After 13 hours of deliberation, jurors deciding the fate of Johnny Depp’s defamation duel with Amber Heard announced Wednesday that they had reached a verdict. There was only one problem: they forgot to specify the damage.
Judge Penney Azcarate told jurors to retire to the courtroom with no deadline on when they will return. It could have taken another hour or three days. After all, juries have ample leeway to calculate damages and there is no formula to follow. They are not given much guidance.
But just 15 minutes later, the jurors returned with a number. They awarded Depp $ 15 million in a verdict in favor of the actor in all respects. Of the award, $ 5 million was punitive damages intended to punish Heard for particularly reprehensible conduct and deter similar conduct in the future (later reduced to $ 350,000 according to the state statutory limit).
The decision contrasted sharply with the outcome in the UK, where Depp lost a similar defamation case in November 2020. An important difference that led to the reversal of Depp’s fortune, say legal experts, is that his last case was decided by a jury, while his trial abroad was decided by a judge.
“You have seven people on a jury carrying their own luggage,” says Amber Melville-Brown, who followed both trials as head of the U.S. media and reputation team at Withers International. “A judge may be more accustomed to dissociating himself from the evidence, where perhaps a group of lay people is less able to do so.”
Depp received an unequal victory in his lawsuit against Heard, imposing on the three allegations that he was defamed in the December 2018 ex-wife’s opinion piece in The Washington Post. Heard won only one of her three convictions alleging that Depp, through her former attorney Adam Waldman, defamed her by branding her accusations a hoax. He was awarded $ 2 million, with no punitive damages, in the split verdict. (The publication now includes a note from the editor on the verdict.)
The headline, which turned out to be defamatory, read: “I spoke out against sexual violence and faced the wrath of our culture. That must change.” The other defamatory statements were: “Then, two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s anger at the women who spoke,” and ” I had the very rare point of view to see, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse. ” Although the statements did not mention him by name, Depp stated that they implied that he abused Heard.
In the UK, Depp lost a similar defamation suit against The Sun after calling him a “women’s batsman”. As part of his defense, the tabloid newspaper was forced to justify its claims under the country’s strict defamation laws, unlike the U.S. trial, where the burden of proof was on Depp.
The judge in that case ruled that The Sun found that 12 of the 14 incidents of abuse were substantially true. The lawsuit was not decided by a jury.
The UK ruling was one of the reasons Depp’s victory in the Virginia trial was so unlikely. Lawsuits for defamation of celebrities and other people of public interest in the US are very difficult to win. Part of the reason is that these plaintiffs have the additional burden of proving that the speakers of the defamatory statements made them with “real malice”, or knowing that they knew the allegations were false or acted with reckless contempt for the truth.
“In the UK, the plaintiff has a much better chance of winning, and in the US, the defense [does]Says George Freeman, director of the Media Law Resource Center. “Here, the opposite happened.”
The verdict suggests that the jurors rejected Heard’s central theory about the case: that if there was even a case of abuse, he would have to win because his statements would be true. The jury was influenced by Depp’s arguments that Heard faked his wounds, which he documented with photographs and audio recordings, to boost his career by claiming his #MeToo moment. They were convinced that Heard was lying about all cases of abuse.
“In contrast to the UK result, seven people gathered in one room and found that not only are there no 12 cases of domestic abuse, there are zero,” says Lee Berlik, a lawyer for defamation based in Virginia. “Not only that, they found this vague statement to be a hoax. It is difficult to reconcile this with a UK judge. [Heard’s] Telling the truth. “
In particular, the jurors were not abducted at the Virginia trial, which means they may have been exposed to some third-party information or context about the case. The trial turned out to be a goldmine for online influencers, who used Twitch and YouTube to react in real time and posted memes on Instagram and Facebook.
Heard’s attorney, Elaine Bredehoft, argued Thursday on NBC’s Today that social media played a factor in the verdict.
“[The jury] I went home every night, “Bredehoft said.” They have families. Families are on social media. We had a 10-day break in the middle because of the court conference. There’s no way they haven’t been able to influence “And it was horrible. It was really, really uneven. It’s like the Roman Colosseum.”
The #JusticeForJohnny campaign was far more popular than Heard-supported posts. Depp’s post-trial message to Instagram fans had 17 million likes on Thursday, while Heard’s post had about 300,000 likes. As the trial unfolded, Heard was relentlessly mocked by influencers who claimed to have falsified his testimony recounting multiple cases of abuse at the hands of Depp. She was branded a liar for failing to keep her promise to give the entire $ 7 million divorce settlement to the American Civil Liberties Union and Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, though she explained that she had to stop make donations, which had to be paid for. for several years, to pay the costs of the litigation.
“I was told that the jurors couldn’t have avoided all of Johnny Depp’s fans in and around the courthouse and that they didn’t avoid the whole social media talk in his favor,” Freeman said. “It’s not unrealistic to think that this affected them. If it did, that’s problematic.”
Regardless, choosing nine truly impartial jurors was a lot to ask for. Heard’s allegations of abuse against Depp, a former franchise film presenter, have lingered since 2016, when she obtained a restraining order from domestic violence. A man was allowed to be on the jury even though he revealed a text from his wife that Heard called “psychotic.” The message goes on to say, “If a man says a woman hit him, they never believe him.”
There is also the question of whether the judge should have allowed the case to go to trial in the first place. Before a jury was convened, Heard dismissed the lawsuit under the theory that the statements were not specific enough to infer that it was Depp.
Berlik was particularly concerned about not rejecting the statement: “I had the very rare view of seeing, in real time, how the institutions protect men accused of abuse.” While there may be defamation for involvement, he questioned how the claim affects Depp.
“How are the seven minds agreeing that this is a false statement?” Berlik asked. “It looks more likely the jury will come in and say, ‘We believe in Johnny and we don’t believe in Amber.’
Although he agreed with the judge’s decision to allow the jury to decide whether the statement was defamatory, former California appellate judge Halim Dhanidina said, “There comes a point where a statement is so vague that it cannot be reasonably determined to be a statement. “
Dhanidina added: “There is a point where the court has to draw a line.”
Another main purpose of the appeal is whether the trial should have taken place in Virginia and not in California, where both parties reside. Depp, at least in part, chose to sue Heard in Virginia because the state at the time did not have an anti-SLAPP law, which allows for the early dismissal of lawsuits aimed at calming freedom of expression. Azcarate sided with the Pirates of the Caribbean actor that it was appropriate for the case to be tried in Virginia because the opinion piece was printed at the Post plant in Springfield.
Had the case moved to California, Heard could have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit soon under California’s generous anti-SLAPP statute. In doing so, Heard allegedly transferred the burden to Depp to show that it was likely to prevail in the case. Legal experts agreed that a change of location would probably not have changed the outcome of the trial, but would have provided another arrow to Heart’s carcass. Combined with a new judge ruling different rulings, such as not allowing the trial to be broadcast publicly, he may have overruled it.