Washington: Actor Amber Heard testified Thursday that her ex-husband Johnny Depp sexually assaulted her. Amber Heard said Depp threatened to ‘carve up’ her face with a broken bottle during a heated argument one month after their 2015 marriage. The 36-year-old Aquaman actor recounted multiple instances of alleged physical and sexual abuse during her second day on the witness stand in the defamation case filed against her by the Pirates of the Caribbean star.
The 58-year-old Depp brought the suit against Heard over an op-ed she wrote for ‘The Washington Post’ in December 2018. In the article, Heard described herself as a ‘public figure representing domestic abuse’. Heard did not name Depp in the op-ed, but he sued her for implying he was a domestic abuser and is seeking $50 million in damages.
The Texas-born Heard countersued, asking for $100 million. She claimed she suffered ‘rampant physical violence and abuse’ at his hands. She recounted in harrowing detail an incident that occurred in March 2015 in Australia, where Depp was filming the fifth installment of the Pirates series.
Depp testified earlier in the trial that an ‘irate’ Heard was the aggressor in the argument. He said she severed the tip of one of his fingers by throwing a vodka bottle at him.
Heard provided a very different account on the witness stand Thursday. She said she confronted Depp about his drinking and he dared her to try to take a bottle from him. “I get a hold of it,” she said. “I slammed it down on the ground right in between us. That really set him off. It was like a light bulb switch went off,” Heard added.
She said Depp threw another bottle at her but ‘it missed thankfully’. “Also cans, like soda cans, beer or soda cans, and they’re coming at me one after the other. At some point he had a broken bottle up against my face, neck area, by my jawline and he told me he’d carve up my face,” Heard said. She added that Depp was screaming at her that she had ‘ruined his life’.
Breaking down in sobs, Heard said that Depp ripped off her nightgown and sexually assaulted her with a bottle. “Johnny had the bottle inside of me and was shoving it inside of me over and over again,” she said. “He was repeatedly threatening to kill me.”
Heard said she managed to escape and when she came down from her bedroom the next morning she found that Depp had used blood from his finger, food and paint to write ‘incoherent’ messages throughout the house – on mirrors, walls, lampshades and other surfaces. She said she did not know how his fingertip was cut off.
‘Feeling so embarrassed’
Heard also testified about another incident in which Depp allegedly slapped and kicked her on an airplane. He did so after accusing her of having an affair with James Franco, her co-star on The Adderall Diaries. “He was mad at me for taking the job with James Franco,” Heard said.
“He hated, hated James Franco. He was already accusing me of kind of secretly having a thing with him in my past since we had done Pineapple Express together. He called me a slut,” Heard added as she recounted the incident that took place on a May 2014 flight.
Heard said Depp, who had been drinking, slapped her across the face at one point and kicked her in the back as she moved to another seat. Members of Depp’s security detail and his assistants were on the plane at the time, informed Heard.
“No one said anything, no one did anything. It was like you could hear a pin drop on that plane,” she said. “And I remember feeling so embarrassed.”
Depp, during four days of testimony earlier, denied ever being physically abusive towards Heard. He claimed she was the one who was frequently violent.
Depp’s lawyers earlier put experts on the stand who testified that he has lost millions because of the abuse accusations, including a $22.5-million payday for the sixth installment of the Pirates franchise.
Depp is a three-time Oscar nominee. He and Heard met in 2009 on the set of The Rum Diary. They got married in February 2015. Their divorce was finalised two years later.
