Amber Heard defamed Johnny Depp in her 2018 Washington Publish op-ed, a Virginia jury decided Wednesday afternoon.
The seven-person jury determined to award the “Edward Scissorhands” star a complete of $15 million in damages after deliberating for about 13 hours.
The jury awarded Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Nevertheless, Virginia legislation caps punitive damages at $350,000. This implies Depp will obtain a most of $10.35 million after he pays an admittedly “shamed and humiliated” Heard the $2 million in compensatory defamation damages she was awarded.
The jury declared Heard “acted with precise malice” when she penned her now-infamous op-ed, titled “I spoke up towards sexual violence — and confronted our tradition’s wrath. That has to alter.”
Heard initially filed for divorce from Depp in Might 2016, and accused him of home violence days later when she requested a brief restraining order.
The star didn't pen her WaPo piece — in her function as “ambassador on ladies’s rights on the American Civil Liberties Union” — till December 2018, greater than two-and-a-half years later.
Within the op-ed, Heard, 36, claimed that she was a sufferer of abuse — however didn't explicitly title Depp, 58, as a perpetrator.
As a substitute, she wrote that over the previous “two years” she had develop into a “public determine representing home abuse” and that she feared being “blacklisted” in Hollywood.
“I had the uncommon vantage level of seeing, in actual time, how establishments shield males accused of abuse,” Heard wrote, including that she felt “on trial within the courtroom of public opinion.”
Depp’s legal professionals asserted that Heard was clearly implicating him as an abuser within the op-ed and claimed that it considerably broken his status and price him profitable film roles — together with a $22.5 million deal to star in a sixth “Pirates of the Caribbean” film.
In the course of the trial, nevertheless, Heard vigorously maintained that her piece was not about her ex-husband, saying on the stand: “It’s not about Johnny. The one one who thought it was about Johnny is Johnny.”
She additional insisted: “It’s about me. It’s about what occurred to me after Johnny. It’s about what occurred to me after I escaped my marriage. It’s about me and my life and what I endured as soon as I moved on and acquired a TRO [temporary restraining order] and moved on with my life. It was about what occurred to me after.”
The jury disagreed.
Though the jury decided Depp was defamed, the $15 million they selected to award him fell far wanting the $50 million in damages that he was searching for.
Nonetheless, Depp launched a press release to The Publish saying he felt victorious and has lengthy claimed that he had by no means been abusive towards Heard. As a substitute, he claimed that she was the abuser of their turbulent relationship.
“The jury gave me my life again,” Depp triumphantly declared. “Six years in the past [in 2016, when Heard first accused him of abuse], my life, the lifetime of my kids, the lives of these closest to me, and likewise, the lives of the individuals who for a lot of, a few years have supported and believed in me have been eternally modified,” he stated.
“False, very critical and legal allegations have been levied at me by way of the media, which triggered an countless barrage of hateful content material, though no fees have been ever introduced towards me,” he added. “It had already traveled around the globe twice inside a nanosecond and it had a seismic affect on my life and my profession.
“From the very starting, the objective of bringing this case was to disclose the reality, whatever the end result,” the “Sleepy Hole” star additional declared. “Talking the reality was one thing that I owed to my kids and to all those that have remained steadfast of their help of me. I really feel at peace figuring out I've lastly completed that.”
In the meantime, Heard appeared visibly devastated as she sat within the courtroom and listened to the jury’s verdict.
“The frustration I really feel immediately is past phrases. I’m heartbroken that the mountain of proof nonetheless was not sufficient to face as much as the disproportionate energy, affect, and sway of my ex-husband,” Heard stated in a press release obtained by The Publish after the decision. “I’m unhappy I misplaced this case. However I'm sadder nonetheless that I appear to have misplaced a proper I believed I had as an American — to talk freely and overtly.”
Depp summed up the decision otherwise: “And 6 years later, the jury gave me my life again. I'm actually humbled.”
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