A lawyer for Johnny Depp sought to discredit abuse accusations by his ex-wife, Amber Heard, during cross-examination on Tuesday, confronting her with audio recordings of the couple’s arguments as well as text messages and love notes that the lawyer suggested showed Ms. Heard to be an unreliable witness.
As Ms. Heard finished her testimony at Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia, the lawyer, Camille Vasquez, challenged Ms. Heard’s assertions that she has only ever hit Mr. Depp as a defense. Ms. Vasquez played recordings from an argument several years ago in which Ms. Heard acknowledged, “I did start a physical fight,” and called Mr. Depp a “baby.”
Ms. Heard testified that in that incident, she hit him only because he was trying to “bust” into the bedroom where she was trying to hide from him.
“I accused him of being a baby for complaining about me hitting him when he was trying to get through the door that I was trying to barricade,” she testified on Tuesday.
Ms. Heard, 36, is locked in a tense legal battle with Mr. Depp, 58, over competing defamation claims and has spent several hours during the trial sharing her accounts of repeated physical abuse throughout their relationship, as well as multiple instances of sexual assault. Mr. Depp has denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting her and has accused her of being the abuser in the relationship.
Mr. Depp sued Ms. Heard three years ago over an op-ed, published in The Washington Post, in which she called herself a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Ms. Heard countersued Mr. Depp, saying that his former lawyer had defamed her by calling her accusations of abuse a hoax.
During one part of her questioning, Ms. Vasquez challenged an account of the aftermath of an incident in Australia in 2015, in which, according to Ms. Heard, Mr. Depp sexually assaulted her with a bottle and beat her while he was intoxicated on MDMA. Ms. Heard testified that after Mr. Depp’s attack, she had a bruised jaw, as well as cuts on her arms and feet from broken glass on the ground.
“There is not a single medical record reflecting treatment for any of those injuries, is there, Ms. Heard?” Ms. Vasquez asked.
“I didn’t seek treatment,” Ms. Heard replied.
Mr. Depp has testified that he was the person injured that night when Ms. Heard threw a vodka bottle, hitting his hand and severing part of one of his fingers. Ms. Heard said he injured his finger by smashing a wall-mounted phone into “smithereens” while in a rage; Ms. Vasquez pointed to a lack of photographic evidence of the broken phone or of the injuries Ms. Heard said she suffered that night.
Ms. Heard said documentation of the abuse was incomplete because she only started taking photos of her injuries “incidentally,” when she wanted to show a friend or her mother. She never envisioned a legal battle like this, she said.
Ms. Vasquez also presented a love note that Ms. Heard wrote to Mr. Depp about two months after the Australia incident, which included the line, “I have seen in you the true bones of friendship and respect.”
Ms. Heard said the couple had been in a “honeymoon period” at the time.
As in Mr. Depp’s testimony, Ms. Heard’s cross-examination involved an airing of insults she had hurled at him during arguments. In one recording, Ms. Heard can be heard calling him a “sellout” and a “joke.” She acknowledged on the stand that she called him “horrible, ugly things,” noting that he called her names, too. (In her lawyers’s cross-examination of Mr. Depp, they brought forward several text messages to other people in which he referred to Ms. Heard using insults and obscenities, including calling her a “worthless hooker.”)
Central to the case is the op-ed, and Ms. Vasquez sought to establish that, even if Ms. Heard did not mention Mr. Depp by name in the piece, it was clear that the subject was their relationship. Ms. Heard confirmed that when she said she became a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” she was referring to getting a temporary restraining order against Mr. Depp in 2016.
Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber Heard
In the courtroom. A defamation trial involving the formerly married actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard is currently underway in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia. Here is what to know about the case:
The case. Mr. Depp brought a defamation case against Ms. Heard in an effort to clear his name from domestic abuse allegations that she has made against him and that he denies. The jury is also considering a countersuit from Ms. Heard, who claims that Mr. Depp defamed her when his former lawyer said her domestic abuse claims were a “hoax.”
Ms. Heard’s op-ed. Mr. Depp’s suit was filed in response to an op-ed Ms. Heard wrote for The Washington Post in 2018 in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Though she did not mention her former husband’s name, he and his lawyers have argued that she was clearly referring to their relationship.
The end of their marriage. Ms. Heard filed for divorce in 2017, just over a year after the pair had married. She also obtained a temporary restraining order against the actor after accusing him of hitting her. She later withdrew that claim, and in January 2017, the couple agreed to a $7 million divorce settlement.
An earlier defamation case. The trial follows another case Mr. Depp brought in London in 2020 against The Sun newspaper, which called him a “wife beater” in a headline. In that trial, a judge found that there was “overwhelming evidence” that he had assaulted Ms. Heard repeatedly during their marriage.
The domestic abuse claims. In the 2020 trial, Ms. Heard accused her former husband of assaulting her first in 2013, after they began dating, and detailed other instances in which he slapped her, head-butted her and threw her to the ground. Mr. Depp has since accused her of punching him, kicking him and throwing objects at him.
At one point, Ms. Vasquez focused on the article’s headline: “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.” Ms. Heard denied writing the headline, testifying that The Washington Post did not consult her on it, and said she had no intention of making public her allegations of sexual assault in that op-ed. When she tweeted the op-ed, Ms. Heard testified, she did not realize what the headline said.
“Not very careful about what you publish, are you, Ms. Heard?” Ms. Vasquez asked.
“I just didn’t notice the title,” she said.
After Ms. Heard left the stand, the jury heard prerecorded testimony from iO Tillett Wright, a former friend of the couple who said he never saw either of them hit the other. But he said that in 2015, shortly after a fight in which Ms. Heard said Mr. Depp had pulled out chunks of her hair, he witnessed injuries to her scalp.
Throughout Ms. Heard’s testimony, which occurred over four days of the trial, Mr. Depp has kept his focus away from his ex-wife on the stand, often staring at a screen in front of him. On Monday, Ms. Vasquez said he looked away from her because he had promised her that she would never see his eyes again.
But during redirect on Tuesday, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, asked her why she thought Mr. Depp had avoided looking at her.
“Because he’s guilty, because he knows he’s lying,” Ms. Heard said. “Otherwise, why can’t he look at me?”
