Johnny Depp: the fall of an idol
Had Johnny Depp’s libel action been the basis for a film, the pitch would have gone like this: an ageing heartthrob is accused of domestic violence by a “young blonde on the make” – and must go to court in a last-ditch effort to save his name. We know how this movie would have panned out, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph: “decades of thrillers have trained us to side with the dishevelled anti-hero, and to regard with extreme suspicion the femme fatale circling overhead”. But real life is not the movies, and on Monday, Depp comprehensively lost his libel case. In court, Mr Justice Nicol ruled that The Sun’s description of him as a “wife beater” had been “substantially true”. He listed 12 allegations of domestic violence against Depp that had been “proven” to the civil standard (on the balance of probabilities). He also said that he did not accept Depp’s lawyers’ characterisation of the actor’s ex-wife, Amber Heard, as a “golddigger”, who’d compiled a dossier of phoney evidence against him as an “insurance policy”.
Depp should never have risked this libel action, said The Times. Presumably, he banked on his expensive lawyers being so intimidating, Heard would refuse to testify. But she was not cowed, and the moment she took the stand, it was clear that “no good could come of the trial for Depp”.
Even if he hadn’t suffered the stain of being branded a wife beater, the sordid revelations about his drinking and drug abuse that came out in court this summer would have been enough to ruin a man whose fortune derives mainly from his roles in family films. The court heard that he passed out in toilets, scrawled messages in blood on walls, and flew into a string of jealous rages. There was even a row about who’d deposited faeces in their bed.
What happened to the Depp we loved in the 1980s, asked Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. In his youth, he seemed soulful and artistic. On screen, he had a rare tenderness; off it, he was the coolest man in the world. Even then, he was in thrall to the likes of Keith Richards; but what he failed to learn from his hellraiser heroes is how to age well. In his pirate hats and blue-tinted shades, Depp started to look preposterous; his substance abuse became ugly; and so did his attitude: in texts, he referred to Heard as a “flappy fish market”, and “joked” that he’d like to drown and burn her, then “f*** her burnt corpse”. Time will tell if his career is over, said Ed Potton in The Times, but this fight isn’t: Depp is likely to appeal in London, and has an even bigger libel suit coming in the US. If you thought Depp v. Heard Part One was grim, brace yourself for its sequel.