Amber Heard will appeal verdict in Johnny Depp defamation trial, lawyer says
Heard has "excellent grounds" for an appeal after "an enormous amount of evidence was suppressed"
We haven’t seen the end of Depp v. Heard yet. Amber Heard “absolutely” plans to appeal the jury’s verdict from the Virginia defamation trial, according to her lawyer Elaine Charlson Bredehoft. Bredehoft appeared on Today on Thursday to discuss the outcome of the case.
On Wednesday, the jury ruled in favor of Johnny Depp, awarding him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages (the latter reduced to the maximum allowed, $350,000, by Judge Penney Azcarate). But Heard “has some excellent grounds for” an appeal, Bredehoft said on Today.
“She was demonized here. A number of things were allowed in this court that should not have been allowed, and it caused the jury to be confused. We weren’t allowed to tell them about the UK judgment,” the attorney explained, referencing the case in which a British judge ruled that The Sun’s description of Depp as a “wife beater” was “substantially true.”
Heard’s team “had an enormous amount of evidence that was suppressed,” Bredehoft shared, including “the medical records, which were very, very significant because they showed a pattern … going all the way back to 2012 of Amber reporting this to her therapist, for example. We had [a] significant amount of texts, including from Mr. Depp’s assistants, saying, ‘When I told him he kicked you, he cried. He is so sorry.’ That didn’t come in.”
Further, the jury was not sequestered throughout the trial. So although they weren’t supposed to look at social media (which was inundated with decontextualized information about the case, and often biased in Depp’s favor), Bredehoft believed the jurors were “absolutely” affected by the circus surrounding the case.
“They went home every night. They have families. Their families are on social media. We had a 10-day break in the middle because of the judicial conference. There is no way they couldn’t have been influenced by it,” she said. “It was horrible. It was really, really lopsided. … I was against cameras in the courtroom and I went on record with that and argued against it because of the sensitive nature of this. It made it a zoo.”
While Heard was awarded $2 million in damages for her own countersuit, Bredehoft stated that the actor could “absolutely not” afford to pay the nearly $10.4 million judgment. The verdict sends “a horrible message,” Bredehoft opined. “It’s a significant setback because that’s exactly what it means. Unless you pull out your phone and you video your spouse or your significant other beating you, effectively, you won’t be believed.”