Amber Heard maintained her composure throughout former husband Johnny Depp’s $50m defamation suit against her last week. That is, until her lawyers played a video of Depp, pouring himself a beaker of wine, raging and shouting “Motherfucker!” as he smashed up or into the kitchen cabinets.
Heard’s neutral disposition collapsed, she dropped her head and appeared close to tears.
What the jury makes of that video, filmed by Heard herself in one of the couple’s marital homes, several court observers hinted on Thursday, could decide the outcome of an action that turns on a 2018 Washington Post opinion article in which Heard wrote she had become “a public figure representing domestic abuse”.
Last week in the current case, being heard in Fairfax, Virginia, the video of Depp shouting was shown during cross-examination after two days of unchallenged testimony from the Pirates of the Caribbean star. During that earlier evidence he discussed his abusive upbringing, his struggles with drug addiction and alcoholism, he offered musings on brain chemistry, and a self-serving interpretation of the collapse of his career after allegations of domestic abuse surfaced in 2016, the re-educations of #MeToo and other topics.
If his defamation case against Heard was purely a legal matter, Depp’s presentation could have been cut short. Instead, it was arguably also an audition, or re-audition, designed to remind the public of his charisma and why he had shot to fame at a young age in quirky, romantic roles like Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and Dead Man.
But the Depp of recent years, in his Keith Richards-parodying role in Pirates of the Caribbean, surrounded by acolytes, managers, bodyguards, lesser-stature actors, concierge doctors, psychotherapists, nurses – all of whom have given supportive testimony – is a more challenging proposition.
At the culmination of Thursday’s cross-examination, jurors were shown pictures of bloody daubings that Depp had made with a partially severed finger in Australia; tape recordings of the actor moaning in the bathroom of a private jet, throwing up, and recordings of Heard trying to reason with her inflamed and intoxicated husband.
“What happened? All I did was say sorry,” Heard says on the video. “Did something happen to you? I don’t think so. You drank this whole thing this morning? You’re smashing shit.”
Whatever the outcome of the trial – Heard is counter-suing for $100m – Depp’s testimony, regardless of what the court ultimately makes of it has made for uncomfortable viewing as he has issued repeated apologies to the jury for the trial’s exhibits. “I’ll just say that I’m not proud of any of the language that I used,” he offered from the stand last week, and said he often used “dark humor” to express himself.
“Functionally it’s a libel trial but it’s also the divorce case that never was,” says Amber Melville-Brown, head of the US media and reputation team at the law firm Withers. “Theses kinds of acrimonious accusations lobbed back and forth are of the kind you’d expect in a nasty divorce.”
The couple settled out of court in 2017, with Depp paying his wife $7m, Heard keeping their two teacup yorkies, Pistol and Boo, and a horse named Arrow. Depp kept his real estate assets, including properties in Los Angeles, Paris and a private island in the Bahamas and 40 vehicles. At the time, the couple issued a statement: “Neither party has made false accusations for financial gain. There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm.”
To Depp, that agreement came apart with Heard’s Washington Post article. Heard’s lawyers claim she is exempt to libel claims under Virginia’s current anti-Slapp law that provides legal “immunity” for certain claims based on speech regarding a matter of public concern.
Either way, says Melville-Brown, entering into the libel courts, whether in the US or in the UK, where Depp already lost an action against the Sun newspaper in 2020 for calling him a “wife-beater”, is a high-stakes move. Depp has argued that Heard was the one who became violent in the relationship.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result,” Melville-Brown says. “He is expecting a different result. This is a different case under different law with different evidence, different parties, different witnesses, but it all comes down to the same basic allegation.”
In court last week, much of the testimony focused on dueling portraits of Depp: the “southern gentleman” described by a former Heard assistant, or a “monster” as both Depp and Heard came to describe his personality change under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
Near the start of their marriage, in 2015, Depp texted a former security guard. “We’ve been perfect. All I had to do was send the monster away and lock him up, we’ve been happier than ever,” he wrote. To one of his doctors, he said: “I have locked my monster child away in a cage deep within and it has fucking worked.”
But the monster, Heard’s attorneys argue, kept reappearing, while Depp has countered that Heard used the word to describe when she thought he was using drugs or alcohol – and that her perception was not always correct. “Let’s drown her before we burn her,” Depp texted the actor Paul Bettany in 2013. “I will fuck her burnt corpse afterward to make sure she is dead.”
Early in the case, Depp said his public image had gone from “Cinderella to Quasimodo” overnight when Heard made her abuse allegations in People magazine in 2016. Depp was dropped from the Pirates franchise and has had little movie work since.
Depp’s Quasimodo allegory is of course interesting, in part because the hunchback of Victor Hugo’s novel was feared by the townsfolk as a sort of monster, but he finds sanctuary in the unlikely love of Esmeralda that is fulfilled only in death.
Many stories are being played in the Virginia courtroom, not least Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, but ultimately jurors will need to decide whose credibility stands up to scrutiny. Depp, at times charming and forthright but at others grandiloquent, is close to the end of his testimony. Heard will probably take the stand early next week. She has already proven herself to be an eloquent advocate for herself in depositions to the UK case.
The central legal questions of defamation, of reputational fallout from Heard’s alleged libel, have at times seemed spare to the proceedings. “Even if the jury agrees he was defamed the jury can still decide she is protected under the Virginia law,” says Melville-Brown.
“I keep waiting for one of them to get up and rush across the courtroom in true movie-style to say, ‘Sweetie, I’m so sorry,’ shower the other with kisses and say, ‘Let’s just walk away.’ Of course, it’s too late for that now. They are so entrenched in their respective positions in the court and with people around the world, they can’t get out of it now.”
