‘DID HE JUST KICK ME?’: Amber Heard recounts bruising fights with Johnny Depp


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Amber Heard testified that her ex-husband Johnny Depp was furious about her acting career and jealous about her work with actor James Franco.

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During her testimony on Thursday, Heard, 36, told her attorney Elaine Bredehoft how Depp, 58, flew into a rage when she agreed to a role opposite Franco in 2015’s The Adderall Diaries.

“He hated — hated — James Franco,” Heard told jurors. “He had already accused me of having a secret thing with him in my past since we had done Pineapple Express together.”

The actress recalled how a fight with Depp over the phone spilled over onto a private flight from Boston to Los Angeles in May 2014.

“I spoke to him, he had already been upset with me and accused me of not telling him about scenes that I had, if I had a kissing scene or any kind of romantic scene… I had to tiptoe around telling him when I had any scene like that,” she said.

“He was upset with me, but he didn’t sound coherent on the phone. ‘How could you tell me this when I’m working?’ … It was like I was telling him I was having an affair,” she said tearfully. “He started to sound less connected to reality as these arguments were happening.”

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Recounting how Depp arrived on the jet “stinking” of marijuana, Heard said the actor attacked her in front of his assistants and bodyguards while they were in the air.

“He asked me about how the kissing scene went,” Heard testified. Then he started to use explicit language “about my body… saying really disgusting things about my body. He was straight-up taunting me,” she said.

“This was happening with security and his assistants on the plane. He was speaking to me like that in front of people,” she said noting that she was “embarrassed.”

Amber Heard testifies in the courtroom at the Fairfax County Circuit Court in Fairfax, Va., Thursday, May 5, 2022.
Amber Heard testifies in the courtroom at the Fairfax County Circuit Court in Fairfax, Va., Thursday, May 5, 2022. Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo /Associated Press

But the exchange quickly escalated into violence, she alleged, when he kicked her from behind.

“Did he just kick me?” she said. “No one did anything. I felt so embarrassed that he could kick me to the ground and no one would do anything about it.”

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Depp, who mostly kept his head down throughout her deposition, also expressed jealously about other actors she had worked with, including Billy Bob Thornton, Jim Sturgess and Eddie Redmayne, Heard said.

Depp acknowledged that there was a disagreement before the ill-fated flight last month when he took the stand. “I knew that she was ready for some kind of brawl, and I sat on the plane drawing in my notebook. She would verbally heckle, hassle, accuse, poke, prod physically, psychologically and emotionally,” he said, adding that he locked himself in the plane’s bathroom and fell asleep.

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Another time, Heard described Depp’s tantrum when he accused her of flirting with someone at the 2014 Met Gala in New York. In their hotel room after the event, the pair got into a physical altercation.

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“Johnny shoved me and grabbed me by my collarbone. I think at that point I shoved him back. I remember he threw a bottle at me, it missed me, but it broke the chandelier,” she said.

“He shoved me down on the sofa and at some point he whacked me in the face. I think that was the first time (where I thought), ‘Is this a broken nose?’ I remember my nose being swollen, discolored and red.”

Johnny Depp reacts as he leaves for a recess at the Fairfax County Circuit Court in Fairfax, Va., Thursday, May 5, 2022.
Johnny Depp reacts as he leaves for a recess at the Fairfax County Circuit Court in Fairfax, Va., Thursday, May 5, 2022. Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo /Associated Press

In Thursday’s testimony, Heard, acknowledged being smitten by Depp’s marriage proposal and said she thought of herself as the “luckiest woman in the world.” She said her family de ella was close with him as well, including her father de ella who did drugs with him during one get together.

the Aquaman star also said she broached a prenuptial agreement before their marriage in 2015.

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“I wanted to eliminate any doubt in his mind, so I brought it up to him. He said, ‘The only way out of this is death.’”

Elsewhere in her testimony Thursday, Heard spoke about allegations that Depp abused her with a liquor bottle during an explosive fight in 2015.

“I didn’t know if the bottle he had inside me was broken,” she said. “I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything.”

As Depp sat stoically, she spoke about instances where he bashed her “against the wall” and wrote messages to her in blood.

“There was blood on the carpet,” she said of one scary moment. “I saw brown letters on the wall and then I realized it was meant to be a message, but it was incoherent.”

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On Wednesday, Heard said their partnership veered wildly between tender moments of romance and bouts of violence that was often preceded by Deep’s drug and alcohol abuse.

“When I first started drinking, I didn’t think anything of it,” she said. “I tried to not talk about auditions. He would make these comments about me ‘whoring myself out’ … it felt really dirty to be an actor, never mind that he was one.”

When Bredehoft asked Heard about the first time she was physically hit by him, she said it was a moment she would never forget.

“We were sitting on the couch, having a normal conversation and he was drinking and I didn’t realize at the time that he was using cocaine… he’s drinking and we’re talking and he’s smoking cigarettes. I asked him about the tattoo on his arm. I didn’t know what it said. It looked muddled. I asked what it said, and he said, ‘Wino.’ I laughed because I thought he was joking and he slapped me across the face.

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“I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. I just stared at him, laughing still … he said, ‘You think you’re a funny bitch,’ and he slapped me again. I stopped laughing because I didn’t know what else to do.”

Earlier in the trial, Depp testified that he never struck Heard and argued that she was the one who was the abuser.

Depp is suing Heard for $50 million, claiming that her 2018 Washington Post op-ed defamed him when she described herself as a survivor of domestic abuse. The article never mentioned the Pirates of the Caribbean star by name, but Depp claimed the article implied he was the abuser and impacted his acting career. Heard has counter-sued for $100 million, arguing Depp smeared her by calling her a liar.

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During his time on the stand, Depp dismissed Heard’s accusation that he tried to limit her career opportunities, saying, “Ms. Heard had come to me and she seemed to be seriously concerned about how she was being portrayed in Hollywood. Because she had done films where there was kind of arbitrary nudity, things of that nature, she had voiced to me that she did not want to be looked upon that way in the industry. She wanted to be able to escape the chains of being objectified by the Hollywood system, which is a difficult thing for any woman certainly, unfortunately. ”

In 2020, Depp lost a libel case against the UK Sun after the British tabloid labeled him a “wife beater.” A London High Court judge believed he had repeatedly assaulted Heard.

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