the times | Saturday April 9 2022 15
News
Johnny Depp’s toxic marriage to Amber
Heard will be raked over again next
week at the start of their much-antici-
pated $50 million defamation trial in
Virginia.
Depp, 58, launched the lawsuit
against Heard, 35, after she described
herself as a domestic violence victim in
a 2018 column in The Washington Post.
While the actor’s name was not men-
tioned, he has argued he was clearly the
target of the article and his career was
derailed as a result.
Heard has countersued for $100 mil-
lion and the stage is set for another
headline-grabbing trial where both
parties are set to take the stand in pro-
ceedings that will be broadcast on
Court TV.
The former couple fought a bitter
libel battle in London in 2020, which
Depp lost.
A source close to Heard has accused
Depp of bringing the latest case to
maintain his hold over his ex-wife.
The source said: “Amber Heard fell in
love with Johnny Depp and believed
that if she could help him stay clean and
sober, he would stop the abuse and they
could live their fairytale life together.
“Unfortunately, it became clear to
Amber that she could not ‘fix’ Johnny,
and the longer she stayed with him, the
more she continued to be subjected to
his emotional and physical abuse and
risked her own safety. This lawsuit is
simply Johnny’s mechanism to con-
tinue to abuse Amber.
“He threatened to ruin her career
and inflict global humiliation upon her,
and after losing in the UK, this is his
last-gasp attempt to do that.
“We believe in the end, the jury will
view all the evidence and come to the
same conclusion the UK court did —
that Johnny Depp inflicted violence
and abuse on Amber, at times causing
her to fear for her life.”
A source close to Depp said that the
case was about clearing his name. “This
case being brought to trial is proof that
the court acknowledges the notable
amount of preliminary wins, evidence
and witnesses in support of Johnny,”
they said.
“To decline the opportunity to clear
one’s name and allow someone taking
advantage of the system to walk away
with zero repercussions would be care-
less and set a dangerous precedent for
similar situations in the future.”
The trial is due to begin on Monday
and is expected to last seven weeks.
Pictures, videos and messages will be
introduced as evidence. Elon Musk and
the actors James Franco and Paul Bet-
tany are on the witness list.
Both sides have lodged objections to
the other’s list in a flurry of legal filings.
Depp has objected to Heard calling on
the actress Ellen Barkin, a former flame
and co-star whom he has accused of
holding a grudge against him.
Franco and Musk could give live evi-
dence via video link. Heard has denied
Depp’s allegations that she had affairsDepp and Heard in London in 2011, Heard leaving the court, right, and one of the pictures used in evidenceArrest warrant issued as
singer’s stalker goes missing
A fan who stalked the singer Tom Odell
and went to his home is being sought by
police after she failed to attend court.
Olga Moskaleva, 45, who is from Bel-
arus but lives in Harrow, northwest
London, bombarded the Brit Award
winner with postcards, letters and
emails and tried to meet him at a gig.
She was ordered to leave Odell, 31,
alone but stalked him between April 1,
2020, and September 20 last year.
Moskaleva admitted stalking and
could face up to six months in jail but
did not arrive at Thames magistrates’
court for a hearing. Caroline Geary, her
lawyer, said she may have left the coun-
try or been sent to a mental hospital.
“We arranged for a psychiatric re-
port, however no funds were made
available to us so it has not been com-pleted,” Geary said, adding that she had
not heard from her for several weeks.
“My concern is that she has now left the
UK, unless something has happened to
her, maybe she has been sectioned.
Normally she is quite responsive.”
Moskaleva sent Odell a postcard in
April 2020 and posted a letter through
his letterbox the following month. She
also left books at his home on July 16,
2020, and sent him five emails, includ-
ing one saying she would “see him to-
morrow”. She was seen on CCTV out-
side Odell’s home on July 31 last year.
Moskaleva last appeared in court on
February 10. She was bailed on condi-
tions that included orders not to attend
events featuring Odell or his fiancée,
Georgie Somerville, a model. Magis-
trates issued a warrant for her arrest.Ed Sheeran has revealed that he now
films every songwriting session to
reduce the risk of future copyright
claims.
Sheeran, 31, said his studio ses-
sions with fellow musicians
were now infused with the
fear that “they might be
touching someone’s else’s
note”. He was speaking after
the High Court ruled this
week in his favour in a copy-
right battle over his 2017
No 1 single, Shape of You.
He told the BBC’s News-
night last night that the case
had left its mark on his crea-
tive process. “Now I just film
everything, everything is on
film. We’ve had claims come
through on the songs and we
Sheeran films everything for safety
David Sanderson Arts Correspondent go, ‘Well here’s the footage and you
watch. You’ll see there’s nothing
there.’”
Sami Chokri, who performs as
Sami Switch, brought legal action
claiming Shape of You derived
elements from the song he co-
wrote in 2015 called Oh Why.
The court heard how
Sheeran and his co-song-
writer Johnny McDaid had
settled a previous copy-
right claim in the United
States over a separate
song by paying more than
$5 million.
McDaid told Newsnight
the latest four-year legal
battle had taken a toll. “In
the last year, it got really heavy and it
was consuming. The cost to our mental
health and creativity was really tangi-
ble,” he said.
Sheeran said “coincidences were
bound to happen” in the pop music
industry. He said that 22 million songs
were released each year and only 12
notes were available.
On the changes to his songwriting
process he added: “There’s the George
Harrison point where he said he’s
scared to touch the piano because he
might be touching someone else’s note.
There is definitely a feeling of that in
the studio. I personally think the best
feeling in the world is the euphoria
around the first idea of writing a great
song. That feeling has now turned into
‘Oh wait, let’s stand back for a minute’.”
He added that he was pleased the
case was over, “happy we can move on,
and get back to writing songs”.Ed Sheeran said that the
copyright case had
drained him mentallywith the men. The
private correspond-
ence of Depp and
Heard will also be
laid out publicly.
Among the
previously un-
seen evidence is
bodycam foot-
age from Los
Angeles police
officers who at-
tended the scene of
one of the couple’s ar-
guments in May 2016.
A key difference
between the trial in Virginia
and the one in London will be the intro-Depp v Heard: The $50m rematch
duction of expert witnesses, with
Depp’s team believed to be keen to have
specialists examine potentially doc-
tored pictures.
The actor’s representatives are also
expected to introduce donor records
proving Heard failed to fulfil her pledge
to donate her $7 million divorce settle-
ment to the American Civil Liberties
Union and the Children’ Hospital Los
Angeles.
Her lawyers are believed to be pre-
paring to counter that the claim is irrel-
evant and the only reason Heard may
have had trouble following up with her
pledges is because of the financial bur-
den of fighting her former husband in
court.
While much of the evidence will be
fresh to the jury, a significant portion
appears to be making a return from the
London trial. Pictures apparently prov-
ing Depp was a drug user are included
on the evidence lists, bearing names
such as “white powder lines, rolled bill,
tube, credit card”.
Exhibits relating to injuries to both
Depp and Heard were included in the
High Court trial.
The pair married in 2015 after meet-
ing on the set of the 2011 film The Rum
Diary. They divorced in 2017 and their
legal battles have now lasted longer
than their marriage. Depp, who lost
lucrative roles in the Pirates of the Car-
ibbean and Fantastic Beasts franchises
as controversy engulfed his career, fail-
ed in his libel trial against The Sun.
He took the newspaper to court after
it labelled him a “wife-beater”. A
London judge found the claim to be
“substantially true” after hearing evi-
dence that he had repeatedly attacked
Heard.
Depp has since complained of being
blacklisted by Hollywood and railed
against so-called cancel culture. The
actor once earned $75 million
per film but his most
recent movie, Minama-
ta, was released to lit-
tle fanfare and per-
formed poorly at
the box office.
Heard, best-
known for the
Aquaman films,
wrote an opin-
ion piece in The
Washington
Post in which she
described herself
as a “public figure
representing domes-
tic abuse”, a claim that
triggered Depp’s lawsuit.
She welcomed a daughter
via surrogate last year.JOEL RYAN/APThe stage is set for a
repeat of a London libel
trial that upheld claims
of domestic violence,
Keiran Southern writes
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