It took 12 days filled with plenty of bizarre antics and grave allegations, but the jurors in Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard on Thursday finally learned major new details about the 2018 Washington Post op-ed at the crux of the titanic legal battle.
A video deposition of Terence Dougherty, general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was played to a packed Fairfax County, Virginia, court, detailing how the nonprofit worked with Heard to write and publish the column. In his $50 million lawsuit, Depp has argued that the op-ed—in which Heard describes herself as having emerged as a domestic violence survivor two years earlier, but does not name Depp—“devastated” his career and effectively tagged him as an abuser.
In May 2016, Heard had filed for divorce and was granted a temporary restraining order against Depp after she showed up to court with a bruised face. In her application, Heard alleged that Depp threw a phone at her, which he denied.
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Heard and her legal team have said the December 2018 op-ed was not focused on her former husband and their short-lived union. Instead, they have claimed it primarily served as a forum for the actress to urge victims to speak out about a critical problem in society.
The testimony on Thursday offered more nuanced insight into how the sausage was made.
“My understanding [is] that the language that ended up in the op-ed was very different from the original op-ed…. It did not refer directly to Ms. Heard’s relationship with Johnny Depp,” Dougherty testified in the video deposition, which was recorded last December. He went on to note that Heard’s lawyers specifically “removed references to her marriage and divorce.”
But, the ACLU executive said, even without the explicit mention of Heard’s ex-husband, it was his understanding “she was referring to Johnny Depp” in the op-ed.
Jurors are slated to determine whether Heard acted with “actual malice” when she wrote the Post op-ed—meaning that the actress knew what she had written in piece was false—or that she published the piece with “reckless disregard” for the truth about the Pirates of the Caribbean star. The jury will also be asked to review some issues raised in Heard’s 2020 countersuit against Depp for defamation.
Simply put, jurors must decide not just whether the piece indirectly alluded to her relationship with the actor that officially ended in 2017, but also whether Heard intentionally meant to harm or be dishonest about Depp in the piece. Depp’s lawyers have insisted that the piece damaged his reputation and career, and directly resulted in Disney dropping the actor from the Pirates franchise.
The actors have also accused one another of verbal and physical abuse. While both have denied that they engaged in that behavior, in November 2020, a London judge found that there was “overwhelming evidence” that Depp had assaulted Heard repeatedly throughout their marriage, and she was “in fear of her life.” Depp lost that case, itself an attempt at suing a publication for characterizing him as a “wife-beater.”
While on the stand, Depp has testified that he lost “nothing less than everything” after Heard’s 2018 op-ed.
If he did suggest the piece was understood to be about Depp, Dougherty also described painstaking steps Heard and the ACLU team went through to ensure that Depp and his former marriage were not explicitly mentioned in the column.
Dougherty said that after Heard and Depp reached a settlement in their divorce, the Aquaman actress announced she was going to donate her $7 million payout to charity—splitting it between the ACLU and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Ultimately, he testified, they never received the full $3.5 million that was pledged, but did receive about half of the money in Heard’s name.
Dougherty told the court that $500,000 of the $1.3 million the ACLU received on Heard’s behalf came from Vanguard payment they believed stemmed from a fund set up by Elon Musk. Shortly after her break-up with Depp, Heard started dating Musk—though text messages revealed in court Wednesday suggested she told at least one friend she never really loved the billionaire.
Even though the ACLU never received Heard’s pledge in full, Dougherty said, the nonprofit helped Heard write and review the op-ed in 2018—nothing that, at one point, it was potentially going to be placed in The New York Times or Teen Vogue. The executive said the original basis for the op-ed was Heard seeking to discuss how survivors of gender-based violence might feel less safe under the Trump administration—and ways for them to take action.
The piece, according to emails shown in court, would also weave in “a number of things Amber had expressed from her personal story about being a survivor of gender-based violence.”
“Your lawyers should review this for the way I skirted around talking about your marriage,” one November 2018 email sent from the ACLU to Heard said. Another email noted that Heard’s lawyers were trying to be careful about mentioning Heard’s past with Depp, noting that the couple have signed an NDA as part of their settlement agreement.
Another internal ACLU email recapped aloud in court read: “Amber sent back the op-ed with final edits from her legal team which specifically neutered much of the copy regarding her marriage and the DV.”
Dougherty agreed with a question proposing that Heard had watered down the piece, noting that her team took specific steps to make the copy as vague as possible. He also claimed that the Washington Post was responsible for the headline.
“From what I know, Ms. Heard involved her attorneys and made changes to the op-ed based on the advice of her attorneys,” Dougherty added. “Based on my investigation, I am not aware of a situation where she did not rely on her attorneys.”
Testimony continued into Thursday afternoon, but veered from the op-ed at the center of the case.
Malcolm Connolly, a security guard who used to work for Depp and has known the actor for over two decades, described to jurors how he believed Heard “wanted to wear the pants” in the relationship. He also claimed that he never saw physical injuries on Heard—but saw several on Depp.
“It would be scratches on his neck, maybe a fat lip in the corner,” Connolly via a video link from England. “He had bruising on the eye socket.... It would get more regular. Not every week, but it definitely happened, yeah.”
In one moment that garnered laughter from the courtroom and Depp, an attorney for Heard grilled Connolly about instances in which the actor was drunk, including one in which he allegedly tried to “urinate in the foyer.”
When Connolly denied having witnessed any such incident, the Heard attorney questioned him again, asking that Depp “had his penis out, didn’t he?”
“I think I would remember seeing Mr. Depp’s penis,” the security guard answered, prompting Depp to double down over his desk in laughter.
It was the latest instance of the actor having fun at a defamation case that centers on allegations of domestic violence.
