would regularly fly into violent rages, once cutting off his finger tip when she threw a liquor bottle at him. He said that she was “a calculating, diagnosed borderline personality; she is sociopathic; she is a narcissist; and she is completely emotionally dishonest.” He enlisted his former partner, Paradis, and ex Winona Ryder as character witnesses. But ultimately, he lost the case in July 2020.

In his ruling, the judge agreed that on multiple occasions, Depp seemed to have placed Heard in “fear for her life.” That decision also highlighted some depraved texts from the actor to other members of the industry. To Heard’s former agent, he once wrote that she was “begging for total global humiliation. She’s gonna get it … I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market … I’m so fucking happy she wants to fight this out!!! She will hit the wall hard!!! And I cannot wait to have this waste of a cum guzzler out of my life!!!” To another actor, he wrote: “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.” Of his sister and producer, he demanded: “I want her replaced on the WB film,” which Depp admitted referred to Aquaman.

He was denied an appeal to the judge’s decision, but in the meantime, he had already undertaken a defamation suit against Heard in the U.S. over her 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post.

Reading the op-ed, there’s little question who Heard is talking about, even though Depp’s name doesn’t appear anywhere in the text. Entitled “I spoke out about sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change,” the essay touches on the professional consequences she says followed from becoming “a public figure representing domestic abuse,” and the limits of the Me Too movement. “Imagine a powerful man as a ship, like the Titanic,” she wrote. “That ship is a huge enterprise. When it strikes an iceberg, there are a lot of people on board desperate to patch up holes — not because they believe in or even care about the ship, but because their own fates depend on the enterprise.”

Mostly, her argument highlighted political solutions; reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and shoring up Title IX protections on campus, rather than rolling them back. But three months later, in early 2019, Depp filed a $50 million defamation suit over the article, arguing that her claims were “demonstrably false” and, further, “brought new damage to Mr. Depp’s reputation and career.” While it’s true that Depp’s career has flatlined since 2016, members of the film industry who spoke with the Hollywood Reporter suggested the U.K. ruling may simply have been a final nail in his coffin. Alleged drug abuse and underperforming films, they said, may have also played a part in the waning of his prospects.

In any case, Heard filed to dismiss Depp’s case April 2019, offering new and horrific details about the alleged abuse in the process: Heard alleged that Depp, often under the influence of drugs and alcohol — “we called that version of Johnny ‘the Monster,’” she said in the filing — would beat her, choke her, and at times ripped chunks of her scalp from her head while pulling her hair. “I remember being afraid that Johnny might not know when to stop,” she wrote of one alleged assault, “and that he might kill me.”

The case wasn’t dismissed, and Heard countersued for $100 million in August 2020, saying Depp’s accusations about her making the whole thing up — that she had been “painting on her bruises,” for example — for publicity were intended to hurt her reputation.

Though the Washington Post isn’t named in the lawsuit, it is printed in Springfield, Virginia, which is also where its online servers live. The trial therefore opened on April 11 at the Fairfax County Courthouse, where Judge Penney Azcarate has already barred fans from camping overnight. Per the Guardian, Heard’s lawyers may invoke a Virginia law that protects people from litigation when they speak with third parties about “matters of public concern that would be protected under the first amendment.” Witnesses on Heard’s side are expected to include Elon Musk — whom Heard dated during the divorce proceedings — and James Franco, who apparently asked about her bruised face, and who has faced sexual-misconduct allegations of his own. Depp reportedly plans to call Paul Bettany, the actor he texted about burning Heard and then some.

In opening statements, Depp’s lawyers said that Heard wrongfully “presented herself as the face of the #MeToo movement — the virtuous representative of innocent women across the country and the world who have truly suffered abuse,” and that her “false allegations had a significant impact on Mr. Depp’s family and his ability to work in the profession he loved.” Heard’s attorneys, meanwhile, alleged that Depp once sexually assaulted her with a liquor bottle, noting that — as “an obsessed ex-husband hellbent on revenge” — “all Mr. Depp has wanted to do is humiliate Amber, to haunt her, to wreck her career.”

We will update as the case progresses.


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