the times | Friday May 27 2022 17
News
MICHAEL REYNOLDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGESStuart MacDonald
Amber Heard said trolls had threatened to microwave her one-year-old daughterAmber Heard sobbed in court as she
recounted the daily death threats she
says she receives after Johnny Depp
accused her of fabricating allegations of
abuse.
As the former couple’s libel trial
draws to a close, Heard returned to the
witness box and said that she had
struggled to cope with online attacks
from fans of her ex-husband.
The Aquaman actress said the threats
extended to her one-year-old daughter
and that trolls had told her they wanted
to put the child in a microwave.
Depp, 58, sued Heard, 36, for $50 mil-
lion over an article in The Washington
Post in 2018 in which she described
herself as a victim of domestic abuse.
The Pirates of the Caribbean star was
not mentioned by name but his lawyers
say he was clearly the target. Heard
countersued for $100 million after
accusing Depp and Adam Waldman,
his lawyer, of trying to ruin her career
by calling the allegations a “hoax”.
Heard said:“I am harassed, humiliat-
ed, threatened every single day. Even
just walking into this courtroom, sitting
here in front of the world having the
worst parts of my life, things that I
have lived through, used to humili-
ate me. People want to kill me and
they tell me so every day.
“People want to put my baby in
the microwave and they tell
me that. Johnny threaten-
ed, promised me that if I
ever left him he’d make
me think of him every
single day that I lived.”
Heard said the “har-
assment and humilia-
tion” that she had alle-
gedly endured in
court and online
Heard describes death
threats from Depp fans
meant that “every single day I have to
relive the trauma”.
She said she wakes up screaming, and
her friends and intimate partners have
to follow “unspoken rules” to avoid trig-
gering a panic attack. Those close to
Heard know not to touch or surprise
her, she said.
Heard, apparently referencing
Depp’s at times aloof demeanour in the
courtroom, said: “I am not sitting in this
courtroom snickering. I’m not sitting in
this courtroom laughing, smiling, mak-
ing snide jokes. I’m not.
“This is horrible. This is painful. And
this is humiliating for any human being
to go through. Perhaps it’s easy to forget
that — I am a human being. And even
though Johnny promised that I deserve
this and promised he’d do this, I don’t
deserve this. I want to move on.”
Asked by Benjamin Rottenborn, her
lawyer, what she hoped to do after the
trial, Heard said she had found comfort
in charity work. “I’m not a saint,” she
said, adding that she hopes to “get my
voice back”.
Camille Vasquez, a lawyer for Depp
whose aggressive cross-examination of
Heard became one of the highlights of
the trial, returned to question the
actress on her testimony.
“Your lies have been exposed to
the world multiple times,” Vasquez
said. The lawyer suggested that
Heard had not expected so many
witnesses to come forward
to support Depp’s version
of events.
Vasquez said there were
inconsistencies through-
out Heard’s testimony
and claimed the actress
had alerted the media
when she obtained a
temporary restraining
order against Depp in
May 2016.
Heard’s testimony
brought the evidence
in the trial to an endafter six weeks of graphic allegations of
abuse from both sides. The jury will
hear closing arguments today before
retiring to consider its verdict.
Depp and Heard met while filming
the 2011 drama The Rum Diary. The
court has been told that they enjoyed a
whirlwind romance before the
relationship descended into violence.
They married in 2015 but Heard filed
for divorce the following year.Keiran Southern Los Angeles
Johnny Depp is
suing his ex-wife
for $50 million
Sir Sean Connery’s plan to fund chari-
ties after his death have been boosted
after a Picasso he owned sold for
£17 million.
The late actor’s family put the art-
work up for sale to raise funds for the
Sean Connery Philanthropic Trust,
which will share the proceeds between
good causes in Scotland and the Baha-
mas, where he lived with his wife
Micheline, 93, for more than 30 years.
The Edinburgh-born actor bought
Pablo Picasso’s Buste d’homme dans un
cadre a few years before he died in Octo-
ber 2020, aged 90. The
1969 painting was sold at
Christie’s in Hong Kong
yesterday. The bidding
started at £10 million and
five bids were made before
it sold for £17.7 million, in-
cluding the buyer’s prem-
ium. Georgina Hilton, the
auctioneer, wore a tuxedo
in tribute to Connery’s role
as James Bond.
Connery’s family said
Picasso sale raises £17m
for Sean Connery charities
proceeds from the sale would support
organisations working in areas he
cared about, including sport and ocean
preservation. His stepson Stephane, an
art adviser, said: “Sean had an extraor-
dinary sense of aesthetics, composition
and movement honed by his career in a
visual medium as well as his long mar-
riage to Micheline, a fine and interna-
tionally exhibited painter. [We] are now
working to create a fund that will...
keep his legacy of integrity, opportunity
and effectiveness alive.”
The painting is one of Picasso’s mus-
keteer portraits and has been described
by art experts as “one of the finest and
most striking of the art-
ist’s paintings from the
last decade of his life”.
In February Con-
nery’s family announ-
ced they had donated
$1 million to the char-
ity Race Against Dem-
entia, a dissease from
which the actor suf-
fered.
The money will
fund a pilot scheme at
Edinburgh University
to help to tackle Brit-
ain’s biggest killer.Buste d’homme dans un
cadre was painted in 1969