Amber Heard continued her explosive counter-argument to Johnny Depp’s claim of defamation, telling jurors her former husband was surrounded by security guards and assistants who enabled him to avoid the consequences of his drug and alcohol issues.
The court was shown photographs of Mr Depp passed out, which Ms Heard said she starting taking in 2013 because he would black out and later deny what had taken place when he was intoxicated.
“He wouldn’t remember, or he would deny it. There was no one to back me up – just his employees versus my word,” Ms Heard said.
Ms Heard later testified about a trip to London in 2013, where she and Mr Depp were filming movies, when Mr Depp disappeared and came home so intoxicated that he was carried into their rented home “like a baby” by a security guard.
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Heard testified: “His assistants and other security guards were shaking their heads. I remember thinking: surely this is it. He was very sick for at least two days. I felt at that juncture very encouraged that we were on the same page – that he had hit rock bottom.
“I understood enough about addiction to know you have to hit rock bottom, have some consequence to get better.”
Mr Depp, she added, got briefly sober. “I thought we were on a good path to sobriety,” she said.
“I felt very encouraged that everybody and I were on the same page, and I felt encouraged that we were in a new chapter,” Ms Heard added.
But Mr Depp soon relapsed, she said. The court was told that Mr Depp and Ms Heard’s father ran out of drugs at the couple’s engagement party, and her father left the party with Mr Depp’s security team to pick up more. Ms Heard has previously testified about her father’s heroin addiction.
Ms Heard testified that she had insisted on pre-nuptial agreement. “I wanted to eliminate any doubt in his mind and in other people’s minds. So I brought it up to him and brought it up to my therapist,” she said.
But Mr Depp, she said, had ruled it out. “He accused me of having one foot out,” Ms Heard said, and told her “the only way out of this is death”.
Heard said that Mr Depp would become angry if any of her movies were scripted with sex scenes. She said: “Every time I got a script, it was what kind of, you know, how I was dressing? Did I have a sex scene?”
Ms Heard said she compensated for his jealousy by declining more sexually provocative parts or petitioning wardrobe managers to allow her to dress more conservatively.
“I had to eggshell or tiptoe around him when I had any kind of scene,” Ms Heard said of the conflict.
Mr Depp, she said, hated that she worked with James Franco in The Adderall Diaries and had kicked her in the back on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles.
“He called me a sl*t” for the scenes,” Ms Heard said, adding how he accused her of liking filming the scenes.
“He was being really explicit about my body, about how I liked it. He called me go-getting, a sl*t. He asked if I was wet, why I wasn’t looking at him – did James do this and that to me?”
The jury heard Mr Depp “howling like an animal” in an audio recording recorded by Ms Heard on the flight. Depp, Ms Heard said, had locked himself in the bathroom and passed out.
Suspected broken nose
After the Met Gala in New York, Ms Heard testified, Mr Depp had thrown a bottle at her. She told the court: “He shoved me down on the sofa and at some point he just whacked me in the face. I suspected I had a broken nose. I remember it being swollen, discoloured and red.”
Ms Heard testified that a team of detox doctors was brought into help Mr Depp after the LA-Boston flight. The doctors elected to keep Depp on painkillers so he could finish filming, she said. But Mr Depp, Ms Heard said, was taking “about double” the number of opiate painkillers he told his doctors he was taking. Depp, Heard said, would “nod out” or fall asleep in mid-sentence.
“He’d been lying to them so he could get extra-high before he had to detox,” Ms Heard testified.
“I didn’t understand what was going on,” Ms Heard said. “I hadn’t seen anything like this. I was trying to figure what happened.”
In 2014, Ms Heard said she started attending daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, a 12-step group for family members of people with addiction.
Eventually, Ms Heard said, Mr Depp agreed to a detox programme under the care of a team at his home in Bahamas. But the process did not go smoothly, she said.
“He slapped me across the face, but he did so while he was crying,” Ms Heard said. “I shouldn’t have been there. I don’t know how to detox someone. I don’t know why the doctors and nurses wanted me to be there. It was hell.”
The court is out on Friday and all of next week, leaving jurors 10 days to mull Ms Heard’s testimony before Mr Depp’s counsel can mount a cross-examination. – Guardian