Though Amber Heard does not blame the jury for siding with her ex-husband Johnny Depp in their recent defamation trial, the Aquaman star believes there is evidence that was not presented in court that could have changed the verdict.
“There’s a binder worth of years of notes dating back to 2011 from the very beginning of my relationship that were taken by my doctor, who I was reporting the abuse to,” Heard tells Savannah Guthrie on tonight’s Dateline, part of the latest segment of her exclusive conversation with NBC News. “Her notes represented years — years — of real-time explanations of what was going on.”
As explained on Dateline, the notes detail what Heard told her therapist: that Depp “hit her” and “threw her on the floor” on one occasion in 2012, and “ripped her nightgown” and “threw her on the bed” on another — and that Depp “threw her against a wall and threatened to kill her” in 2013.
Guthrie explains to the Deadline audience that the judge found the therapist’s notes to be “hearsay and inadmissible.”
In the Dateline preview clip above, Guthrie, whose husband Michael Feldman has done consulting work for Depp’s legal team, summarizes Depp’s side of the story: “He says he’s never struck any woman. His lawyers argued at trial [that] none of his other prior relationships — not one woman — has come forward and said he physically hit them. You were the only one.”
“Look what happened to me when I came forward,” Heard responds. “Would you?”
Last month, a jury in Fairfax County, Va., decided unanimously in favor of Depp, finding that Heard intentionally and maliciously defamed him when she wrote her 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post about her experiences as a domestic abuse survivor. Depp was awarded $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Judge Penney Azcarate reduced the punitive damages to Virginia’s statutory cap of $350,000.
