Depp’s bodyguard backs employer
LONDON — Johnny Depp’s security chief has alleged that Amber Heard physically abused Depp during the couple’s tempestuous marriage, giving testimony to support Depp’s libel suit against a British tabloid that accused him of assaulting his former spouse.
Lawyers also released statements from two of Depp’s former romantic partners, Winona Ryder and Vanessa Paradis, who said they could not reconcile Heard’s accusations of violence with the kind and loving man they knew.
Depp is suing News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, and the paper’s executive editor, Dan Wootton, over an April 2018 article that called him a “wife-beater.” He strongly denies abusing Heard.
In a written witness statement released as he appeared in court Thursday, security officer Sean Bett said that “throughout the course of Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard’s relationship, Ms. Heard was verbally and physically abusive towards Mr. Depp.”
“On many occasions, I witnessed her shout at Mr. Depp. I was also told by Mr. Depp on multiple occasions that Ms. Heard had physically abused him,” he said.
Bett, a former Los Angeles deputy sheriff who has worked for Depp for a decade, said he regularly had to remove the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star from bad situations when Heard was in an “abusive mood.”
“Ms. Heard often behaved in this way when she had been drinking. I learnt quickly to recognize the signs, so that we were able to leave the situation before it escalated further,” he said.
Depp, 57, and Heard, 34, married in Los Angeles in February 2015. Heard filed for divorce the following year, and the divorce was finalized in 2017.
The Sun’s defense relies on 14 allegations made by Heard of violence by Depp between 2013 and 2016, in settings including his private island in the Bahamas, a rented house in Australia and a private jet. He denies them all and claims Heard was the aggressor during their volatile relationship, which he has likened to “a crime scene waiting to happen.”
In a week and a half of testimony, judge Andrew Nicol has heard from Depp — who accused Heard of compiling a dossier of fake claims against him — as well as several current or former employees who have backed his version of events.
Heard is due to give her side of the story when she enters the witness box next week.
Bett was cross-examined Thursday by The Sun’s lawyer, Sasha Wass, who questioned his claim that he had never seen Heard with bruises or marks on her face or body but had several times seen Depp with bruises inflicted by his wife.
There was a dispute about the date of a photo of the actor’s bruised face taken by Bett, and Wass suggested Bett was lying to protect his employer.
“Ma’am, you can call me a liar a hundred times. I’m not a liar. I’m telling the truth,” Bett said.
Paradis and Ryder had been scheduled to give evidence, but Depp’s lawyer said Thursday that he no longer needed to call them, “much as it would have been a pleasure to have them here,” because The Sun does not contest Depp’s claim that he never hit them.
Depp and French singer Paradis had two children during a 14-year relationship that ended in 2012. American actress Ryder dated Depp for several years in the early 1990s.
In a written witness statement, Ryder said Depp “was never, never violent towards me. He was never, never abusive at all towards me. He has never been violent or abusive towards anybody I have seen.”
Paradis said in a statement that she had always known Depp to be “a kind, attentive, generous, and nonviolent person and father.”
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is venturing onto increasingly shaky legal ground as officials reject new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, sidestepping a Supreme Court ruling reinstating DACA, legal experts and lawmakers say.
The court ruled last month that the Trump administration hadn’t followed federal procedural law or justified terminating DACA in 2017, calling the rescission “arbitrary and capricious.”
DACA grants protection from deportation to so-called Dreamers brought to the United States as children. The Obama-era program, which has bipartisan support, has given temporary relief to some 700,000 young immigrants, with nearly 200,000 DACA recipients in California.
The court did not decide on Trump’s executive authority to rescind DACA, and it offered the administration a road map for how to try to end it for good.
But despite threatening another attempt to shut down the program, the president hasn’t tried again. Monday, 25 days after the ruling, was the deadline for the administration to file for a rehearing. It didn’t.
The White House’s refusal to either act or restart the program sets up a potential showdown with the court with little precedent, said Muneer Ahmad, clinical professor at Yale Law School, who was involved in a New York-based DACA suit against the administration.
“The longer the administration refuses to accept and adjudicate new applications and declines to issue a new rescission order,” said Ahmad, “the more of a legal concern that becomes.”
The White House declined to respond to requests for comment Thursday, and the Justice Department did not immediately respond.
Immediately after the court ruled, Trump and his officials rejected the decision as “politically charged.”
Since then, the administration has refused to process new DACA applications, advocates and lawmakers say, despite widespread legal consensus
— including from Trump’s supporters and former officials — that slow-rolling the restarting of the program violates the court’s order.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Dick Durbin of Illinois, as well as 31 other senators, wrote to the acting Homeland Security secretary demanding the department “immediately comply” with the court’s ruling and “fully reinstate DACA protections, as the Court’s decision unequivocally requires.”
The Citizenship and Immigration Services agency, which administers DACA, has rejected new applications, or confirmed receipt but then not acted on them, according to lawyers. Jaclyn Kelley-widmer, associate clinical professor of law at Cornell law school and an immigration attorney, said USCIS is sending these new applicants notices saying the agency is “not accepting initial filings.”
Meanwhile, other USCIS employees say they’ve received no guidance on the Supreme Court ruling or new DACA applications. The agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
The Trump administration has eschewed traditional policymaking and repeatedly sought an end run around Congress with immigration orders. Yet the president’s comments in recent days have only added to the confusion.
Last Friday in an interview with Telemundo, he contradicted himself, saying he would be issuing an executive order on DACA, then saying instead it was a bill that would “give them a road to citizenship.” The White House followed up with a statement saying Trump supports a legislative solution for DACA, potentially including citizenship but not “amnesty.”
Then on Tuesday in a Rose Garden news conference, Trump said he’s working on DACA “because we want to make people happy.”
“We’ll be taking care of people from DACA in a very Republican way,” he said. “I’ve spoken to many Republicans, and some would like to leave it out, but, really, they understand that it’s the right thing to do.”