After two days of deliberation, a jury has returned its verdict in the defamation trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp: Heard defamed Depp three times in her 2018 Washington Post op-ed, while attorney Adam Waldman — acting on Depp’s behalf — defamed her once in his 2020 Daily Mail article.
The decision concludes six weeks of grueling testimony in Virginia’s Fairfax County Courthouse, the latest installment in a heated legal volley that began in 2016. In her op-ed, Heard identified herself as a survivor of sexual violence whose career suffered when she named a powerful man in Hollywood as her abuser. She did not mention Depp directly, but given how publicly the actors’ divorce played out and how central Heard’s allegations of domestic violence were to the proceedings, Depp argued that most readers would have filled in the blank. He had weathered a fair amount of bad press by that point but nonetheless sued Heard for defamation. After losing her bid to have the case dismissed, she sued back. Below, a timeline of the current case and how they got here.
Heard and Depp met on the set of The Rum Diary and began dating by 2012, after he separated from his partner of 14 years, Vanessa Paradis, and she broke up with her partner, Tasya van Ree. The actors married in early 2015, and despite many assurances from unnamed tabloid sources that everything was “great” and “they are great together,” Heard filed for divorce 15 months later. Depp greeted this news with a terse public statement: “Given the brevity of this marriage and the most recent and tragic loss of his mother, Johnny will not respond to any of the salacious false stories, gossip, misinformation and lies about his personal life. Hopefully the dissolution of this short marriage will be resolved quickly.”
This was May 2016.The couple had already weathered a whole international dog-smuggling drama by this point, and the gossip magazines quickly got to work on possible motives for the divorce. They floated alleged familial animosity, Ben Affleck, and different life phases (when they got together, she would have been around 25 and he would’ve been about 48)as possible reasons for the split, but the realone emerged in court filings: “There was one severe incident in December 2015 when I truly feared for my life,” Heard wrote in her documents, arriving in court with bruises on her face. (People published photos of the injuries too.) Depp allegedly threw an iPhone at her head during an argument days before, and Heard wanted a restraining order against him, having already filed a police report. And so began a very nasty, very public divorce.
According to Heard, Depp routinely became explosively angry and physically violent throughout their relationship, particularly when substances were involved. Her filings framed the iPhone incident as a repeat event, alleging that Depp subjected her to “excessive emotional, verbal and physical abuse” as well as “angry, hostile, humiliating and threatening assaults.” Heard said she had photos and video to support her statements — and breaking from its apparent support of Depp, TMZ eventually leaked footagefrom Heard’s cell phone showing the Pirates of the Caribbean star raging at his wife. Text messages came out, too, in which Depp’s assistant — Stephen Deuters — apologizes on the actor’s behalf for having kicked Heard the night before. “He’s done this many times before,” she wrote back. “Tokyo, the island, London (remember that?!), and I always stay. Always believe he’s going to get better … And then every 3 or so month [sic], I’m in the exact same position.”
