Tuesday was the final day of arguments in Johnny Depp’s libel lawsuit against News Group Newspapers, the publisher of British tabloid The Sun, and the paper’s executive editor, Dan Wootton. Over the course of 16 days, spread across three weeks, Depp and his legal team argued that a 2018 headline in which the paper referred to him as a “wife beater” was false and damaging. The Sun’s defense was that there was enough evidence to support the label. Its case relied on 14 alleged incidents described by his ex-wife, Amber Heard, who testified on The Sun’s behalf.
Depp denies all of them.
Now, we wait for a verdict. Unlike in U.S. libel cases, in the U.K. the burden of proof is on the defense. The case will be decided by judge Andrew Nicol, who has many days full of multiple witness testimony to consider. It could be a while. In the meantime, a brief primer on what the case has shown us so far.
The pair met on the set of The Rum Diary in 2011. They were married in 2015 and Heard filed for divorce about a year later. She also filed for a restraining order shortly after, but eventually withdrew it, and by the end of the contentious divorce, after the couple settled for $7 million, they released a joint statement in which Heard took back accusations of physical harm and he took back accusations that she was lying for profit.
“Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love,” it read. “Neither party has made false accusations for financial gain. There was never an intent of physical or emotional harm.”
But that was not that. Along with this case in the High Court in London, Depp is suing Heard in Virginia for an op-ed published in the Washington Post in 2018 in which she, without naming names, cast herself as a victim of domestic abuse. (Depp alleges, and the judge in that case agreed, that it was a not-so-thinly veiled reference to him. Depp denies all allegations of domestic abuse.) The U.S. trial has no court date yet.
The London courts, however, moved forward with the case this summer. Almost every day, Depp and Heard arrived in person separately and with entourages, taking a moment to pull down their bandanas, donned for pandemic protection, and wave at crowds gathered.
Depp’s legal team, with efforts from barristers David Sherborne and Eleanor Laws, sought to cast doubt over the 14 incidents of abuse that Heard detailed for The Sun’s defense. In an opening statement, Sherborne claimed vindication, not money, was the star’s objective. He might get the justice he was looking for, but he had to expose himself in the process. There were audio recordings of unpleasant exchanges, images of bloody fingers entered into evidence, and one photo of Depp passed out with a tub of ice cream in his lap. In a world where stars have more and more control over the access tap, why would anyone open the fire hose?
Sherborne asked this rhetorical question himself in his closing argument Tuesday as well. Depp was “subjecting himself to this painful, public process. Why else would Mr. Depp, this private man as he explained, expose all the most intimate details of his private life?”
The Sun’s team, led by Sasha Wass, painted Depp as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, whose worst qualities came out when he was not sober, which, they argued, was often. Wass referred to this version of Depp as the “monster,” borrowing a descriptor that both Depp and Heard used in texts and emails to describe a version of him. Depp has denied all accusations of physical violence, though he admitted to one accidental headbutt.
Depp’s team painted Heard as the actual aggressor and a “compulsive liar.” The court heard stories of Heard’s abuse from first-hand accounts and in recordings Depp had made. They suggested that she faked her bruises and Depp claimed she was fabricating a dossier on him throughout the time they were together in order to accuse him of violence later.
The proceedings became a strange, daily unfurling of a toxic marriage underwritten by money and fame. A number of domestic and support workers took the witness stand, usually assembled via teleconference: bodyguards, property managers, assistants, medical professionals, island keepers, and an interior decorator. Each had tales of lies, violence, and occasionally just strange goings-on in L.A., Depp’s private Caribbean island, Australia, and on a plane from Boston.
There was the alleged first incident in 2013. Heard claimed in a written statement that she laughed at one of Depp’s most famous tattoos, the one that read “Winona Forever,” in reference to Winona Ryder, ’90s darling and his former girlfriend. He had it edited into “Wino Forever.” The laughter angered him, she said, and he allegedly hit her multiple times, knocking her to the floor.
There was the night in Australia, after they had knowingly or unknowingly smuggled in their two teacup Yorkies. From that night emerged competing stories of how the tip of Depp’s finger was severed—Depp alleged Heard threw a vodka bottle, Heard alleged that he cut it himself on his own phone. Regardless, there are photos of “easy Amber” written on a mirror in his blood, Depp having accused her of an affair with her costar at the time Billy Bob Thornton. (The court heard, too, Depp’s accusations that Heard had affairs with many of her costars, including James Franco and Channing Tatum. Heard has denied these.)
There was Heard’s 30th birthday party in 2016. It began after Depp returned two hours late to their Los Angeles penthouse from a meeting with his financial advisers where they told him that $750 million had disappeared from his finances (he would eventually sue his money managers for the loss). And it ended with someone (or some dog, depending on who you believe) defecating on their bed. Depp claims this is when he realized that the marriage was over. The next day the building manager said he had to pay a man on the street in money and tacos to retrieve Depp’s phone, which Heard had allegedly thrown out the window at some point.
Even those witnesses not ultimately called into court contributed to the strangeness of the thing. Ryder wrote Depp a letter of support but the defense ultimately didn’t call her to give testimony. Depp accused Heard of having an affair with Tesla cofounder Elon Musk on the stand and in text messages (his pet name for Musk is “Mollusk.”). Musk again denied he had had an affair with Heard while she was married to Depp, in a recent wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd. He denied, too, that he, Heard, and Cara Delevingne had a threeway. “So I think people think these things are generally more salacious than they are,” he told Dowd.
The prosecution entered last-minute evidence after the first day of testimony from Heard’s sister Whitney Henriquez. On Thursday, she denied that Heard was ever violent toward her, but the following day Sherborne introduced a reality-television clip from the mid-2000s that was never aired in which Henriquez’s fellow castmate says, “I can’t believe Amber beat your ass,” and appeared to look for bruises. (Henriquez later testified that they were talking about a verbal argument. The castmates were “inferring, trying to make a storyline—albeit a bad one—interesting, nothing more.”)
In her closing remarks on Monday, Wass, The Sun’s barrister, reminded the judge that Depp, who was forthcoming about his use of drugs and drinking, was often out of control and infrequently sober. She suggested that in that state he may not be aware of what he does or says. “The characterization that he is a wife beater is entirely truthful,” Wass said. She claimed he was “surrounded by a clique of aging, male rabble-rousers with alcohol and drugs shared together,” that it was “destroying his life, his career, and his health,” and that “Mr. Depp has spent his entire adult life doing exactly what he wanted, and he was not about to answer to a woman at this stage in his life.”
Sherborne followed with his closing remarks on Tuesday. “Portraying Mr. Depp as controlling and intimidating towards her is an essential part of the narrative but it is an abusive and unsustainable myth,” he said, per *Evening Standard.* The text messages from Depp to various friends riddled with abusive language about Heard were “exaggerated” and used “poetic license” and “metaphors” that “should not be taken literally.” He added, “He has never hit a woman in his entire life. Period, full stop, nada.”
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