The actor's lawyer begins to question the actress and puts her in trouble during a very tense session
The trial of Johnny Depp against Amber Heard resumed its sessions on Monday after a week of interruption. And he did it with a marathon session in which the actress was first questioned by her lawyer and then by Depp's lawyer. In the first part, she attacked her ex-husband and said that if she asked for a divorce, it was her because she thought that without him she would not survive. In the second, the tension increased and the lawyer put Heard in trouble.
A lawsuit of 50 million dollars (almost 48 million euros) from Depp against Heard is being settled in the Fairfax (Virginia) court, answered by the actress with a request for 100 million. But in addition, the trial is leaving an incalculable emotional toll, to which Heard referred: “The most intimate, shameful and deeply humiliating things that I have survived are used against me every day, over and over again. It's torture. I am suffering a lot emotionally. I have a baby. I want to keep going forward. I want Johnny to move on too. I want you to leave me alone,” she said.
Heard had been booed on her arrival at the courthouse by the crowd outside, in contrast to Depp, who was cheered after arriving in a big black car. Looking at the cameras, the actor joked that they were his relatives.
At the beginning of her statement, the actress corrected the testimony from previous sessions to ensure that the abuse by her ex-partner had begun in 2012, and not in 2013, as she had stated. "I wish the period when we were in love, and he was sober and he didn't hit me, would have lasted longer than he did."
One of the incidents that she recounted in the Monday morning session happened during their honeymoon in 2015, when they were traveling on the Orient Express. Depp had been sober for a while and they argued because he wanted to drink. He did and then they fought in the sleeping car, according to the actress. “It was a small, narrow sleeping car, and there were two beds, one on each side. He had me against the wall while he was standing on the floor, between the beds, and I was on the bed half kneeling, half standing, trying to get his arms off my neck. And he held my neck against the wagon for what seemed like a very long time to me.” She said that she was afraid that Depp would accidentally kill her.
The actress also maintained that it was not she who had burned or cut Depp, but that he inflicted them on himself and that she pressed a lit cigarette against his cheek. She also recounted a discussion, illustrated with a video, about her opposition to him recording her without permission. Also, the actress tried to explain the recording broadcast over and over again in which she is heard saying that she has hit Depp: "He hit me proactively and I had to resort to hitting him reactively," she said.
One of the most scatological episodes, and the cause of one of the couple's last fights before separating, is the one in which the actor accuses the actress of having left human excrement on his bed in April 2016. "It doesn't make sense" , Heard has declared, assuring that it was feces from one of his dogs. In May of that year, Depp's mother died, the two saw each other again (Heard says Depp told her he needed to see her; the actor claims he only called her to inform her and to tell her he wanted a divorce, but she asked him to leave. see in person). The discussion about the excrement arose again, they fought and the police showed up at her home, but she avoided accusing the actor: “I didn't want this to come to light. I didn't want him to get in trouble. I wanted to protect Johnny."
However, there was no way to save the marriage no matter how hard she tried, according to the actress's version. “I knew he wouldn't survive if he didn't, so I filed for divorce. I knew if I didn't, I probably wouldn't literally survive,” she has stated. "The person she was afraid of was also the person she was in love with," she added, after explaining that she had suffered from panic attacks and had begun to lose hair from stress.
In Monday's session, there was a moment for makeup. Two weeks ago, during her exhibition, Heard's lawyer showed a corrective palette of different colors, saying that it was what the actress had to use to cover the bruises and marks of the blows of her ex-partner. But the product she was showing, from the Milani brand, didn't actually go on the market until December 2017, the company was commissioned to confirm after a tremendous uproar on social media. On Monday, both Heard and her lawyer tried to say that it was a product of that style, not necessarily that one. The play of theater betrayed Heard's lawyer at this point.
After the lunch break, it was Depp's lawyer's turn to question the actress. It was a tense exchange, full of interruptions and protests. The lawyer began by playing a recording in which Heard is heard telling her husband: "Tell the world, tell them ... Me, Johnny Depp, man, I am also a victim of domestic violence."
She also showed him photos taken shortly after the violent incidents that she recounted. For example, pictures in public the night after, according to her statement, she thought he had broken her nose: "I should see how she looked under the makeup," she replied. The lawyer made the actress declare several times that she did not request medical assistance after these alleged assaults and that she never told anyone about the sexual assault of which she says she was subjected with a bottle, that she had been raped and that she had bled from the vagina. "No, I didn't want to talk about it to anyone," replied the actress.
Heard was also asked about the article that she published in The Washington Post and that is at the origin of this lawsuit. The actor alleges that he damaged him professionally and that he caused the cancellation of the latest installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, the successful saga in which he has been the protagonist. The trial, in fact, is being held in Fairfax, because that is where the newspaper's presses that gave birth to the text for which Depp accuses Heard of defamation in a civil lawsuit are. The actress has declared on the article, that she did not mention Depp: “It is not about Johnny. The only one who thought it was Johnny was Johnny. It's about me. It's about what happened to me after Johnny. It's about what happened to me after I ran away from my marriage. It's about me, my life and what I've been through."
The lawyer asked her if she had sent a photo of Depp asleep with spilled ice cream, which she called "embarrassing". The actress said she didn't remember it, but the lawyer showed her a screenshot of the photo in a message to a friend in which she said: "This is what I'm dealing with." "Are you supporting Mr. Depp?" the lawyer asked. “That's me getting support from my best friend. I need support too," she replied.
The cross-examination session on Monday ended with the lawyer revealing that she had reneged on her commitment to donate the seven million dollars from the divorce to two charities. She defended herself by saying that she had stopped the donations due to her ex-husband's demand, but that she hoped to resume them in the future and that they were already fully committed. The lawyer replied that she had had more than a year before the lawsuit and had not donated the money. The tension was increasing, but the session ended.
