Emotional audio was played to the court during Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s multi-million-dollar defamation trial on Monday as the Aquaman actor said she begged her then-husband to stop calling her “a liar” about his alleged abuse.
In the audio clip, Ms Heard is heard speaking to Mr Depp in a recorded conversation in June 2016 – one month after she filed for divorce from the Pirates of the Caribbean actor.
“I’m being called a liar and a gold-digger,” she is heard saying.
“I’m not lying about any of this s*** and I’m not after any of your money.”
She told the court that she wanted him to stop calling her “a liar” and stop the “smear campaign” that he had allegedly launched against her.
“I was trying to get Johnny to stop the smear campaign that he launched,” she said.
Ms Heard claimed that Mr Depp told her he would “ruin” her and her career.
“Johnny told me that he would ruin me. That no one would ever touch me - professionally that no one would ever work with me again,” she said.
“That I would never work again. That he would ruin my career.”
Ms Heard said that her former spouse “refused” to not engage with the press about their break-up.
“He was calling me a liar and he was forcing me to prove it and I knew that wasn’t going to be good for him and I kept saying don’t make me prove it... but he was calling me a liar,” she said.
Other audio recordings were also played to the court, where Ms Heard is heard crying and telling him “I’m just trying to point out the facts”.
In one recording, she tells him that his own security guards had told her that “that I was going to get killed”.
Ms Heard told the court that she had never wanted to have to tell people about the alleged abuse but that she wanted him to stop accusing her of lying about it.
“I was begging Johnny to not make me prove what I’ve had to sit on this stand and had to sit in front of you all to prove and talk about,” she said.
“I didn’t want this, I dont want to be here. I didn’t want to be there then.
“I was trying to get him to not call me a liar as everything I have said to date and everything I have said now is the truth.”
Ms Heard sobbed on the stand as she said she was trying to urge Mr Depp.
“Just don’t call me a liar. Just don’t say that this isn’t real because I am the walking proof of it,” she said of her conversation with him.
Ms Heard returned to the stand for a third day of testimony as the trial resumed in Fairfax, Virginia, after a one-week break on Monday.
Mr Depp is suing his ex-wife for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she penned for The Washington Post where she described herself as a “a public figure representing domestic abuse”.
The Pirates of the Caribbean actor is not named in the article, which is titled “I spoke up against sexual violence – and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change”.
However Mr Depp claims that it falsely implies that he is a domestic abuser – something that he strongly denies – and that it has left him struggling to land roles in Hollywood. He is suing for $50m.
Ms Heard is countersuing for $100m, accusing Mr Depp of orchestrating a “smear campaign” against her and describing his lawsuit as a continuation of “abuse and harassment”.
