Amber Heard’s legal team has announced that they will not call Johnny Depp back to the witness stand.
In a statement to the press, Ms Heard’s attorney said that “calling Depp back to the stand would be as relevant to us as a bicycle to a fish. Everything Depp has testified up to this point has been irrelevant to the heart of this case, and there’s no reason to believe it would be any different now”.
Court TV Legal Correspondent Chanley Shá Painter tweeted that “this statement is from a source close to Amber Heard this afternoon after her team changed their mind in calling Depp to the stand”.
The defamation trial between Mr Depp and Ms Heard began on Monday 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”.
Law & Crime Correspondent Angenette Levy tweeted that Ms Heard’s team “will not call Johnny Depp to the stand as they had initially planned. He will be back during his rebuttal case. Is this an issue of time? [Ms Heard’s] team has less time left than [Mr Depp’s]”.
“We had said this would be risky. They don’t have a lot of time left and Johnny Depp was largely regarded to be uncontrollable as a witness by Amber Heard’s lawyers. Many legal observers felt he did well on the stand,” she added.
“Heard’s team is running out of time to present their evidence … at the beginning of the week they only had about 8 hours to use on their case in chief and rebuttal this week,” Ms Painter added.
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.
