Johnny Depp’s sound engineer Keenan Wyatt has testified during the actor’s defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard that she became “abruptly loud” when he told her that Mr Depp cared for her.
According to Mr Wyatt, Ms Heard yelled “how dare you talk to me” after he tried to speak to her during a private flight.
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”.
On a May 2014 private jet flight from Boston to Los Angeles, Mr Wyatt said Ms Heard appeared to be giving Mr Depp “the cold shoulder,” and that she was “being quiet and seemed pouty”.
At one point, Mr Wyatt said he “went up to her and said something to the effect of ‘you know he cares about you’. And all of a sudden she snapped and started yelling at me. ‘How dare you talk to me? Get away from me’. So I went back to my seat and minded my own business”.
“She was abruptly loud, it was a quiet plane – all of a sudden it got very loud,” he added.
On several occasions, Mr Wyatt said he has “never seen Johnny abuse anybody ever”.
Mr Wyatt said Mr Depp “said something to her like, ‘don’t talk to my friend that way’ and I just stayed in my seat and finished the rest of the flight”.
In her 2018 op-ed, Ms Heard partly 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”.
