Amber Heard has officially filed an appeal of her defamation case against Johnny Depp, nearly two months after she was ordered to pay her ex-husband more than $10 million in damages.
Attorneys representing the 36-year-old actress filed a notice to appeal the verdict in the Virginia Court of Appeals in Fairfax County on Thursday, court records obtained by DailyMail.com show.
The move comes just a week after Heard was denied a request for a new trial.
In June, the Aquaman star was ordered to pay Depp $10.35 million in damages at the end of an explosive six-week trial, when a jury ruled he had defamed the Pirates star of the Caribbean in an opinion piece published in 2018.
Amber Heard filed a notice of appeal of the judgment in her defamation case against Johnny Depp on Thursday, court records obtained by DailyMail.com reveal.
The actress was ordered to pay her actor ex-husband $10.35 million in damages after a jury found she defamed him in a 2018 op-ed about domestic abuse.
Heard’s notice to appeal the verdict, filed Thursday in the Fairfax County Court of Appeals of Virginia, comes a week after he was denied a new trial.
Depp, 59, was awarded $15 million in total: $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages.
The judge later capped the damages at the state’s maximum of $350,000, leaving Depp with a total of $8.35 million.
Instead, Heard won just one of her three counterclaims, which related to Depp’s lawyer’s statements suggesting that she and her friends ransacked his apartment before calling the police.
Ultimately, the jury awarded him only $2 million in compensatory damages out of the $100 million he was seeking and zero dollars in punitive damages.
Depp’s representatives reaffirmed their confidence in the court’s decision in a statement to DailyMail.com following Heard’s appeal request.
“The jury heard the extensive evidence presented during the six-week trial and reached a clear and unanimous verdict that the defendant herself defamed Mr. Depp, on multiple occasions. We remain confident in our case and that this verdict will maintain,” said a spokesperson for the actor.
Earlier this month, Heard’s lawyers asked the judge to overturn the decision and declare a mistrial, arguing that one of the jurors in the case should not have been eligible because his subpoena was intended for his father, who had the same name and lived at the same address.
Heard, 36, won just one of his three counterclaims in the explosive six-week trial earlier this year. The jury awarded him just $2 million in compensatory damages out of the $100 million he was seeking
Depp, 59, was awarded $15 million in total before the judge capped damages at the state’s maximum of $350,000, leaving him with $8.35 million. The actor (pictured at a rehearsal in Italy on Sunday) has been touring with British musician Jeff Beck in Europe since his win in early June.
Depp had sued Heard, arguing she defamed him when she called him “a public figure who represented domestic abuse” in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post. The couple married in 2015 before splitting just over a year later
The request was denied in a written order last Wednesday, with Judge Penny Azcarate ruling that there was “no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing” by the jury and that the jury’s verdict should stand.
He also noted that both sides had questioned and accepted all jurors at the start of the trial.
“Due process was guaranteed and provided to all parties in this litigation,” Azcarate wrote.
In the 43-page memorandum filed on July 1, Heard’s lawyers had also argued that the verdict — and the $10 million in damages she now owes Depp — should be thrown out on the grounds that during the trial, Depp “proceeded solely for defamation by implication theory, abandoning any claim that Ms. Heard’s statements were actually false.”
Depp’s lead attorney, Ben Chew, responded to the motion in a statement to Courthouse News, saying “What we expected, more time, not more substance.”
Heard has also said she cannot pay the $10.35 million in damages she owes Depp.
Although he has previously indicated that he wants to appeal the verdict, to do so he would have to post bail for the full amount of the damages.
It is likely that the mistrial motion was an attempt to circumvent these requirements while still overturning the decision in the case.
Court documents obtained by DailyMail.com show Judge Penny Azcarate denied Heard’s motion to set aside the verdict in a written order last week.
The motion called into question the validity of the jury selection process, pointing to one juror – identified as Juror 15 – whose year of birth was listed as 1945 in court records.
The filing argued that Juror 15 “was clearly born later than 1945. Publicly available information shows that he appears to have been born in 1970.”
Judge Penney Azcarate ruled that there was “no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing” by the jury and that the jury’s verdict should stand
“This discrepancy raises the question of whether Juror 15 actually received a juror summons and was properly screened by the court for juror service.”
“It appears that his identity could not be verified,” the filing says.
Depp had sued Heard, arguing that she defamed him when she called him “a public figure who represents domestic abuse” in an op-ed published in The Washington Post.
Depp denied hitting Heard and said she was the one who became violent in their relationship.
Heard countersued, saying Depp insulted her when her lawyer called her allegations “hoax.” The jury awarded Heard $2 million in damages on one of his counterclaims. Heard said she only hit Depp in defense of herself or her sister.
During an interview with Good Morning America in June, Chew suggested that Depp might be willing to waive the millions of dollars in damages owed to him if Heard agreed not to pursue an appeal.
However, Heard’s lawyers lost that chance during the June 24 hearing when they refused to make that deal and Azcarate finalized the verdict, leaving Heard’s only avenue forward in an appeal. lation
To do so, however, Heard would still need to come up with the cash to post bond in the full amount of $10.35 million while the appeal is pending, a common practice.