WARNING: This article contains allegations of physical and sexual violence that some readers may find distressing.
Amber Heard sobbed as she recounted a fight in Australia with Johnny Depp during which she claims that he sexually assaulted her with a vodka bottle.
The Hollywood actress claims the Pirates of the Caribbean star slammed her against a wall, threw bottles at her and ripped off her nightgown in a drug-fuelled rage in Australia in March 2015.
Testifying in a Virginia court hearing the defamation trial between the pair on Thursday, Ms Heard said that Mr Depp went on to penetrate her with a vodka bottle and that afterwards she was so scared she slept behind a “barricaded” door.
The trial between Mr Depp and Ms Heard began on 11 April in Fairfax, Virginia following Mr Depp’s lawsuit against his ex-wife in March 2019. Mr Depp is arguing that she defamed him in a December 2018 op-ed published in The Washington Post titled “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change”.
Describing when she arrived in Australia in March 2015 while Mr Depp was shooting the fifth Pirates installment, Ms Heard said he had lost “a tonne of weight, so I knew something was up”.
“The first night... when he shoved me, I went skidding across the floors ... it was so easy for him to throw me around like that,” she said.
She claimed that Mr Depp grabbed her neck and smashed her head against a wall. Ms Heard said she slept behind a “barricaded” door and that she took sleeping pills to fall asleep. When she awoke, she said Mr Depp was “still up”.
Ms Heard said they had an argument about drugs, including MDMA. “He took a handful of pills... either eight or 10 pills... of MDMA,” she said.
She added that Mr Depp accused her of not liking his sister and that he was upset about actors she had worked with, including Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl.
By March 2015, Ms Heard said she had heard Mr Depp use the phrase “the only way out of this is death”, referring to their relationship, about 25 times.
In a subsequent fight, Ms Heard said Mr Depp slammed her “hard” against the walls, calling her a “whore, slut, fat ass”.
She added that he would drink in front of her “as a show of force”. She claimed that Mr Depp said that others had warned him about her and that “nobody” liked her.
She said she shoved him off of her, and that he responded “you wanna go, little girl?” and proceeded to shove her into a games table and that he kept “whacking” her face.
Ms Heard testified that Mr Depp “taunted” her to take a bottle from him. She said she eventually grabbed it and “smashed it on the floor”, which “really set him off” and that he “backhanded” her and threw another bottle at her.
She added that he later had a “broken bottle” against her face, saying that he would “carve” it up.
Ms Heard said she didn’t remember if she threw anything in Mr Depp’s direction, but that she doesn’t think she did.
“He was throwing these bottles, one after the other, and I felt glass breaking behind me,” she said, adding that he ripped off her nightgown.
“He’s screaming at me that he hates me and that I ruined his life,” Ms Heard said. “I f***ing hate you, you ruined my f***ing life,” she quoted him as yelling.
Ms Heard said Mr Depp’s eyes went “black” and that she “couldn’t see him anymore”.
“I’ve never been so scared in my entire life,” she added. Ms Heard said Mr Depp was on top of her and that she tried to tell him that he was “really hurting me”.
“I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t get through to him, I couldn’t get up... I don’t know what happened next,” Ms Heard said, claiming he went on to sexually assault her with a bottle.
“I could feel this pressure on my pubic bone,” she added, saying that it “looked like” Mr Depp was “punching” her, adding that there were “broken bottles, broken glass” all over the room.
She said she didn’t want to move “because I didn’t know if it was broken, I didn’t know if the bottle that he had inside me was broken”.
“I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t feel pain,” she added, saying that she remember thinking “please God, I hope it’s not broken”.
“I don’t know how that ended,” Ms Heard said, adding that she remembers being in the bathroom “retching” and that she “lost control of my bladder”.
“There was blood on the floor,” she said, adding that she took sleeping pills to fall asleep that night.
When she woke up the next morning, she said it “became clear that he was still up, he hadn’t gone to sleep”.
Ms Heard said she saw “dried blood” on the walls. “I saw what looked like my name,” she added.
“By the time I had gotten down the stairs, the blood had been taken over by paint, navy blue paint,” she testified, adding that one of the paintings in the house “had a giant penis on it”.
“He just looked, he wasn’t there anymore, it wasn’t Johnny,” she said of Mr Depp concerning the March 2015 incident.
Ms Heard said Mr Depp has his hand wrapped in “bandana rags”.
“Look what you made me do, I did this for you,” Mr Depp said, according to Ms Heard. She said she “quickly became aware” that he was using his finger as a paintbrush “even though there were lots of paintbrushes around”.
“I figured out he was missing a finger, he kind of held it up,” she added.
“What did you do? When?” she said she asked him. “I realised in my head that there could have been many hours since this probably happened.”
Mr Depp appeared to chuckle in the courtroom on Thursday when Ms Heard said that following the arrival of security personnel, he “took his penis out of his pants, trying to pee outside, saying that he had more messages for me”.
She added that security staff “corralled” Mr Depp back into the house “like a wild animal... peeing or trying to pee”.
Ms Heard said Mr Depp said he was “leaving more messages” for her. “It made no sense,” she added.
The court has previously been shown messages and “reminders” that Mr Depp scrawled in blood and paint after severing his finger in a fight during which he claims Ms Heard threw two vodka bottles at him.
When Mr Depp testified about the incident earlier in the trial, he told the court: “It was all getting too crazy.”
Mr Depp said, “I was a mess, I was a wreck, I was shaking” as he tried to avoid Ms Heard.
He recalled pouring himself two or three “stiff shots of vodka”, adding that it was the “first taste of alcohol I had had for a long time”.
The actor said Ms Heard yelled “oh, you’re drinking again” when she found him.
“She walked up to me, grabbed the bottle of vodka and then just stood back and hurled it at me,” he said. “It just went right past my head and smashed behind me.”
Mr Depp testified that he grabbed another, larger bottle of vodka and poured himself another shot as Ms Heard was “flinging insults left, right, and centre”.
“She then grabbed that bottle and threw that at me,” Mr Depp said, demonstrating to the jury how he was sitting at the time. He said his fingers were resting on the edge of the bar and that the large vodka bottle “made contact and shattered everywhere”.
“I felt no pain at first,” he said. “I felt heat and as if something was dripping down my hand.”
“I was looking directly at my bones sticking out,” he added. “Blood was just pouring out.”
“I don’t know what a nervous breakdown feels like, but that’s probably the closest that I’ve ever been,” he said. “Nothing made sense and I knew in my mind and in my heart that this is not life.”
“No one should have to go through this,” he added.
Being in the middle of something like a nervous breakdown, Mr Depp said he started “to write in my own blood on the walls”.
“Little reminders from our past that essentially represented lies that she had told me and lies that I had caught her in,” he said, adding that he hid in a bathroom and texted his doctor to come over.
Showing the finger that was injured to the court, Mr Depp said the bones were “crushed” and that it looked like “Vesuvius”, referring to the Italian volcano.
Mr Depp said he couldn’t recall what Ms Heard said after seeing his injury.
“It was almost like white noise, just someone yelling,” he said. “It was just a high pitched constant attack of insults, it was just jumbled words to me in a very high frequency and I was in a bit of shock.”
In her 2018 op-ed, Ms Heard wrote that “like many women, I had been harassed and sexually assaulted by the time I was of college age. But I kept quiet — I did not expect filing complaints to bring justice. And I didn’t see myself as a victim”.
“Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out,” she added at the time.
While Mr Depp isn’t named in the piece, his legal team argues that it contains a “clear implication that Mr Depp is a domestic abuser”, which they say is “categorically and demonstrably false”. Mr Depp is seeking damages of “not less than $50m”.
Ms Heard has filed a $100m counterclaim against Mr Depp for nuisance and immunity from his allegations.
