Actor Amber Heard tearfully told jurors Thursday that Johnny Depp sexually assaulted her with a liquor bottle in an alcohol-fuelled rage.
The March 2015 incident in Australia, where Depp was filming the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, is sharply disputed and has been a focal point of the four-week civil trial in Fairfax, Virginia.
The night ended with the tip of Depp’s middle finger cut off, and him writing vulgar messages in blood on the walls of the house. Depp denies assaulting her in any way and says his finger was severed when Heard threw a vodka bottle at him; Heard said she’d taken sleeping pills after she was attacked and was not awake when the finger was severed.
The graphic description of the sexual assault left Heard fighting for her composure as she described it to jurors. She said Depp had been angry as soon as she arrived in Australia, roughly a month after the couple had married in February 2015.
He was accusing her of sleeping with co-stars in her movies, including Billy Bob Thornton and Eddie Redmayne, with whom she’d just shot the film “The Danish Girl” — accusations she denied.
The fight escalated to the point where he threw her into a ping-pong table, breaking it, Heard testified. He ripped off her nightgown, and Heard said she was naked and exposed as she was assaulted.
“I couldn’t get up. I thought he was punching me,” she said. “I could just feel this pressure on my pubic bone.”
She thought he was assaulting her with his fist, but later figured out that she was being assaulted with a bottle, and realized that there had been numerous bottles broken in the fight.
“I looked around and saw so much broken glass. I just remember thinking, `Please God, please don’t be broken,”‘ she said.
Heard described bizarre details in the aftermath of the attack, including seeing her shredded burgundy nightgown used to wrap a raw steak that had been left out. She said that when Depp’s security team finally arrived to tend to his severed finger, Depp was still trying to leave vulgar messages for her, but was trying to write them by urinating on the wall.
Much of the trial testimony has been repetitive of a civil suit Depp filed against a British newspaper. A judge there ruled against Depp in 2020, finding that Heard had in fact been assaulted multiple times by Depp. But the sexual assault allegations described by Heard on Thursday were not publicly aired in the U.K trial.
Depp is suing Heard in Virginia for libel over an op-ed she wrote in The Washington Post describing herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” His lawyers say he was defamed by the 2018 article even though it never mentioned his name.
