The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Defamation Trial came to an end on Friday as the parties to the duel offered final arguments after a seven-week trial that has caught the public’s attention and become a sort of fire test for the state of gender relations.
The case will then be deliberated by seven of the 11 jurors selected for trial in April.
Heard’s legal team, the defendant in the case, told jurors to “think about the message Depp and his lawyers are sending to Amber and the victims of domestic abuse.”
“If you didn’t take pictures, it didn’t happen,” Benjamin Rottenborn said. “If you did not seek medical attention, you were not injured.” Depp, he said, “can’t and won’t take responsibility … it’s all someone else’s fault.”
He told jurors that “if Amber was abused by Mr. Depp even once, then she wins … and we’re not just talking about physical abuse, psychological abuse … sexual abuse.”
He told them to consider text messages, previously shown in court, that showed “the meanest and most disgusting language you can imagine.”
“Those words are a window into the heart and mind of America’s favorite pirate,” he said. “This is the real Johnny Depp.”
Earlier, Depp’s lawyer, Camille Vasquez, told jurors that Heard had “ruined her life by falsely telling the world that she was a survivor of domestic abuse at the hands of Mr. Depp.”
For his summary, Vasquez played audio recordings in which Heard admits to beating Depp and calling him “a baby.”
“Take a minute to really think about what you heard there,” Vásquez asked the jury. “This is the real Mrs. Heard, the one on the audio recordings, not the one in this room.”
Vasquez later said that Heard was “a victim of a truly horrific abuse or that she is a woman who is willing to say absolutely anything.” There was no recording of Depp admitting to hitting Heard, he said. “It does not exist. It didn’t happen. “
Vásquez said Heard’s allegations of violence were “an act of profound cruelty” toward the “true survivors of domestic abuse.” He referred the jury to the initial statements of the case. “She came into this courtroom ready to give her life-long performance … and she gave it.”
Vázquez said the apologies sent by Depp’s text messages to his ex-wife – “for my behavior, I’m a fucking savage” – had never been for violence against her.
“What we have is a mountain of unproven allegations that are wild, exaggerated, and unlikely,” Vásquez said. “And you can’t choose which of these savage allegations to believe and which to ignore. Either you believe everything or nothing.”
Picking up the narrative, another Depp lawyer, Benjamin Chew, told the jurors, “Now you’ve met the real Amber Heard. Fear.” Depp, he said, had struggled with drugs and alcohol, “you’ve never heard him deny that” – and “he owns their flaws. He told you all about them. But he’s not a violent abuser.
“There’s a world of difference between having a substance abuse problem and being an abuser,” Chew added. Heard’s lies, he said, had grown over time.
Chew added that Depp was a supporter of the #MeToo movement. “No one came out of the woods to say ‘me too’ [about Depp]. This is a unique and singular case of ‘me too’, where there is not a single ‘I too’ ”.
The summaries of the case came after Judge Penney Azcarate gave long instructions to the jurors, ordering them – for “more evidence” – to find for defamation with “real malice”.
Each side had 61 hours during the seven-week trial to present their case, with dozens of witnesses and experts commenting on Depp and Heard’s 15-month marriage. Each had two hours to summarize.
While legal experts do not expect the case to provide any case law, for millions it has become an imperfect prism on the direction of the gender equality movement and gender relations in general, and whether , as Depp stated in presenting the case, was He heard who was the aggressor in their relationship, not him.
For Heard, who has benefited from a London Defamation Court ruling unrelated to the finding that it was “substantially true” that Depp is a “women’s hitter”, his share of the defamation case is based in itself the statements a Depp press officer gave to the Daily Mail alleging that his allegations of domestic violence were “a hoax of abuse” orchestrated to take advantage of the #MeToo movement were defamatory and intentionally false.
In his counterclaim, Heard has asked the court to award him $ 100 million in damages.
If Depp prevails in his claim that he was defamed by Heard in a December 2018 opinion piece he wrote in the Washington Post he describes himself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse” – all and never to have mentioned him by name — the 58-year-old actor. could award his claim for $ 50 million.