Amber Heard isn’t backing down from her claims of abuse at the hands of ex-husband Johnny Depp, even after a Virginia jury sided with him and agreed she defamed him.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard Steve Helber/Associated Press, pool
“To my dying day, I will stand by every word of my testimony,” the “Aquaman” actress told Savannah Guthrie in a “Today” show interview that aired Tuesday.
During the six-week trial, Heard, 36, alleged repeated physical and emotional abuse by Depp, including sexually assaulting her with a glass liquor bottle, slapping her and head-butting her. Depp, in return, accused her of being the aggressor including “demeaning name-calling” and throwing a bottle at him that sliced off part of his finger.
In the NBC News interview, Heard admitted to “horrible, regrettable” behavior during her marriage but insisted that any physical violence was in response to Depp, 59.
“As I testified on the stand about this, when your life is at risk, not only will you take the blame for things that you shouldn’t take the blame for,” she said, “but when you are in an abusive dynamic psychologically, emotionally and physically, you don’t have the resources that, say, you or I do with the luxury of saying, ‘Hey this is black or white’ because it’s anything but when you’re living in it.”
The Virginia jury found “clear and convincing evidence” that Heard defamed Depp, despite her never naming him in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which she wrote that she was “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” The jury awarded him $15 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages, which was lowered by the judge to just over $10 million.
Heard was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages for Depp’s former lawyer calling her allegations a “hoax.”
Depp’s lawyers, Heard said, “did certainly a better job of distracting the jury from the real issues,” including her First Amendment rights.
“I would not blame the average person for looking at this and how it’s been covered and not think that it is Hollywood brats at their worst,” she told Guthrie. “But what people don’t understand is it’s actually much bigger than that. This is not only about our First Amendment right to speak.
“I spoke it to power,” she said, “and I paid the price.”
The rest of Heard’s interview will air Wednesday on “Today.”
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