Overview and Updates Johnny Depp and Amber Heard case

ohnny Depp has been testifying in a libel trial for three days, ostensibly to determine if Amber Heard defamed him in a 2018 newspaper op-ed.

Depp has testified about everything from taking medications as a child to having a near-mental breakdown in which he used his severed finger to write on the walls in his own blood to recount his ex-alleged wife’s falsehoods, turning the trial into a spectacle.

Depp denies ever harming Heard, and despite the public attention brought to his drug usage and violent text messages, he says he’s preoccupied with disclosing the truth and doesn’t want to disappoint those who looked up to him.

“My goal is the truth because it kills me that all these individuals I’ve met over the years… think I’m a fraud,” Depp said during his testimony on Tuesday (NBC).

Heard authored an op-ed piece in The Washington Post in 2018 in which she referred to herself as a “public figure symbolizing domestic abuse,” according to the actor (NBC).

Depp’s lawyers said it was a clear reference to charges Heard made when she filed a restraining order against him in 2016. Heard never mentioned Depp by name.

Depp said that the allegations and article turned him into a Hollywood outcast, costing him a role in the lucrative “Pirates of the Caribbean” film trilogy.

Heard’s lawyers claim that his opinion post was factually correct and did not disparage him. They claim Depp’s terrible behavior destroyed his reputation, and that The Walt Disney Company had already planned to fire Depp from “Pirates of the Caribbean” months before the piece was published.

Heard has accused Depp of assaulting her physically and sexually on several times before and during their brief marriage, frequently in instances when she claims he drank so much that he blacked out later.

Heard’s allegations of substance misuse have been “grossly inflated,” according to Depp, who claims he was never out of control during that time. They first met in 2009, married in 2015, and then divorced a year later (NBC).

Many text messages Depp wrote to pals outlining the massive amounts of booze and drugs he had taken at a period when he claimed he wasn’t a problem drinker have been highlighted by Heard’s attorneys.

Depp tried and lost a similar action in England against a newspaper. Depp abused Heard on a dozen occasions and put her in dread of her life on other occasions, according to the judge.

Later in the trial, Heard is likely to testify. 

Depp sent text messages to Bettany in which he stated a desire to kill and defile Heard, according to Heard’s lawyers.

Depp stated, “After claiming he wants to burn her,” “Before we burn her, let’s drown her!!! After that, I’ll (expletive) her scorched corpse to make sure she’s dead” (NBC).

Depp has apologized to the jury for his foul language, saying that he “went to dark places in the heat of the anguish I was feeling.” He also likened his writing to Thompson’s gonzo style, which featured a lot of loud language and inflated ideas (NBC).

When Marianna Kelly was asked what her opinion was on the prosecution, she responded: “With the prosecution, I believe that when the prosecutors were speaking, their arguments were not very direct or clear in helping the case at all. In my opinion, the prosecution did not have any solid evidence to bring Heard’s argument to justice.”