In her first interview since losing an explosive defamation trial to Johnny Depp, Amber Heard insisted she stood by everything she said in the courtroom and shared grim details about the public invective against her throughout the case—including calls for her death.
In a sit-down interview on the Today show, Heard held her ground as she was grilled by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie about allegations she made during the highly publicized trial. The interview comes just days after Guthrie interviewed Depp’s lawyers—after dropping that her husband had done consulting work for Depp’s legal team.
“To my dying day, I will stand by every word of my testimony,” Heard told Guthrie, who then pointed to several audio tapes that were played during the trial in which the actress admitted to hitting her ex-husband. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. A lot of mistakes. But I've always told the truth.”
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Among those videotapes are recordings of an infamous 2015 fight in Australia. Heard alleged in court that Depp sexually assaulted her with a liquor bottle during the fight, while her ex-husband insists the actress hurled a bottle of vodka at him that severed his fingertip.
“You’re testifying and you’re telling me today, ‘I never started a physical fight,’ and here you are on tape saying you did,” Guthrie asked at one point during the interview. Heard responded that “20-second clips or the transcripts of them are not representative of the two or three hours” they spent fighting.
On June 1, a jury concluded that Heard defamed Depp when she penned a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which she described herself as a domestic violence survivor. The jury also found that Heard was defamed by Depp’s ex-attorney, Adam Waldman, who had described her abuse claims as a “hoax.”
During the interview, Heard also addressed the social-media frenzy that engulfed the extremely public trial, with online sympathy skewing heavily in favor of Depp. “I think the vast majority of this trial was played out on social media,” Heard said. “I think that this trial is an example of that gone haywire, gone amok. The jury’s not immune to that.” She added: “I think even [for] the most well-intentioned juror, it would have been impossible to avoid this.”
But criticism from members of the public wasn’t just confined to cyberspace. The Aquaman star also spoke about the daily experience of seeing crowds of people expressing their hatred for her throughout the litigation.
“Every single day, I passed three, four, sometimes six blocks, city blocks lined with people holding signs saying ‘Burn the witch’, ‘Death to Amber,’” Heard said. “After three-and-a-half weeks, I took the stand, and saw just a courtroom packed full of Captain Jack Sparrow fans who were vocal, energized. This was the most humiliating and horrible thing I’ve ever been through. I have never felt more removed from my own humanity. I felt less than human.”
Heard also used the interview to argue that “really important pieces of evidence” had been kept out of the latest trial. (Depp previously lost a defamation case against The Sun newspaper in Britain after the publication described him as a “wife beater”).
When Guthrie asked Heard whether or not Depp simply “had better lawyers” at the U.S. trial, Heard said: “I will say his lawyers did a certainly better job of distracting the lawyers from the real issues.”
Later in the interview, Heard slammed Depp’s legal team for saying she gave the “performance of her life” on the witness stand. “Says the lawyer for the man who convinced the world he had scissors for fingers?” Heard shot back, referencing Depp’s role in Edward Scissorhands.
As well as saying she didn’t blame the jurors for ruling against her, Heard added that she could understand why some people would be annoyed by the entire fight. “I would not blame the average person for looking at this and how it’s been covered and not think that it is Hollywood brats at their worst,” Heard said. “But what people don’t understand is that it’s actually so much bigger than that.”
Heard and Guthrie then got into a debate over the First Amendment, which Guthrie pointed out “doesn’t protect lies that amount to defamation.” But Heard insisted: “It’s a freedom to speak to truth to power[...] and that’s all I spoke. And I spoke it to power, and I paid the price.”
Guthrie also pressed Heard on the issue of her instigating violence, reading from a transcript from the trial in which Heard says she started a physical fight. “I did do and say horrible, regrettable things throughout my relationship,” she admitted. “I behaved in horrible, almost unrecognizable to myself ways. I have so much regret.”
“It was very, very toxic,” Heard said of her relationship with Depp. “We were awful to each other. I made a lot of mistakes. A lot of mistakes. But I’ve always told the truth.”
