Johnny Depp returned to the stand Wednesday morning in the defamation case between the actor and his ex-wife, Amber Heard, and offered some of his most pointed responses yet to her testimony accusing him of serial domestic violence.
Within hours, he was back on the defensive, confronted with texts about his sexual conquests that he denied writing, claiming to a Heard lawyer, “You could have typed it up last night.”
Shortly after ex-girlfriend and supermodel Kate Moss testified remotely to shoot down a rumor that Depp had pushed her down a staircase decades ago, the actor retook the stand. He reiterated his previous claims that Heard was abusive and he the real victim. He also seemed to key on testimony offered by Heard’s sister Whitney Henriquez, who has stood out as the first eyewitness to say she saw Depp attack Heard.
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To the contrary, Depp suggested Henriquez was a victim of her sister, too.
“Amber’s sister Whitney always seemed to get the dirty end of the stick, and I felt for her for that because it wasn’t new,” he said. “It had been there for life. It was pretty obvious.”
Depp was then invited to inveigh on his own pain throughout the proceedings. Asked, “What has it been like for you to listen to Ms. Heard’s testimony at this trial?” Depp paused for several seconds and said, “Insane.”
“It’s insane to hear heinous accusations of violence—sexual violence—that she attributed to me, that she accused me of,” he elaborated. “I don’t think anyone enjoys having to split themselves open and tell the truth, but there are times when one simply has to because it’s gotten out of control.”
Depp’s legal team is wrapping up the testimony phase of the trial before closing arguments with a string of rebuttal witnesses, including Depp himself. The actor and Pirates of the Caribbean star addressed the court in a deep, rheumy voice, and at a deliberate, sometimes halting pace in testimony dotted with asides.
One was directed tartly at the lawyer raising objections for Heard, Benjamin Rottenborn. Depp referred to him as “Mr. Rotten,” then corrected it to “Mr. Rottenborn.”
Depp is suing Heard for $50 million, claiming she defamed him even without naming him in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed identifying herself as a victim of domestic violence. Heard is counter-suing for $100 million, claiming Depp and his former lawyer defamed her by labeling her allegations a “hoax.” Each has accused the other of violent abuses and career-damaging lies.
Near the end of an hour of friendly questioning by one of his lawyers, Depp called Heard’s allegations “horrible, ridiculous, humiliating, ludicrous, painful, savage, unimaginably brutal, cruel, and all false. All false.”
“No human being is perfect,” he said. “But I have never in my life committed sexual battery, physical abuse—all these outlandish, outrageous stories of me committing these things and living with it for six years and waiting to be able to bring the truth out. So this is not easy for any of us. I know that. But no matter what happens, I did get here and I did tell the truth and I have spoken up for what I’ve been carrying on my back, reluctantly, for six years.”
Cross examination of Depp got messy, fast, when an attorney for Heard confronted him with texts sent from his phone.
One text exchange Mr. Depp denied having with his personal assistant, Stephen Deuters, in February 2017 referenced a woman in vulgar and domineering terms. Rottenberg, the lawyer for Heard, read it back to Depp: “Molly’s pussy is RIGHTFULLY MINE!!!! Should I not just bust in and remove its hinges tonight???”
“Did I read that right?” Rottenborn asked Depp.
“You read it right,” he muttered.
Rottenborn read the next text, “I want to change her understanding of what it is like to be thrashed about like a pleading Mackrel ... I NEED. I WANT. I TAKE.”
“You read it right,” Depp said again. “But I did not write that.”
“Sometimes you give your phone to people,” he protested, saying he didn’t know who “Molly” was, and didn’t have the “hubris” or the “expectation” to talk that way about women.
Depp did admit to writing a text in the summer of 2016, after Heard had received an order of protection, in which he promised “total global humiliation” of Heard to a talent agent that she and Depp had shared. Depp described her with a string of vulgarities and, as Rottenborn read them back, Heard’s face visibly fell as she listened and she wiped her eyes.
The harangue read in part, “I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market… I’m so fucking happy she wants to go to fight this out!!! She will hit the wall hard!!!! And I cannot wait to have this waste of a cum guzzler out of my life!!! I met a fucking sublime little Russian here… Which made me realize [sic] the time I blew on that 50 cent stripper… I wouldn’t touch her with a goddam glove. I can only hope that karma kicks in and takes the gift of breath from her.”
Depp said he was reacting angrily to having his life destroyed by false accusations of abuse and sexual violence.
Depp also returned to the scene of a confrontation with Heard in Australia in March 2015 that turned bloody and delayed filming of the fifth Pirates movie, but with dueling accounts of why. Depp has testified that his fingertip was severed by the shattering of a vodka bottle that Heard threw at him. Heard has denied throwing the bottle and said that in the same spate of violence Depp sexually assaulted her with a liquor bottle.
Depp texted his doctor, David Kipper, afterward, “I cut the top of my middle finger off.” On Wednesday, he attempted to offer a clarification, testifying that he walked Kipper through the wreckage of the newlywed couple’s rented house, his finger maimed. “When you saw the damage in the house and everything, the blood everywhere, I mean obviously there was serious damage done,” he said. “There would be no point in lying to the man. He’d been through it with me and Ms. Heard before. I told him that she had thrown a bottle of vodka and… smashed and cut my finger off.
“The tip of my finger,” he added, “but a good chunk. I miss it.”
Objections from Heard’s lawyers, often followed by private bench conferences, appeared to short-circuit some lines of questioning. They included an effort by Depp to talk about several days in May 2016 when his mother died, his daughter had a birthday, and Heard served him with divorce papers and a restraining order.
Depp did discuss the couple’s 2015 honeymoon, a trip to Asia on the storied Orient Express train between Singapore and Bangkok. Jurors looked at a photograph in the train’s luxurious bar car of the kitchen staff, Heard, and Depp himself sporting a white tuxedo jacket and what appeared to be bruising below his eyes.
“I just remember I took a pretty good shot to the face, to the eye,” he said, leaving him with “a bit of a shiner.”
Heard has testified that Depp choked her in their sleeper car on the last night of the train trip after an argument about his drinking: “Johnny punched me in the face, grabbed my neck and pinned me against the wall of the car.”
Depp said it was Heard who instigated the violence on a honeymoon that swung from pleasant and relaxed to chaotic. “These things could happen very quickly,” he said. “If you disagreed—” he began before Rottenborn objected.
Asked again by his lawyer how he got the black eye, he said, “Ms. Heard hit me. Is that better?”
Heard’s own case has included several pictures taken of her with facial bruising and lacerations and a portion of her scalp missing after she said Depp tore out clumps of her hair.
As Heard watched him from her lawyers’ table, Depp also pushed back on an earlier claim that, in Australia, he swallowed eight to 10 ecstasy pills in a single take. Depp said he had done the drug, known for inducing euphoria, no more than seven times in his life because it didn’t deliver the expected high. He denied ever downing eight to 10 at once “because I’d be dead.”
The first very assertion Depp made in his rebuttal appeared designed to put distance between him and the libel lawyer Adam Waldman, who represented him in a failed defamation case in the United Kingdom against a tabloid, The Sun, that called him a “wife beater.”
In 2020, Waldman disparaged Heard’s domestic abuse claims as an orchestrated “hoax” in interviews with another London tabloid, the Daily Mail. Depp said he only learned of those statements—which are at the core of Heard’s defamation counter-suit—when Heard’s legal claim was filed in August 2020.
Depp also said, contrary to Heard’s testimony, that he did play a role in her landing the coveted and potentially career-boosting role opposite Jason Momoa in Aquaman. The film was the largest-grossing of the DC Comics superhero movie adaptations with Warner Bros. studios at more than $1 billion.
Depp said he spoke to top executive at Warner Bros., where he had a multi-film deal, at Heard’s request after she had auditioned for a role in the franchise. He denied trying trying to get her fired from the role after their split.
But Rottenborn showed Depp another text to his sister Christi Dembrowski, about a week after Heard’s temporary restraining order: “I want her replaced on that WB film!!!”
Depp said he wrote the text, but denied it signified what it said. He said his next conversations with executives at Warner Bros., which was releasing big-budget movies with both Heard and Depp, were just to warn them of the bad publicity coming their way.
“Yes, it’s just acting, it’s just movies,” he said. “But it’s business and it’s your word. And I had given my word to them. I felt responsible that I had to tell them exactly what was going on, and that [it] was going to end up ugly.”
