It’s been exactly two months since Johnny Depp won his defamation trial against Amber Heard in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Over the course of seven weeks, the nation watched as Depp and his legal team cited defamation on three counts against Heard in relation to a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post titled “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.”
Depp claimed Heard’s op-ed irrevocably damaged his reputation and career by accusing him of domestic violence, and sought $50 million in compensatory damages. Heard subsequently launched a $100 million counterclaim against him.
On June 1, 2022, the seven-member jury ruled in favor of Depp on all three counts, awarding him $10.35 million. Heard, by all accounts, lost the court of public opinion but was still awarded $2 million. The public opinion was largely in favor of Depp, evidenced by the TikTok hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp that received over 19 billion views.
The positive ruling for Depp comes after his loss in a U.K. courtroom two years prior. At the time, he sued The Sun newspaper for calling him a “wife beater” and for accusing him of assaulting his ex-wife. That ruling, unlike the U.S. one, was delivered by a judge instead of a jury. Depp was found guilty on 12 of 14 counts of domestic violence against Heard in that trial.
Since her loss in the U.S. defamation trial, Heard has publicly made it known that information used in the U.K. courtroom was not brought forth in the U.S. trial. Now, over 6,000 pages of unsealed court documents from the U.S. trial have been viewed by The Daily Beast and are being shared with the public. They don’t, by and large, look good for Depp.
Did Johnny Depp kick Amber Heard on an airplane?
One piece of evidence that was made available in the U.K. trial but not in the U.S. trial were claims that Depp “kicked” Heard on a private jet in 2014. These claims came in the form of text exchanges between Depp’s former assistant Stephen Deuters and Amber Heard.
“If someone was truly honest with him about how bad it really was, he would be appalled,” said Depp’s former assistant, Deuters in a text message to Heard. “I’m sad he does not have a better way to really know the severity of his actions yesterday. Unfortunately for me, I remember them in full, in full detail, everything that happened. He was appalled, when I told him he kicked you, he cried.”
Subsequent text messages from Depp to Heard following the alleged altercation were also not made available in the U.S. trial. In those texts, Depp admitted to feeling “shame and regret” and that he was “sorry” for his actions. “I will never do it again… My illness somehow crept up and grabbed me…I feel so bad for letting you down,” he said. He then called himself a “fucking savage” and a “lunatic.”
The text messages were deemed inadmissible in the U.S. court even though they were used in the U.K. trail. Depp’s law firm, Brown Rudnick claimed no record of the text messages could be found, not even on Depp’s iCloud account. They were subsequently determined to be “missing.”