The Sunday Times June 5, 2022 23NEWS REVIEW
having to read about their father, which
was untrue”.
While Depp could doodle on his note-
pad in court, eat gummy bear sweets and
have a laugh with his legal team, Heard
appeared to have no such luxury. She
maintained an expression of lip-
trembling stoicism as she listened to a
dozen or so people paint her as a fraudu-
lent, aggressive fantasist.
Team Depp’s fluent forensic psycholo-
gist, Shannon Curry, told the court she
had spent two days evaluating Amber
Heard face to face, as well as reading med-
ical reports and sitting in on depositions
by various clinicians who had treated the
actress in the past. Curry had concluded
that Heard’s test scores matched the crite-
ria for borderline personality disorder
and histrionic personality disorder.
Curry went on to explain that border-
line personality disorder “seems to be a
predictive factor for women who imple-
ment violence against their partner. And
one of the most common tactics... is
actually physically assaulting [them] and
then getting harmed themselves.”
As Depp’s case was being meticulouslyUnsurprisingly, de Boer thought any
suggestion Depp might be a violent
abuser was for the birds. “We know bet-
ter. We know him,” she said. “We’re here
to support him so he knows he’s not
alone. We believe him. He’s going to win.”
To get into court, I had to queue up for
a numbered, tamper-proof wristband,
100 of which were issued at 7am on a first-
come, first-served basis.
The evidential fireworks began almost
immediately, but the main event didn’t
start until day six, when Depp, who had
been watching and occasionally chuck-
ling as his side’s witnesses gave evidence,
finally took the stand. Unlike at the Lon-
don trial, his words were being broadcast
to the world.
“Never”, Depp affirmed ponderously,
“did I myself reach the point of striking Ms
Heard in any way. Nor have I ever struck
any woman in my life.” Heard’s allega-
tions, he said, were “not based in any spe-
cies of truth”.
Depp told the jury he had pursued his
case because he “felt the responsibility of
clearing the record... to clear my chil-
dren of this horrid thing that they werevinced Heard was a manipulative liar.
Feminists and women’s rights campaign-
ers were thin on the ground.
Priscilla Valdes, 31, described the
domestic violence she witnessed as a
child, perpetrated by a woman. She said
she could empathise with men who try to
come forward and are disbelieved. I
asked if she thought the online ragging of
Heard might stop victims of abuse coming
forward. “No,” she replied instantly. “It
doesn’t stop people like us who really,
truly, are going through these things.”
I soon began to feel as if I were living in
some kind of lurid fable. The journalists,
diehard spectators, court staff,
legal folk and day-tripperspresented to the jury, the outside world
began to wake up to what was being
played out in real time on their phones
and laptops. On TikTok, Depp v Heard
was a gift. Deft editors created “hilarious”
60-second videos re-enacting Heard’s tes-
timony, relentlessly mocking her
demeanour, the graphic descriptions of
the violence she said she suffered and her
apparent propensity to break down in the
witness box without producing any tears.
After watching each day’s proceedings,
I would go outside to sit on park benches
in the Virginia sunshine, listening to and
interviewing victims of domestic abuse
who had travelled from all over the US to
be there. All but a handful were con-be there. All but a handful wer
An Amber Heard supporter holds a placard as the
actress testifies at Fairfax county court, VirginiaNick Wallis was the
only journalist at
court for every day
of the libel trials in
both London and
Virginia. He bore
witness to a
gruesome celebrity
psychodramaNEWS REVIEW
P
icking over the entrails of a
toxic celebrity relationship in
a provincial US court is un-
familiar territory for me. For
the past decade or so I’ve led
a more parochial existence,
reporting on the Post Office
Horizon scandal, in which
hundreds of British sub-
postmasters were wrongly
given criminal convictions. Last year I
spent months writing a book on it. This
year I fancied a bit of a change. Which is
how I ended up following a six-week defa-
mation trial at a court in Virginia.
The identities of the plaintiff and defen-
dant made this trial worldwide news.
Johnny Depp is one of the biggest names
in Hollywood. His ex-wife, Amber Heard,
is — or was — an up-and-coming movie
starlet. Right now they are the latest
unfortunate protagonists of a brutal
socio-legal gender war.
My interest in their story began in July
2020, when I was sent along as a tele-
vision reporter to the High Court in Lon-
don to cover the opening day of Depp v
NGN and Wootton. The journalist Dan
Wootton had called Depp a “wife-beater”
in a column in The Sun, and the actor was
suing Wootton and the The Sun’s pub-
lisher, News Group Newspapers (NGN).
Journalists in the UK are allowed to
tweet about proceedings as they happen,
and as I began to do so, my Twitter follow-
ing exploded. The demand for informa-
tion among Depp’s worldwide army of
supporters was staggering.
Three months after the trial finished,
Mr Justice Nicol produced a judgment
that found Heard’s claims credible — The
Sun’s claim that Depp was a “wife-beater”
was “substantially true”. It was a shock to
the “Deppheads” and a strategic victory
for Heard.
For Depp was also suing her in America
over a claim she had made in The Wash-
ington Post in 2018: “Two years ago, I
became a public figure representing
domestic abuse.” With the London judg-
ment still warm, Heard countersued
Depp in the US, saying he had authorised
his lawyer’s statement that some of her
allegations were a “hoax”. Depp v Heard,
in which the court would hear both
Depp’s claim and Heard’s counterclaim,
was scheduled for April 11 this year.
As the trial date approached, I put for-
ward a proposal to my Twitter followers:
if they crowdfunded my passage to the
US, I would cover Depp v Heard in Vir-
ginia. I raised enough money in six days.A
month later, in the pitch dark, I
stumbled out of a taxi that had
brought me to Fairfax county court
in Virginia. I was the first reporter
on the scene. Now what?
At 4am the first fan arrived. Natasha
Miller had driven 2,600 miles from Reno,
Nevada. Dressed in a trapper’s hat, a tas-
selled suede coat and chunky jewellery,
she cautiously agreed to tell me about her
support for Depp.
Depp and Heard had met in 2010 and
married in 2015. Within 15 months Heard
had filed for divorce. Four days after that
she was filmed walking out of Los Angeles
Superior Court with a red mark on her
cheek and a restraining order against
Depp. The couple announced their
divorce shortly afterwards.
“I think he got a really bad rep in the
beginning and people were quick to
believe everything,” Miller said. “And
then more came out.” Why had she come?
“Because I love him,” she replied, looking
fleetingly happy.
Miller was the first of many dozens of
Depp supporters I would meet in Fairfax.
Each of them had a story to tell about their
love of and connection to Depp.
Many had turbulence in their lives. The
most memorable — and loudest — of the
early arrivals was Depp’s self-proclaimed
No 1 fan, Yvonne de Boer, 58 (“Same age as
Johnny!”), from Los Angeles, who carried
photos of all her meetings with Depp. In
most, de Boer is pictured hugging the life
out of “my Johnny” while beaming at the
camera. Depp wears a ring she designed
for him. She showed me photos of
another ring she had brought, telling me
conspiratorially: “His security told me I
can give it to him when the trial is over.”INSIDE DEPP HEARD
EVERY LAST, SAD, ENGROSSING V
MINUTE OF IT
Johnny Depp
waves to fans
— one of whom
dressed up as
“Amber Turd”
— outside the
courthouse. He
munched
gummy bears
during the trial
then headed to
London to play
on stage with
Jeff Beck.
Above, petting
a badger in
Kent. Far right,
Amber Heard
waits for the
verdictlearnt how to interact in and around the
court. We were marshalled by deputy
sheriffs, who wore five-pointed star
badges, carried guns and rode liveried
Harley-Davidsons. The rhythms of our
existence were governed by the timings of
the court.B
y the last week of the trial it was
impossible to get into court without
arriving before 1am. Scuffles broke
out in the queue. Hundreds of peo-
ple, realising they had no prospect
of securing a wristband, lined the street
round the back of the court. As Heard
arrived, the Depp fans yelled: “Amber
Turd! Amber Turd!” The chants switched
to wild cheers as Depp, their hero, swept
through the gates, waving and grinning
through the rear window of his SUV.
And then, after a seven-week marathon
slog, the jurors were sent out at 3pm on a
Friday to begin their deliberations. Depp
couldn’t leave Virginia quickly enough. As
soon as the trial was finished, he jetted off
to the UK to play a string of very public
gigs with the 77-year-old rocker Jeff Beck.
Heard’s whereabouts were a mystery.
Nobody had any idea how long we
would be kept waiting for the verdict, but
shortly after lunchtime on Wednesday
the jury announced it had reached its
decision. Before the verdict was read out,
the bailiff and judge warned against any
outbursts from the gallery. The jury filed
in. Its conclusions were seismic. Depp
had successfully overcome America’ssacred First Amendment to win a defama-
tion case over an article that didn’t even
mention him by name.
Heard’s 2018 Washington Post piece
was defamatory. Furthermore, the jury
agreed that all the contested statements
within the article were false and made
with malice, triggering a $15 million
award for damages (later reduced to just
over $10 million). The jury could have
reached that conclusion only by listen-
ing to Heard’s lengthy, graphic
descriptions of what Depp allegedly
did to her and concluding that every
word she had uttered was false.
There was a twist. When the jury
turned to Heard’s countersuit, it
dismissed two of the statements by
Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman call-
ing Heard’s abuse claims a “hoax”,
but a third did not slip through the
net. In this particular statement
Waldman referred to a night in
2016 during which all hell
appeared to break loose between
Depp and Heard. Police were
twice called to the couple’s
penthouse apartment in
downtown LA and on both
occasions concluded the argu-
ment was verbal. They left with-
out filing a formal report.
In 2020 Waldman told the
Daily Mail: “This was an
ambush, a hoax. They set Mr
Depp up by calling the cops, but
the first attempt didn’t do the trick.
The officers came to the penthouses...
and left after seeing no damage to face or
property. So Amber and her friends
spilled a little wine and roughed the place
up... and then placed a second call to
911.” The jury found this statement was
defamatory, untrue, authorised by Depp
and made with malice. It awarded Heard
$2 million.
I finished a few broadcast commit-
ments, had a beer and booked an Uber
back to the flat I was staying in. I was sur-
prised to not even feel not even the slight-
est pang of sentiment for the court that
had been my workplace for two months.
The day after the verdict, Heard’s law-
yer, Elaine Bredehoft, gave a sit-down
interview on national television in the US.
She told America the jury got “confused”
and her client had “excellent grounds” for
appeal. Bredehoft complained that
Depp’s lawyers “were able to suppress”
evidence including Heard’s medical
records, which allegedly detailed some
of her injuries over the years. The law-
yer said a text from one of Depp’s
assistants stating, “When I told him he
kicked you, he cried,” was also excluded
from the US trial, despite being part of the
evidence considered in the UK.
That night Depp, after being pictured
holding a badger at an animal sanctuary
in Kent, arrived at a gig in Gateshead to a
hero’s welcome.
The Great Post Office Scandal, by Nick
Wallis, is published by Bath Publishing
at £25
Charlotte Ivers, page 29The first fan
arrived at the
court at 4am — she
had driven 2,600
miles from NevadaEVELYN HOCKSTEIN/REUTERS