Amber can’t pay off £7m libel bill, says her lawyer
As Depp enjoys fish, chips and Newcastle Brown Ale at local pub...
AMBeR Heard cannot afford to pay the £6.6million won by Johnny Depp in his libel trial against her and will appeal against the verdict, it emerged last night.
The actress’s lawyer elaine Bredehoft said Miss Heard was ‘absolutely not’ able to come up with the sum awarded by a jury to her ex-husband after a sixweek televised trial.
experts said that, as well as financial ruin, Miss Heard, 36, may never work in Hollywood again because ‘public opinion has shifted against her’.
Depp was not in court in Fairfax, Virginia, for the verdict on Wednesday, when he won damages over a piece Miss Heard wrote in the Washington Post saying she was a surviHeard vor of domestic abuse.
Instead he was 3,000 miles away in Newcastle upon Tyne and was seen in a pub ahead of the verdict feasting on fish and chips, the city’s famous Brown Ale and Guinness.
Miss Heard was in court and looked crestfallen as the judge read out her fate.
Her only consolation was the jury found Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman defamed her with one of three statements to the media and awarded her more than £1.5million in damages. Putting that towards the £8.2million she must pay Depp, it leaves her owing about £6.6million.
Miss Bredehoft told NBC’s Today show that one of the first things Miss Heard said after the verdict was: ‘I am so sorry to all those women out there.’
The lawyer said: ‘This is a setback. For all women in and outside the courtroom. And she feels – she feels the burden of that.’ Asked if could pay the money she owes Depp, Miss Bredehoft said: ‘Oh, absolutely not.’
She said the case was a ‘tale of two trials’ and noted that Depp lost his libel action at the High Court in London in 2020 when a judge ruled he was a wife beater.
Miss Bredehoft said: ‘The [UK] court found – we weren’t allowed to tell the jury this – that he had committed 12 acts of domestic violence, including sexual violence.
‘What did Depp’s team learn from this? Demonize Amber and suppress the evidence. We had an enormous amount of evidence that was suppressed in this case that was in the UK case.’
She said that the online hate directed at Miss Heard by Depp’s fans was ‘horrible’ and made the internet seem like the ‘Roman colosseum’. The lawyer said there was ‘no way’ the jury were not influenced by the trial clips broadcast across social media, most of them pro-Depp. Last night the New York Times reported that a spokesman for Miss Heard had said the actress planned to appeal.
Speculating on the future careers of both stars, former entertainment lawyer Matthew Belloni said it ‘will be a while before a major studio will consider either “safe” enough to bet on’.
He added: ‘The personal baggage that was revealed in this trial was just too icky for a studio to want to deal with.’
Reputation management consultant Alexandra Villa of In House PR said: ‘Amber’s career appears to be in crisis right now. Producers will have to consider carefully whether they will hire her as the momentum of public opinion has shifted against her.’
Miss Heard’s net worth is unclear. Fox Business puts it at £6.3million, but others say it is closer to £2.3million. She said she spent £4.7million on lawyers for the trial.
Under Virginia law, Depp has up to 30 years to pursue his ex-wife for the money she owes him, meaning Miss Heard’s earnings could be diminished for decades.
Ahead of the verdict, Depp visited the Bridge Tavern – and promptly appeared in fans’ social media posts greeting them.
He left with his entourage at about 7.25pm and was thought to have gone back to his hotel to watch the verdict on television.
He is on tour with guitar legend Jeff Beck, and Depp was added to the official tour promotion following the verdict. Last night they played the Sage in Gateshead.
Moments after the trial ended, when the spiral of smoke still lingered after the terrible match had been struck, Amber Heard announced that the verdict was ‘a setback for women’. Well, it was certainly a setback for her.
What future awaits the 36-yearold actress, who now standsbefore the world exposed as a teller of lies, a cleaver of fingertips, a despoiler of bed sheets?
one wonders if the perfume deals and lead roles once proffered by the greasy hand of Hollywood are something she can now only see from the rear-view mirror of her career; watching as they bounce down the Amber highway, along with the tumbleweeds of woe and the mud-slinging
memories of her toxic marriage to Johnny Depp.
At the end of this mutual defamation trial, jurors found that Heard did indeed defame her ex-husband when she wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which she described herself as ‘a public figure representing domestic abuse’.
In her post-trial statement, she even managed to peel open a fresh seam of victimhood, claiming that she felt sad ‘to have lost a right I thought I had as an American — to speak freely and openly’. However, it is no secret, certainly not to her lawyers, that free speech doesn’t give you a right to say whatever you want.
this lapse is hardly surprising. the six weeks of this trial were characterised by mirage after mirage: from the millions of dollars pledged but never donated to the dry-eye tears that threatened but never fell, no matter how hard she tried to crank them out in the witness box.
the only real tears came on Wednesday afternoon, when the verdicts were read out and a new reality dawned. And even then, despite everything, it was hard not to feel sorry for her. All but one of the counts went against ms Heard and, all too predictably, her supporters are now claiming that this case was nothing more than an orgy of misogyny.
It was, by turns, a curdled victory for the patriarchy and a triumph only for Depp’s celebrity supremacy and superior buying power when it came to lawyers. even worse, it made a mockery of justice — and sent victims of domestic abuse hurtling back into the Dark Ages.
But none of this is true. to believe that it is does a disservice not only to the jury in this case, but to calm, wise Judge Penney Azcarate and to the due processof law itself, so strictly observed every day in her Fairfax County Court in Virginia.
those who watched the case with an open mind did not witnessa great miscarriage of justice nor a travesty fuelled by societal fault lines and gender bias.
What we saw, as the trial unfolded, was the credibility of Amber Heard slowly suppurating under the hot poultice of truth. slowly but surely, her handcrafted persona as the blamelesswife was exposed as a nonsense.
the uncomfortable fact is that instead of being a saintly figurehead for abused women in particular, and the sisterhood in general, she was repeatedly found to have lied. I think everyone hasto be honest about that, instead of freighting this case with a cultural and judicial significance it simply does not deserve.
maybe, just maybe, Amber and Johnny don’t represent anything more than themselves: two spoiled, rich people who lost their way in life and are now trying to find their way back.
How did we get here? When Heard wrote her troublesome article in 2018, the #metoo movement was at the height of itsbombast. Back then, the orthodoxy
was that if a woman said it, you had to believe it. If it is my truth, then it is the only truth.
this certainly put some brutesin the dock, where they deserved to be, but there was a terrible contagion of blame in the air. If a man was accused, guilt wasassumed and that was the end of the matter.
‘Believe all women,’ was one of the rallying cries of the hashtag movement, a message as wilful and shameful then as it is today. Yet high-profile women on both sidesof the Atlantic flocked to support ms Heard, without ever doubting her word or her motives: woman good, man bad, next case.
NoW the pendulum has swung back to a more measured approach. How unlucky for Heard that she hasbeen caught fast, trapped in the amber of a more frenzied age, and now to be forever defined by a bigtop trial that in the end turned into a circus of sadness.
Did it help or hinder the couple that the case was broadcast across streaming platforms and on social media sites and feasted upon every day by an audience of millions hungry for more?
#JusticeforJohnny videos have had more than 19 billion views, compared with 81 million for I stand With Amber supporters. she was subjected to the usual online misogyny, but what does
that prove, except that the anonymouspublic are hateful?
And could it be that parts of the internet turned against her because they watched the trial and formed their own opinions
about who was telling the truth? this trial! It was too much, it wasnever enough, it was a peek into an abyss of excess. And if Amber Heard did not come out of it well, then neither did Johnny Depp, despite hisfond opinion of himself as a southern gentleman of impeccable mannersand character.
every day in court, he would sit at a little desk, sketching doodles and toying with his jelly sweets, his idling charm ever present as his life washeld on pause. Yet the evidence showed he was no one’s idea of a
dream husband — a prickly, jealous, foul-mouthed addict who drank and drugged to pickled excess.
‘the only person I ever abused wasmyself,’ he said at one point, so there was at least a glimmer of self-knowledge. on his last day in court, as he stared down the barrel of his life, Depp looked utterly haunted. the lost years, the rubble of his existence, the fear and loathing — how did it get to this?
some of the arguments on both sides were persuasive. In his closing speech, one of Amber’s lawyersposed the enigma of her alleged domestic abuse: if there are photographs, they are doctored, if there are no photographs, it didn’t happen. meanwhile, Depp’s lawyer pointed out one unique aspect of these proceedings: it was a #metoo trial without a me, too — for no other woman had come forward to accuse him of anything.
It seems clear that in setting herself up as a figurehead for abused women, ms Heard wanted to be seen as a kind of heroine. Yet if you were looking for a woman to admire, there were plenty of them involved in this case.
Judge Azcarate herself, a former serving marine who carries her court papers in a Winnie-the-Pooh satchel. Forensic psychologist Dr shannon Curry, whose expert testimony wasso clear and concise. Depp team lawyer Camille Vasquez who played such a crucial role in giving her client back his life.
there was so much to admire from so many heroines in this courtroom, but the tragedy — for her and for everyone else — is that Amber Heard wasn’t one of them.