Johnny Depp to appeal 'baffling' decision against him
"The sentence is so wrong that it would be ridiculous if Mr. Depp did not appeal," said lawyer Jenny Afia of London judge Andrew Nicol's decision.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.- Johnny Depp intends to appeal the decision of the British justice that gave reason to the tabloid newspaper The Sun, which the American actor had sued for presenting him as a "wife beater", his lawyers announced on Monday.
Johnny Depp on Monday lost the libel suit against the British tabloid which, according to the judge, wrote something "substantially true."
"The defendants have shown that what they published, in the sense that their words have as I understand it, was substantially true," said London judge Andrew Nicol, announcing his verdict in this highly mediatic case.
The proceedings, held in July before the High Court in London, revolved around a headline from April 2018 in which The Sun wondered how British writer J.K. Rowling could take on this "wife beater" in the movie "Fantastic Beasts."
During the three weeks of hearings, Depp struggled to prove that he had never hit Heard despite the violent relationship between the couple, briefly married from 2015 to 2017.
The 57-year-old protagonist of "Pirates of the Caribbean" said that the phrase written by the English newspaper had changed his image in Hollywood, endangering his career.
Depp was "mentioned on the same level as movie mogul Harvey Weinstein," convicted in March in the United States of sex crimes, the star's lawyer, David Sherborne, claimed.
For this reason, he sued the publishing group News Group Newspapers (NGN) and its executive director, Dan Wootton, to wash a reputation that can now be further sunk by this court decision.
Johnny Depp was going to reprise the role of the evil Gellert Grindelwad next year in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", a spinoff from the magical universe of Harry Potter. But this case has cast doubt on his participation in the film.
