Amber Heard has suggested that Johnny Depp’s other former partners may be too afraid of a backlash to come forward with accusations of abuse against the Pirates of the Caribbean star.
In her interview on NBC’s Dateline on Friday night, the Aquaman actor responded to a question from Savannah Guthrie about why she is the only one of Mr Depp’s exes to publicly accuse him of violence.
“Look what happened to me when I came forward,” she said. “Would you?” Throughout the couple’s explosive defamation trial in Fairfax, Virginia, Ms Heard testified about multiple alleged incidents of abuse.
Mr Depp denied ever abusing Ms Heard and instead claimed that she was the abuser in their relationship. In a dramatic moment of the trial, supermodel Kate Moss testified that her ex-boyfriend Mr Depp was never violent to her when they dated in the 1990s.
During the trial, Ms Heard referred to a rumour that Mr Depp had once pushed Ms Moss down the stairs. Ms Moss was then called as a witness and testified that she did fall down a set of stairs while the couple were on holiday in Jamaica and that Mr Depp cared for her at the time.
“He never pushed me, kicked me or threw me down any stairs,” she said. Actor Ellen Barkin, one of Mr Depp’s other former partners, also gave testimony, saying that Mr Depp once threw a wine bottle across a hotel room when they were dating in the early 1990s.
The bottle did not hit her or anyone else in the room, she testified, but it was thrown in the direction of her and the group of people in the hotel room at the time.
Ms Heard made the comments about Mr Depp’s former relationships in her first interview since she lost the defamation case with her ex-husband and was ordered to pay him $8.35m (£6.83m) in damages.
During the interview, Ms Heard told Ms Guthrie that she still “loves” Mr Depp, vowed to stand by her testimony until her “dying day”, and said that speaking out about alleged sexual violence was the “scariest, most intimidating thing”.
On Thursday, Mr Depp’s team issued a statement about the interview saying: “It’s unfortunate that while Johnny is looking to move forward with his life, the defendant and her team are back to repeating, reimagining and re-litigating matters that have already been decided by the court and a verdict that was unequivocally decided by a jury in Johnny’s favor.”
Ms Heard’s team responded with a statement of their own, saying: “If Mr Depp or his team have a problem with this, we recommend that Johnny himself sit down with Savannah Gutherie for an hour and answer all her questions.”
Mr Depp sued his ex-wife for defamation over a 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post where she described herself as a victim of domestic abuse and spoke of feeling “the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out”.
Following the dramatic six-week trial, a jury of seven determined earlier this month that Ms Heard had defamed him on all three counts. Jurors awarded Mr Depp $10m in compensatory damages and $5m in punitive damages, before Fairfax County Circuit Judge Penney Azcarate reduced the latter to the state’s legal limit of $350,000.
Ms Heard won one of her three counterclaims against her ex-husband, with the jury finding that Mr Depp – via his lawyer Adam Waldman – defamed her by branding her allegations about a 2016 incident “an ambush, a hoax”. She was awarded $2m in compensatory damages but $0 in punitive damages, leaving the Aquaman actor $8.35m out of pocket.
