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A Fairfax County Circuit Court jury heard the final arguments of the controversial trial between movie stars and ex-spouses Johnny Depp and Amber Heard on Friday, but after a couple of hours of deliberation they decided to resume their work. after the holiday weekend.
Depp filed a defamation suit against his ex-wife for a 2018 opinion piece he wrote in The Washington Post, in which he referred to himself as a public figure representing domestic abuse. Depp, who is asking for $ 50 million, claims the article damaged his career and has denied allegations of abuse. Heard sued Depp for $ 100 million after Depp’s lawyer, Adam Waldman, made several statements to the media describing his claims as false. (The Post is not a defendant in any of the lawsuits.)
To Depp’s claim, the jury is weighing seven questions, including whether Heard made or published three separate statements in the edition, including the headline; if they imply or hint at something about Depp; and if so, if they were false and / or done with real malice. According to Heard’s counterclaim, the jury must decide six questions, including whether Waldman, while acting as Depp’s agent, made the statements and whether they were false and / or made with real malice.
The seven-person jury, which will resume deliberations on Tuesday morning, will assess whether they are both entitled to compensation and, if so, what amount. They began deliberating around 3 p.m.
Frequently Asked Questions: What you need to know as the Depp-Heard test ends
Depp’s team has tried to paint Heard as vengeful and abusive, and lawyers have argued that she intentionally destroyed his career by accusing him of abuse. Depp’s lawyer, Camille Vasquez, said the “Pirates of the Caribbean” actor filed for divorce in May 2016, after a year of marriage, which infuriated Heard. “She didn’t just want a divorce. She wanted to ruin it,” Vásquez said during the final discussions.
Defense attorneys argue that Depp constantly abused Heard, but that it doesn’t really matter in this trial, pointing to the freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment and that the comment does not describe any of the alleged abusive acts to which Heard has done. witnessed. Instead, Heard’s lawyer Ben Rottenborn said, he focused on his “experiences after Johnny Depp.”
“We’re not escaping the fact that when she talked about becoming a public victim of domestic abuse, Amber was talking about her experience in reporting domestic abuse against Johnny Depp,” Rottenborn said. “But that doesn’t make the article, or the statements, about Johnny Depp.”
Before the final arguments began, Judge Penney Azcarate announced that the names of the jurors would be sealed for a year, given the high-profile nature of the case. The trial, which began on April 12, has garnered massive attention and coverage, even with a furious war in Ukraine, the possible stoppage of Roe against Wade and several mass shootings.
Depp’s fandom has been overwhelming for the trial, sleeping on the sidewalks at night to get a spectator bracelet into the room. Hundreds gathered behind the courthouse around 8:30 a.m. Friday, eagerly awaiting Depp’s arrival in what could be his last day in court. “When you hear the bikes, it’s time,” one person advised a group. Some were dressed in pirate costumes and a couple wore a pair of collies named Donald and Danny, dressed in bows as “Depp’s legal team.”
In a packed courtroom, both sides made emotional pleas to the jurors. Vásquez asked the jury to bring Depp back to life … what is at stake in this trial is the good name of a man ”; while Rottenborn described Depp’s lawsuit as “blaming the victims in the most disgusting way.”
“Think of the message that Mr. Depp and his lawyers are sending to Amber and, by extension, to all victims of domestic abuse everywhere: if you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen. If you took pictures, “If they didn’t tell your friends, you’re lying. If you told your friends, they’re part of the deception,” Rottenborn added.
Vásquez told the jury that Heard made up his claims and his testimony has been nothing more than “a performance, the role of a lifetime.” He repeated a question Depp’s team asked during the trial: Why are there no medical records or photographs detailing Heard’s alleged injuries and why did no one see Depp abusing her?
“As an actress, she was photographed all the time. Where are the images of the horrible wounds Heard describes? He asked Vásquez, who also asked again why, if Heard was so scared that Depp would get drunk and drugged himself and hit her, he once gave her a knife engraved with “to death.”
“This is MeToo without any MeToo,” Depp’s lawyer, Benjamin Chew, later said.
Rottenborn, pointing to Depp’s heavy alcohol and drug use, questioned how the actor could fairly explain what happened. He reminded the jury of several allegations of abuse, including in Hicksville, a luxury trailer park in Southern California where Depp allegedly did a thorough search of cavities in Heard before throwing a trailer in the trash; on a flight to Moscow, during which Heard said he hit her and threatened to break the flight host’s wrist; and in Australia where he said he sexually assaulted her with a bottle of liquor.
Both sides also addressed Depp’s famous finger cut, which also occurred during that 2015 fight in Australia. Depp claims that Heard hurt him by throwing a bottle of vodka at him; the defense suggests he was injured. Rottenborn said it didn’t matter: “Amber could have cut it with an ax, and it has nothing to do with whether or not Mr. Depp abused her.”
The final arguments represented a strange dichotomy that has existed throughout the trial, in which Heard and Depp and their witnesses appear to recount the same events in completely different light. Jamie R. Abrams, a law professor at the University of Louisville, said the “reflected defamation claims filed by both parties against each other” make these closure arguments unique.
“Typically, closing statements present the key strengths of the client’s case and highlight the weaknesses of the opponent’s case to show that the other party has not fulfilled its charge,” Abrams said in an email. “Here, both cases have similar weaknesses, which seems to be distorting some of the focus on the closing arguments you might normally see in test work.”
The two actors originally met around 2008 or 2009 when Depp aired Heard on “The Rum Diary,” based on Hunter S. Thompson’s book. Heart’s part was described as the “woman of dreams.” They had a flirtation on set, but they both had other relationships at the time (Depp with the mother of his two children, Vanessa Paradis; Heard with his wife, Tasya van Ree). When they reconnected during the film’s press tour more than two years later, they were both single.
The two began a romantic whirlwind as they promoted the film, and Depp said he thought of her as the “perfect partner.” But after a year, as many people said, things started to fall apart and the two of them started fighting all the time. They married in February 2015, but in May 2016, Heard filed for divorce and a restraining order.
Heard moved to Los Angeles as a teenager in the early 2000s to look for work as an actor, earning small roles in feature films such as “Pineapple Express”, “Zombieland” and “Friday Night Lights”.
Her break came in 2017, when she was chosen by the superhero movie “Justice League” as the underwater princess Mera. It led to a co-starring role as the same character, now the love interest of the title character, in the following year’s “Aquaman,” a film that grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide. She will reappear as Mera in next year’s “Aquaman and the Last Kingdom”, although she stated that her role has been reduced and said she believed it was due to the negative publicity surrounding the lawsuit. of Depp, especially by Waldman’s statements. , Depp’s lawyer, described his allegations as “deceptive abuse”.
Depp, meanwhile, became a teenage idol in the late 1980s after being aired on Fox’s “21 Jump Street” television series, which followed the adventures of young undercover police officers. He gained a reputation for playing eccentric characters, often in Tim Burton’s films, such as “Edward Scissorhands” and Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, but gained worldwide fame as Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney’s “Pirates of”. the Caribbean franchise in 2003, which earned him his first of three Oscar nominations for Best Actor.
Over the past decade, however, he has suffered a number of overt films and box office failures, such as “Mortdecai” and “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” The defense argues that his heavy drug and alcohol use caused his professional decline, but Depp blames Heard’s allegations of abuse.
Mitra Ahouraian, a Beverly Hills lawyer focused on the entertainment business, said jurors are “probably fed up with this for so long.” He referred to Rottenborn stressing that the jury did not need to believe that Depp was abusive, only that he failed during the trial to prove that he never abused her even once. “Listening to this as a member of the jury is probably a great relief. That makes it a lot easier than, ‘Okay, who abused the most?’
Helena Andrews-Dyer, Sonia Rao and Paul Schwartzman contributed to this report