Johnny Depp, Accused of Spousal Abuse, Says Ex-Wife Was the Aggressor

The actor Johnny Depp took the stand for the second day on Wednesday to explain his turbulent marriage to the actress Amber Heard, whom he has sued for defamation, accusing her of “demeaning name-calling” that usually escalated into bodily violence.

“It may start with a slap, it may start with a shove, it may start with throwing a TV distant at my head, throwing a glass of wine in my face,” Mr. Depp instructed a jury at Fairfax County Circuit Courtroom in Virginia.

Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp in courtroom papers of repeatedly assaulting her all through their relationship, from slapping and kicking to dragging her throughout the ground by her hair and greedy her throat, making her fearful that he would kill her.

However over the previous few years of authorized wrangling in america and Britain, Mr. Depp has maintained that Ms. Heard was the one who was violent towards him. In testimony on Tuesday, Mr. Depp denied ever placing Ms. Heard or any lady.

“She has a necessity for battle, she has a necessity for violence,” he stated of Ms. Heard. “It erupts out of nowhere.”

Ms. Heard denied in courtroom papers that she had ever struck Mr. Depp besides in self-defense or in protection of her sister.

Mr. Depp has sued Ms. Heard for defamation over an op-ed she wrote in 2018 by which she stated she was a ​​“public determine representing home abuse.” The article didn’t point out Mr. Depp’s identify, however he testified that the timeframe reference within the op-ed was clearly in reference to their marriage, which lasted lower than two years.

The seven-person jury may also think about Ms. Heard’s countersuit, which asserts that Mr. Depp defamed her when his former lawyer made statements saying that her allegations of home abuse have been a hoax.

Throughout greater than 5 hours of testimony on Wednesday, the jury heard snippets of recorded arguments between the couple. These included audio of Mr. Depp confronting Ms. Heard about kicking a door into his head the earlier evening and Ms. Heard asking, “Why are you obsessing over the truth that I can’t keep in mind it the way in which you keep in mind it?”

Throughout his testimony, Mr. Depp strove to current his facet of a number of incidents which have surfaced as their issues of their relationship grew to become public, together with the time Mr. Depp’s center finger was severed. The harm occurred in 2015 whereas the couple was in Australia for the filming of the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” film.

Mr. Depp instructed the jury that, on the time, Ms. Heard was indignant a couple of assembly she had with a lawyer a couple of potential postnuptial settlement and threw two vodka bottles at him, one in all which missed whereas one other shattered into his hand, inflicting his finger to bleed “like Vesuvius.” He testified that he then skilled a “nervous breakdown” and used his bloody finger to put in writing on the partitions messages that “represented lies that she instructed me.”

Ms. Heard, who is anticipated to take the stand later within the trial, has given a really completely different account of the incident in Australia, writing in courtroom papers that Mr. Depp grew to become violent along with her throughout an argument about his drug use. She has stated that at one level he grabbed her by the neck and collarbone and slammed her right into a countertop, then hit her with the again of his hand and slammed a telephone in opposition to a wall till it “smashed into smithereens,” injuring his finger.

Upon her return to Los Angeles, Ms. Heard wrote in courtroom papers that “I had a busted lip, a swollen nostril and cuts throughout my physique.”

In 2016, Ms. Heard was granted a short lived restraining order in opposition to Mr. Depp after telling a courtroom in California that Mr. Depp had thrown a telephone at her face at shut vary, bruising it. (Mr. Depp testified that he “flopped” the telephone onto the sofa and has asserted in courtroom papers that Ms. Heard’s facial marks have been of her personal doing.)

Most of the accusations being lobbed backwards and forwards in Virginia have already been aired in a courtroom in London. After Mr. Depp sued The Solar newspaper there for a headline by which they referred to him as a “spouse beater,” citing “overwhelming proof” throughout their marriage, a British choose dominated in opposition to the actor.

In Fairfax County, Decide Penney S. Azcarate appeared to chop off an try by one in all Ms. Heard’s attorneys to say the British case earlier within the trial. After a sidebar with the choose, the lawyer moved onto a brand new line of questioning, indicating that there have been restrictions placed on any reference to these proceedings.

Mr. Depp will proceed on the stand on Thursday when he’s to be cross-examined by a lawyer for Ms. Heard.

Mr. Depp’s go well with argues that his profession has suffered due to Ms. Heard’s depiction of him. On Wednesday, Mr. Depp testified that as Ms. Heard’s abuse allegations “gained momentum world wide,” calls stopped coming from brokers and producers and he felt as if individuals began to have a look at him in a different way.

“Irrespective of the end result of this trial, I’ll carry that for the remainder of my days,” he stated.