Amber Heard sobbed uncontrollably on the stand Thursday as she recounted a wild fight with her then-husband Johnny Depp in Australia in which he allegedly penetrated her vagina repeatedly with an alcohol bottle, leaving her retching and bloodied.
The March 2015 trip for the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean 5 was tumultuous from the start, Heard said during her second day of testimony in Johnny Depp’s $50 million defamation suit. One day, after he had been drinking, he started calling her names like “slut” and “fat-ass” and slammed her up against a wall, she said.
Heard said she shoved him back, prompting him to say, “Do you want to go little girl?” It sparked a massive brawl between the pair in which she alleges he threw her on a table, whacked her in the face repeatedly, threw bottles at her, punched a wall beside her head, and ripped her nightgown off.
“At some point he had a broken bottle up against my face, neck area, by my jawline and he told me he’d carve up my face,” she said.
Although she said she only had “flashes” of memory of the fight, she said she recounted her feet slipping on floor tiles as she was naked and being slammed against walls and countertops.
“The next thing I remember, I was bent over backwards on the bar,” she said. “I thought he was punching me, I felt this pressure on my pubic bone… I remember looking around the room, I remember looking at all the broken bottles, broken glass, and I remember just not wanting to move because I didn’t know if it was broken or if the bottle he had inside of me was broken. I couldn’t feel it, I didn’t feel pain, I didn’t feel anything… I just remember thinking, ‘please God, please I hope it’s not broken.’”
She said she remembered then being in a bathroom retching, losing control of her bladder, and bleeding from her vagina.After taking two sleeping pills, she said she woke the next morning to find the walls and furniture of the house smeared with mashed potato and red paint, and Marilyn Manson music blaring. He had ripped her nightgown into shreds and rapped up pieces of raw steak in it, she said.
“I was heartbroken,” she said. “Eventually I realized I could be hurt because I was bleeding but I convinced myself that the bottle wasn’t broken otherwise it would be a lot worse.”
Depp appeared emotionless and stared at a desk as she recounted the fight.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard attend the Met Gala in 2014.
Larry Busacca
Earlier on Thursday, Heard alleged Depp broke her nose after the 2014 Met Gala, as she shared images of him in court where she claims he was passed out after drug and alcohol binges.
“At the Met Gala, he was accusing me of flirting with a woman,” Heard testified. “We get back to the hotel room, he shoves me and grabs my collarbone. I remember he threw a bottle at me, missed me, hit the chandelier.”
Then Depp allegedly punched her, breaking her nose, Heard claimed.
“We were struggling, he’s bigger than me,” she said. “He hit me, I remember my nose being swollen, red. I made a remark to my friend of how bad.”
Depp has denied the claim, saying last week in court that a tissue Heard showed him after the incident, with red stains on it, was not soaked through with blood, but red nail polish.
On the stand Thursday, Heard testified that she began snapping pictures of Depp passed out during his increasingly frequent binges because it was the only way to get anyone to believe the superstar actor was abusing drugs and alcohol.
“I’d been in a relationship with Johnny for over a year, coming up on two years,” the actress testified on Thursday morning. “And I had already noticed that there was this pattern of behavior changes with him that would make my life significantly more complicated, or peaceful, difficult, or wonderful, depending on what… he was using. And I only could tell what he was using because I would have to look for clues.”
Depp would “pass out, and get sick and lose control of himself,” Heard said on the stand. “And then people would pick him up and clean him up and fix it. And he wouldn’t either remember, or he would deny it, or he would accuse me of saying that this had happened when it didn’t. And there was no one to back me up. [It was] just him, his employees, and everyone who had been taking care of him versus my word, and so I started to take pictures [to] say, ‘Look, this is happening.’”
via Fairfax County Circuit Court
Depp insisted previously that one of the pictures simply showed him sleeping. But, he has also conceded in the past that another showed him “on the nod” after taking drugs.
At the pair’s engagement party in 2014, Depp “shared drugs with my dad,” Heard testified, saying that her father, at the time, “was addicted to the same thing Johnny was.” Depp’s lawyer objected, calling the allegation hearsay. But Heard explained that she was there at the time, and watched it happen.
Another exhibit submitted into evidence by Heard’s team was made up of three separate audio recordings she made of Depp aboard a private jet. In them, Depp can be heard moaning in pain after a particularly extreme binge, according to Heard’s description.
While struggling at one point to get off drugs, an addiction doctor prescribed Depp a regimen of medications, including opioid-based painkillers, to help him quit safely, Heard testified on Thursday. But Depp’s behavior and personality “changed drastically,” hallucinating, yelling at people who weren’t there, and falling asleep mid-sentence, Heard said. She eventually discovered that Depp had been taking twice the amount of painkillers he was supposed to.
“I realized then that he had been lying to them and me about the amount, so that he could get extra high before he had to detox,” a visibly emotional Heard said.
The actress is testifying in a $50 million defamation lawsuit Depp filed against her over a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which Heard did not name Depp but referred to herself as a domestic violence survivor. Depp claims the piece damaged his career and falsely painted him as an abuser.
Heard said on Thursday that Depp kicked her to the ground in front of others, but that no one said anything or tried to stop it. She also described Depp as wildly jealous, saying he held a special contempt for actor James Franco.
“He hated James Franco,” said Heard. “He was accusing me of having a thing with him in the past since I had filmed Pineapple Express with him.”
James Franco and Amber Heard attend the premiere of The Adderall Diaries in April 2015.
Gary Gershoff
Heard also told the jury that she had become attached to Lily Rose and Jack, the two children Depp had with French model Vanessa Paradis, his ex-partner. She called them “these beautiful, wildly intelligent little weirdos… I was falling in love with them.”
In 2013, a then-14-year-old Lily Rose developed a “crush” on an unnamed “famous musician over the age of 18,” Heard said in court on Thursday.
“I didn’t agree that this gentleman… spend the night at the house,” Heard continued. “And I felt protective over Lily Rose, and concerned, and naturally, they’re not my children. And I understand that. So I understand why Johnny got so upset with me. But… she was so young, I just felt protective.”
After a fight, Depp always promised to change his ways, Heard testified.
In a 2014 text message to Heard, Depp said he had gone “too far,” and that he would put in “heavy work” with his therapist to fix things.
“I’m sorry for being less…” he wrote. “For your disappointment in me… For my behavior. I’m a fucking savage… Gotta lose that… Gonna lose that!!!”
Fairfax County Circuit Court
The Aquaman actress started her testimony at the Fairfax County Circuit Court on Wednesday, saying, “I struggle to find the words to describe how painful this is. This is horrible for me to sit here for weeks and relive everything.”
In her first day on the stand, Heard detailed the demise of their whirlwind relationship, saying that the first time she was hit by Depp “changed my life.”
“I was sitting on the couch having a normal conversation. He was drinking. I think he was using cocaine because there was a jar—a jar—of cocaine on the table. There’s music playing, smoking cigarettes and I ask him about the tattoo he has on his arm.”
The tattoo on Depp’s upper right arm initially read “Winona Forever,” in honor of his then fiancée Winona Ryder. However when the pair split in 1993 he altered the tattoo to “Wino Forever.”
“To me it looked like black marks, I didn’t know what it said,” Heard testified. “I said, ‘What does it say?‘ He said, ‘It says Wino,’ and I thought he was joking and I laughed. He slapped me across the face and I laughed.
“I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. I thought this must be a joke. Because I didn’t know what was going on.”
She went on to detail several incidences of alleged physical and verbal abuse, including Depp performing a forced “cavity search” of her vagina in search of his cocaine.
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