In response to a $50 million defamation suit filed against her by her former husband and alleged abuser Johnny Depp, 55, Aquaman actress Amber Heard, 32, has submitted a new court filing which details horrific allegations of abuse she endured from the actor, and asked a judge to dismiss Depp’s lawsuit.
“Johnny Depp physically and verbally abused Amber Heard,” her attorney Eric George said in a statement, the AP reports. “Since their divorce, Mr. Depp has continued to publicly harass Ms. Heard, and attempted to gaslight the world by denying his abuse. It is long past time for Mr. Depp’s despicable conduct to end.”
In the filing, Heard reiterates and elaborates on allegations she had previously made about Depp during their divorce proceedings and while the domestic violence restraining order she filed against him was in effect, both in 2016. On repeated ‘occasions, Heard claims, according to the documents obtained by “Page Six,” Depp brutally beat her, choked her, and pulled her hair so hard that chunks of her scalp were ripped off. (“We called that version of Johnny ‘the Monster,’” she writes.) She says she still bears the scars on her arms and feet from one night when Depp beat and choked her in their kitchen, and she was struggling to gain purchase on the floor and counter, which were slick and covered in glass from broken bottles of alcohol. During one incident on the Eastern and Oriental Express train, when Depp choked her against a wall, Heard says, “I remember being afraid that Johnny might not know when to stop, and that he might kill me.”
Since their divorce, Heard has become an outspoken advocate for survivors of domestic abuse. In December 2018, she wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in which she recalled her own experiences with abuse, and described the backlash she experienced after she spoke out, including death threats and a lost movie role.
Depp has repeatedly denied Heard’s allegations against him. And while Heard did not name Depp in the op-ed, he retaliated by suing her for defamation, calling her claims a “an elaborate hoax to generate positive publicity for Ms. Heard and advance her career.”
“I have sought to use my public persona to speak out on an issue that was extremely meaningful to me and millions of other women and men every year,” Heard said in her filing. “I have spoken out about violence in public, but I have always avoided specifically referencing Johnny, or recounting his violence against me, not only because I wanted to move past that phase of my life but also because I was constrained by the terms of a strict confidentiality agreement that Johnny had insisted upon as part of our divorce settlement.”
Following their divorce being finalized in 2017, Heard donated her settlement to the ACLU and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Depp’s team has not yet responded to Heard’s request for dismissal.
