Celebrity
Amber Accuses Johnny Of Putting Paid Employees On The Stand
You cannot tell me that you think this has been fair.”
Amber Heard has broken her silence on her defamation trial, claiming the verdict resulted from biased social media representation. She also accused her ex-husband Johnny Depp of swaying the jury by putting paid employees and randos on the stand. The 36-Year-Old hit out at the hate and vitriol she faced amid the trial while blasting the decision as UNFAIR.
Telling it all in a three-part interview with Savannah Guthrie on the Today Show, Heard doubled down on accusations made by her lawyer that Depp’s excellent acting won them over on the stand.
“Even somebody who is sure I’m deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I’m lying, you still couldn’t look me in the eye that you think on social media there’s been a fair representation. You cannot tell me that you think this has been fair,” the actress, who flew to New York City on a Private Jet for the interview, explained.
She added: “I’ll put it this way, how could they make judgement, how could they not come to that conclusion [that I couldn’t be believed].”
“They had said in those seats and heard over three weeks of nonstop, relentless testimony from paid employees and towards the end of the trial, randos as I say. I don’t blame them; I don’t blame them; I actually understand, he’s a beloved character and people feel they know him. He’s a fantastic actor. Again, how could they after listening to three and a half weeks of testimony about how I was an uncredible person and not believe a word that come out of my mouth.”
Amid the six-week trial in Fairfax, Virginia, Depp allegedly called 38 witnesses while Heard called 24.
The ex-couple gave evidence for four days each, including a forensic cross-examination from the opposition lawyers. Both even returned to the witness stand to testify a second time, and then again, the jury saw dozens of texts, photos, videos, medical records, and pages from the couple’s Love Journal that they hand wrote to each other. The court also heard clips of recordings that Depp and Heard made during their arguments, some of their most intimate moments.
Throughout the trial, social media was flooded with posts about the legal proceedings, with the majority being shared in support of Depp under the hashtag #JusticeForJohhnyDepp.
As of June 13th, the hashtag had over 20.6 billion views on TikTok, while the #JusticeForAmberHeard tag had a relatively low 92.4 million views. Furthermore, Heard, via her interview, claimed she isn’t taking any negative public opinions about her ‘personally,’ insisting she ‘doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her.’ She told Guthrie: “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me or what judgments you want to make about what happened in the privacy of my own home in my marriage behind closed doors.”
She then insisted: “I don’t presume the average person should know those things so I don’t take it personally.”
This interview marks the first time Heard has publicly addressed the verdict, which she previously blasted as a ‘setback for other women’ in a statement published minutes after the ruling was read out in court. A jury had ruled she defamed her ex-husband with a piece she wrote about being a sexual assault survivor in the Washington Post. She was ordered to pay Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages, although the judge reduced it to $350,000 per Virginia law.
Heard was awarded a relatively paltry $2 million in compensatory damages, meaning that Depp, 59, walked away from the case with she owing him $8.35 million.
To be granted an appeal, Heard would likely need to demonstrate errors in the trial or the presiding judge’s reading of the law. She would also need to post a bond of $10,350,000, plus interest charges throughout an appeal trial. This comes less than a week after Depp’s lawyers, Benjamin Chew and Camille Vasquez, slammed any suggestion that social media played a role in the jury’s decision-making as utterly false.
“My view is that social media played no role whatsoever this was a decision made by the jury on the evidence. It was overwhelmingly in Depp’s favor,” Chew had insisted.
