What a show stopper! Amber’s tearful court farewell
Tearful speech outside court ... as Depp’s lawyer was summing up
AMBER Heard battled tears outside the High Court yesterday on the last day of the Johnny Depp libel case.
The actress told of her pain in an impassioned speech – perfectly timed to steal the glory from Depp’s lawyer summing up his case inside.
As his barrister David Sherborne gave a closing speech against the woman he called a ‘compulsive liar’ who sported ‘magic bruises’ that appeared only when she needed them, Miss Heard marched out early and stood on the steps to vow: ‘I stand by my testimony and I now place my faith in British justice.’
She was heckled by jeering Depp fans, who booed and shrieked ‘liar’ and ‘it takes two to tango’. Earlier they had cheered as the Pirates Of The Caribbean star arrived for the last day of his three-week libel trial against The Sun newspaper for calling him a ‘wife beater’ in a 2018 headline.
In an extraordinary performance, Miss Heard, 34, flanked by sister Whitney and girlfriend Bianca Butti – accused Depp of wasting the ‘precious resources’ of British justice by pursuing his case during the coronavirus crisis.
Miss Heard, who was the newspaper’s star witness, clutched her heart and said: ‘I did not file this lawsuit and, despite its signifiending cance, I would have preferred not to be in court.
‘It has been incredibly painful to relive the break-up of my relationship, have my motives and my truth questioned, and the most traumatic and intimate details of my life with Johnny shared in court and broadcast around the entire world.
‘I am aware of the precious resources being consumed by his litigation and will be glad to see those resources re-directed back to more important legal matters already delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.’
Her remarks were timed to upstage the closing remarks of Mr Sherborne, who told the court her allegations of domestic violence were ‘utterly implausible’ and logistically impossible.
Depp was ‘a Southern gentleman who... has never hit a woman in his entire life. Period. Full stop. Nada’, he said. He accused The Sun newspaper of publishing a ‘reputation-destroying, careershe allegation’ and proclaimed: ‘He is no wife beater.’
He branded Miss Heard a serial liar who was doing ‘a huge disservice to genuine victims’ of domestic violence and the MeToo movement by ‘couching herself as one of them’.
He read out a text she had sent in August 2014 saying: ‘This is Amber. And I get what I want.’
Dismissing Miss Heard’s video footage of Depp quaffing red wine for breakfast and angrily slamming cupboard doors in his West Hollywood kitchen, he said: ‘Johnny Depp, kitchen cupboard beater, he can live with. Johnny Depp, wife beater, he cannot.’ For Miss Heard’s 14 horrific claims of domestic violence to be true, others who say they did not see her injuries must have lied, he told the court.
‘Doctors were lying, nurses were lying, police officers are lying? Only Miss Heard was correct?’
Referring to secret recordings Miss Heard sometimes made of her arguments with Depp, he said none actually showed the actor’s alleged acts of brutality.
Mr Sherborne said: ‘We ask, in all the years of violence that she alleges, where are the secret recordings of Mr Depp knocking seven bells out of her, grabbing her by the throat, ripping out her hair? Nowhere. The problem for Miss Heard is that she knows full well there was nothing for her to record. Mr Depp was not a violent man.’
All but one of the accounts of physical violence were witnessed by no one except Miss Heard, he said, suggesting that other witnesses were merely relaying what had told them. During her four days on the witness stand she had kept ‘tossing in lies’, including the ‘unscripted malevolence’ of suddenly saying Depp once threw ex-girlfriend Kate Moss down the stairs. She had ‘tailored her stories to meet the evidence against her’, including changing dates, and ‘inventing whole incidents’, Mr Sherborne said.
Two police officers who attended her Los Angeles apartment on May 21, 2016, when she alleged Mr Depp hurled a phone into her face and then trashed the penthouse, had seen no injuries and no damage. Mr Sherborne said: ‘Someone is plainly lying.’
Photos showing bruising on Miss Heard’s face were taken ‘of an actress – someone familiar with the use of make-up to present a fictional scene’, he
‘Intimate details of my life broadcast’
‘She has kept tossing in lies’
said. He described one of Miss Heard’s allegations made from the witness box, that after swallowing ecstasy Depp had assaulted a stewardess on a flight to Moscow – because he thought she was ‘hitting on’ Miss Heard – as gratuitous attack on his client, adding: ‘She has invented this whole incident out of nowhere.’
The newspaper’s defence is that its headline calling Depp a ‘wife beater’ was entirely truthful.
Miss Heard described in graphic detail incidents in which she alleged Depp headbutted, slapped, choked, kicked, threw her around and ripped out clumps of her hair. Sasha Wass QC, for The Sun, painted whisky and cocaine-addled Depp as a woman-hater who beat Miss Heard for trying to curb his Hollywood hellraising and could then scarcely remember his terrifying rampages.
Mr Sherborne said the case was not about money and his client was not seeking ‘exemplary damages’, adding: ‘What is important to Mr Depp is clearing his name of this appalling allegation.’
He told Mr Justice Nicol: ‘One side is obviously lying, and one side is telling the truth.’
The judge will deliver his verdict in the autumn.