Oh, Sam Fender. We were totally fine with you rocking up to BBC Breakfast with a hangover for the ages, even when you looked as if you might vomit. In fact, it was the kind of thing that made people love you even more. But to post a selfie with Johnny Depp mere seconds after the verdict in his trial against ex-wife Amber Heard was announced? Yikes. Depp might have won the case, but in the picture – taken in the beer garden of Newcastle’s The Bridge Tavern on the final day of the biggest celebrity court drama of the decade – Fender doesn’t mention such legal matters. Instead, Fender brands Depp and his rocker pal Jeff Beck “serious heroes”.
The US court may have ruled that Heard had damaged Depp’s career due to a 2018 op-ed piece she wrote about domestic violence – which didn’t mention Depp at all – but something more important was always at stake: the result of the UK libel suit Depp lost against The Sun in 2020, taken out after they branded him a “wife-beater”. The result of this first trial still stands, as do the statements by UK High Court’s Justice Andrew Nicol, who said the newspaper’s language was not libellous, as “the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms Heard by Mr Depp have been proved to the civil standard”.
