Johnny Depp’s lawyer grill Amber Heard over photos looking fresh-faced after alleged abuse

Johnny Depp’s legal team grilled Amber Heard over photos of her looking fresh-faced during public appearances after allegedly being beat up by Depp. 

The court was shown a clip of Amber Heard appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden in December 2015 with no visible marks or bruises on her face.  

Heard had previously testified that the night before the appearance she thought she was going to die when Depp allegedly headbutted her and tried to suffocate her with a pillow. She claimed she had two black eyes, what she thought was a broken nose and a busted lip from Depp allegedly punching her.

Heard told the court that her make-up team had to work around the wounds and apply ‘super heavy, red matte lipstick’ to hide her bloodied lip for her appearance on the James Corden show.  

She said in her testimony : ‘I got worried that I wouldn’t be able to hide the bruising and swelling. I iced it all night and the next day checked in the mirror to see if I could get away with it, meaning hiding it, so I could make an appearance.

‘I gambled and thought maybe I could pull it off, I had my hair and makeup team come. They worked around it, meaning worked around the lesions on my head with the hair spray because that stings. They worked around the bruising by covering it with heavy makeup, heavier makeup than normal bruise covering makeup.

‘I remember my lip was still bleeding and swollen so we did this really thick super heavy matte red lipstick and I remember very well at the time that we had no choice in color, and that was one of my favorite colors to wear

‘On this occasion we had no choice because we had to hide my busted lip.

During cross examination, Depp’s attorney Camille Vasquez challenged Heard on several incidents where she claims Depp assaulted her.

Vasqeuz asked about the incident in Russia in June 2013 where Heard claimed Depp hit her in the face. At the time Depp was in the country promoting his film The Lone Ranger.

The court was shown a photo of the former couple doing an event for the movie and Vasquez asked Heard if she could see any injuries on her face.

Heard said she could not.

Vasquez turned to the night after the Met Gala in 2014 when Heard claims Depp beat her up again and let her with a broken nose.

Yet the next night she appeared in photographs with no sign of injury at an event to honor the comedian Don Rickles.

Heard told the court: ‘You should see what it looked like under the makeup’.

After being shown another photo of her with no sign of injury, Heard insisted that Depp ‘did whack me in the face and I did think it broke my nose’.

The court was also shown pictures of Heard wearing a backless dress at the Tokyo premiere of Depp’s film Mortdecai in 2015.

Heard had previously claimed that Depp beat her up but she admitted that the photos showed no visible marks.

In her earlier testimony, Heard described the incident in their hotel room in vivid detail.

She said: ‘I managed to get out of his grasp to take a few steps and went into the closet

‘By the time I made it in he had me by the hair. It felt like he was wailing me in a sloppy way and wrestled me to the floor. I didn’t have a fair shot, I was walking away from him.

‘I didn’t see it coming he wrestled me down to the ground. He was really screaming, loud.

‘I remember trying to get up and him wrestling me down and he put his knee on my back and I had this struggle with him and I look at him and he’s still got his glasses on. I remember thinking he looked like he hadn’t been through anything.’

Vasquez asked Heard how photos of her bruised face ended up on the cover of People magazine after she filed for a restraining order in May 2016.

Heard said that she didn’t ‘personally’ give them to the magazine.

Vasquez asked sarcastically if this was Heard ‘protecting’ Depp, as she earlier described.

Heard said: ‘This is him calling me a liar and me having to prove it.’

She added that she gave the pictures to her lawyers and representatives and didn’t’ personally give them to People.

Vasquez asked Heard about a series of photos the jury has seen in which he is passed out.

One of them was at their hotel in Tokyo in 2013, another was on their private island in the Bahamas and another was of him asleep in a chair.

Vasquez asked: ‘You seem to really like taking pictures of Mr. Depp while he’s sleeping.’

Heard said she did it to prove to Depp that he had been passing out because he would deny doing so after he woke up.

She said: ‘I hated it, I hated it…I wanted him to get help. He’s surrounded by enablers.’

Vasquez asked Heard about the picture of Depp’s table at his home in Los Angeles in March 2013 which she claimed showed he was doing drugs.

Vasquez said that the table looked suspiciously neat and said: ‘It doesn’t look like anyone’s been doing cocaine off that table?’

Heard said: ‘With all due respect, I don’t know if you know how that works. When you snort cocaine it goes into your nose.’

Heard added that the tampon applicator next to the driver’s license in the photo ‘is a device that I believe my sister had taught him to use in order to put the cocaine in your nose.’

Vasquez pointed out that Depp is a heavy smoker but there were no butts in the ashtray.

Heard not only took a photo of the scene but sent it to her friend Rocky Pennington.

Vasquez asked: ‘You have a habit of sending staged photographs to (Rocky Pennington), don’t you?

Heard claimed she was just telling Pennington ‘what was going on in my life.’

Vasquez asked Heard if she had any pictures of Depp doing cocaine, and she replied sarcastically that she had none of him ‘mid snort’.

Vasquez asked about statements made by Heard after she got her $7million divorce settlement from Depp.

Once the divorce was settled in 2017 Heard released a statement saying that ‘money played no role for me’ in the divorce and that ‘$7million is being donated to charity.’

When Depp donated $200,00 of the settlement to the ACLU and the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles in Heard’s name, she objected.

Asked why she did so, Heard said that she didn’t want him to ‘get a big tax break.’

She said: ‘He should be paying double that amount to the charity directly. He could do that but he’d need to pay the adjusted amount.’

Heard was asked about an appearance on a Dutch TV show in October 2018 where she said that she had ‘donated’ all of the $7m to charity.

Vasquez said: ‘In this October 2018 interview you said you had ‘donated’ your entire divorce settlement to charity.

‘Your exact words were $7million was donated to, I split it between ACLU and Children’s Hospital.’

‘You say this because you ‘wanted nothing?’

Heard said that was correct.

Vasquez asked: ‘Sitting here today you still haven’t donated the $7m divorce settlement to charity?’

Heard shot back: ‘Incorrect, I pledged the entirety…I intend to fulfill my obligations.’

Vasquez said: ‘Sitting here today you have not donated $7million, donated your divorce settlement to charity?’

In response Heard said: ‘I use pledge and donate synonyms with one another.’

Vasquez said: ‘But I don’t. I don’t use it synonymously. As of today you have not paid $3.5million of your own money to the ACLU?

Heard said: ‘I have not yet.’

Vasquez said: ‘As of today you have not paid $3.5million of your own money to Children’s hospital Los Angeles.’

Heard said: ‘Johnny sued me. I have not.’

Vasquez put it to Heard that the reason was ‘because you did want something’ from the settlement. Vasquez said: ‘You wanted Mr. Depp’s money.’

Heard said that she ‘didn’t get it, wasn’t interested in it.’

Vasquez suggested to Heard that she wanted ‘praise’ for donating the money and wanted to seem ‘altruistic’.

Heard insisted her aim was to ‘clear my name’ because she was being called a ‘liar’.

Vasquez asked: ‘You wanted to be seen as a noble victim of domestic violence?’

A visibly angry Heard said: ‘I have never, never wanted to be seen as a victim.’

The court heard that Heard was paid the $7million in installments with the final payment of $2.3million in February 2018.

Depp sued Heard in 2019 after Heard’s op-ed in December 2018.

Vasquez said: ‘You had all of $7million for 13 months and you chose not to pay it to the charities?

Heard said: ‘I disagree with your characterization of that.’

Vasquez began the cross examination bringing all the drama. 

‘Mr. Depp hasn’t looked at you once this entire trial has he?’ Vasquez asked. 

Heard said, ‘Not that I’ve noticed.’

Vasquez asked, ‘You’ve looked at him many times?’

‘Yes I have,’ Heard said. 

‘Vasquez asked, ‘You know exactly why Mr. Depp won’t look back at you. He promised you you’d never see his eyes again?’

The court heard a recording of a conversation between Depp and Heard taken in July 2016 after she filed for divorce and got a restraining order.

In the audio Depp says: ‘You will not see my eyes again.’

Vasquez said, ‘He tells you, you will not see my eyes again? And he kept that promise?’

Heard said, ‘As far as I know he can’t look at me.’

Vasquez said, ‘He won’t,’ to Heard responded, ‘He can’t.’

The jury were played more from the same recording in which Heard challenged Depp to publicly say she assaulted him and let the ‘judge and jury’ think about it.

Vasquez said: ‘You said you can please tell people it was a fair fight and see what the jury and the judge think’.

Heard testified, ‘I was saying it to the man who beat me up, yes. I thought it was preposterous.’

Vasquez asked, ‘And the man you beat up?’

Heard said, ‘I could never hurt Johnny.’

Vasquez said, ‘You’re here because Mr. Depp finally told the world he’s the victim of domestic violence?’

Heard said, ‘He’s sued me and other companies’ who said that.

‘You didn’t think he’d tell the world he was a victim of domestic violence, did you?’ Vasquez said. 

Heard said, ‘I found it hard to believe that he could or would do that considering the relationship I had. I thought it would be crazy to do so.’

Vasquez said, ‘Or as you said to him, who was going to believe that Johnny Depp, a man, is a victim of domestic violence.’

Heard said, ‘I wasn’t saying it because he’s a man’, adding that it was because he beat her up for five years.

‘Mr. Depp is your victim isn’t he?’ Vasquez asked. 

Heard responded, ‘No ma’am.’

Vasquez said, ‘And once he left you you continued to abuse him by calling him an abuser?’

‘He’s an abuser. You can look either of us up online and figure out who is being abused,’ Heard said. 

DIVORCE NEGOTIATIONS 

Heard said on the stand today that during negotiations with Depp she asked him to stop leaking stories to the media. He agreed to do so but only if she agreed to certain conditions.

She said: ‘He wanted me to drop charges, or some version of that, get back together with him and go on tour with him in the tour bus. Certain things that were impossible and go against all of, everything I’d stood for in getting my restraining order

‘I was feeling like I couldn’t live my life, people were turning on me, I had never been inundated with that much press. Every witness who indirectly supported me got bombarded’

Asked what was important to her about the divorce, Heard said it was just the statement that they put out.

She wanted to ‘get the press out of this’ and stop her and her family being harassed.

Heard said: ‘In that statement to clear my name, I wanted to clear my name, it’s all I have. I come from nothing. All I have is my integrity and my name and that’s what he promised to take from me’.

Depp’s accountant and business manager Edward White testified earlier in the trial and told the court that Heard initially demanded $4million after the divorce in May 2016.

Then the demand ‘continually increased’ to $5million and then it went up to $5.5million, White said.

As divorce negotiations continued the amount kept going up and jumped to $7million which ended up being the final settlement.

White said that on top of that Depp had to pay $500,000 of Heard’s legal fees and all the debts they had accumulated during their marriage – with everything paid to her being tax free.

According to White, the ‘total consideration’ paid to Heard by Depp was $14.25m.

The trial also heard last month that Heard threatened to publicly serve Depp with a restraining order if he did not continue financially supporting her lifestyle after she filed for divorce. 

Among her demands was the ‘exclusive use and possession’ of the black Range Rover she drove, with Depp continuing to make payments towards the vehicle. 

She also wanted to carry on living rent free in three Los Angeles penthouses she and her friends were staying in, all owned by Depp, and asked for her estranged husband to cover $125,000 of her legal and accounting fees.

‘JOHNNY SAID HE WOULD RUIN ME. I’D BE SELLING DEPENDS’  

The court heard a series of recordings of fraught phone calls between Depp and Heard during the summer of 2016 after their divorce.

In one of them Heard tells Depp: ‘I am not after a dime of your money.’

Explaining the recording, Heard said: ‘Johnny told me he would ruin me. That no one would ever touch me professionally. That I’d never work again. I’d be selling Depends’, referring to the adult incontinence products.

Heard said: ‘He’d ruin my career. He refused to not engage with the press by leaking false (stories).

‘I was trying to get him to call the dogs off. He was calling me a liar…I kept saying don’t make me prove it. He was calling me a liar and having a sophisticated PR machine (speak to the press).’

In another recording Heard told Depp that it was ‘unbelievable’ to suggest she was faking her injuries and that she had been involved in some ‘secret Fight Club’, referring to the film about an underground boxing group.

Heard told Depp about the corroborating evidence and texts that backed up her claims going back to years.

Asked about the recording, Heard became emotional and sobbed in the witness box.

She said: ‘I was begging Johnny to not make me prove what I’ve had to sit on the stand and prove and talk about it.

‘To have to sit where I’m sitting today. I didn’t want this, I don’t want to be here today. I was trying to point out something to somebody I didn’t think had a firm grasp on reality.

‘I was trying to point out how absurd it would be for him to keep making me prove this by calling me a liar. I was trying to get him to not call me a liar because everything I’d said is the truth. I was begging him not to make me prove it….there were years of me with injuries on the dates where we were fighting. Pictures from 2012. I was trying to say either you supposed people would rather believe this is an elaborate, years long campaign, for what? It just seemed crazy.

‘I thought no one was advising him in his best interests, always surrounded by yes men and nobody was saying this is crazy, don’t do this. I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him so much. That’s why I’m explaining why I didn’t file a police report. I didn’t want this to hurt Johnny.’

AMBER MET ELON MUSK AFTER JOHNNY STOOD HER UP AT THE MET GALA – MAY 2016   

Heard testified about meeting ex-boyfriend Elon Musk on the Met Gala red carpet after Depp ‘stood her up’. 

Heard told the court that on May 2, 2016 she and Depp were invited to the Met Gala by designer Ralph Lauren but Depp failed to turn up for his fitting. 

Heard said that she went to the gala by herself because Depp was a no-show. 

‘I got out of the car and walked the red carpet by myself, with someone from Ralph Lauren’s team,’ she said. ‘Sat next to an empty place setting for Johnny – he effectively stood me up on the carpet.’

Heard said that she met a man named ‘Elon’ who she later realized was Tesla billionaire Elon Musk. 

She said: ‘I didn’t recognize him until we started talking. He’d reminded me we’d met once before. We spoke on the red carpet in the waiting line. He seemed like a real gentleman.’

Heard said she became friends with Musk after that. She began dating the Tesla founder soon after and by August the following year they had broken up.

Last month Depp’s former agent Christian Carino told the court about emails sent to him by Heard after she broke up with Elon Musk.

Carino, a talent agent with mega agency CAA and Lady Gaga’s ex-fiance, said that Heard began dating Musk ‘immediately after Johnny Depp.’

In an email on August 7, 2017, Heard told Carino: ‘Dealing with breakup. I hate when things go public. See I’m so sad.’

Carino replied to Heard: ‘You weren’t in love with him. You told me 1,000 times you were just feeling space.’

Asked what he meant, Carino said: ‘Why would you be sad if you weren’t in love with him to begin with?’

Heard’s next email read: ‘I know but I wanted time to grieve and recover in my own time.’

In another email in the same conversation she said: ‘I hate that, yet again a man lets me fall on the spikes by myself.’

Carino said: ‘How so?’

Heard emailed back: ‘They’re mad at me for leaving them and put things like this out there’, apparently referring to the story going public.

Carino responded: ‘You could avoid all this if you stop dating uber famous people.’

Asked what he meant in the email, Carino told the court he was trying to tell Heard: ‘If you don’t like being in the press about your personal life don’t date people that are famous.’

HOW AMBER COVERED BRUISES ON HER FACE 

Heard told the jury that ‘no woman wants to walk around with a bruise on her face’ and that you have to ‘ice right away to reduce swelling.’

She said: ‘It’s very manageable if you ice it. Arnica is also a great remedy. If you want to cover up a bruise put foundation first, concealer, on top of that I used a theater makeup kit that I called my bruise kit.’

Heard’s lawyer handed her a circular makeup kit split into four different colored circles, which Heard held up to the jury.

She said: ‘The idea is you want to counteract what color your working with on the bruise. Red is what shows up right away, so you go with opposite on the color wheel by dabbing a bit of green.

‘After a day or two you get more purple so you go with red or orange tones. Day two was always the trickiest because day one and day two are hardest, you get the most blues and purples and you have to deal with the sensitivity.

‘After a few days that becomes more of brown, yellowish brown, five seven days in becomes more of a green then fades into a brown

‘I also noticed that bruising on your face tends to heal a lot faster – for me it was faster than bruising on my body.

‘Lips are the hardest because they crack and bleed’.

THE DOG DID IT! AMBER BLAMES YORKIE FOR POOP IN THE BED – FEBRUARY 2016 

Heard addressed the incident in February 2016 where Depp claims that she pooped in their bed at their Los Angeles penthouse after an argument the night before on her 30th birthday.

Depp’s chauffeur Starling Jenkins previously told the court that Heard told him it was a ‘horrible practical joke gone wrong.’

Heard suggested that it was one of their Yorkshire terriers, Boo, that did it, telling the court that the animal had ‘eaten Johnny’s weed as a puppy and had bowel control issues for life’

Heard said that Boo and their other dog, Pistol, would sleep in their bed so Boo wouldn’t have to get up in the night and possibly go to the bathroom on the floor.

She said that while packing to go away to the Coachella music festival, Heard left Boo in the bed, which appears to have been when the feces incident occurred.

Heard’s lawyer Elaine Bredehoft asked Heard: ‘Did you commit any kind of prank?’

Heard said: ‘Absolutely not. First of all I don’t think that’s funny. I don’t know what grown woman does. 

‘I was not in a pranking mood. My life was falling apart. I was at a crossroads in my life and I’d just been attacked on my 30th birthday by my violent husband with whom I was in love. It was

I don’t think that’s funny, period. That’s disgusting’.

Heard added that it made no sense to do something like that because whenever she and Depp argued he would stay at his house in another part of Los Angeles, meaning he wouldn’t even find the poop.

FINAL ARGUMENT BEFORE DIVORCE – MAY 2016 

Heard told the court that she didn’t see Depp for a month after the argument on her 30th birthday in April 2016.

But when they saw each other next on May 21 – the date of their final argument before she filed for divorce and a restraining order – he was still obsessed with the idea she had pooped in their bed.

Depp called her as his mother had died and he said that he ‘needed’ her.

Recounting the phone call, Heard said: ‘He was going on about scientists and DNA and feces. He’d had some scientific analysis done.

‘As soon as I heard about this feces he thought was a prank, all the scientists he conferred with, I thought he was out of his mind. Clearly the drinking and drugs are not getting better. Clearly the delusions are not getting better.’

Heard said she was ‘really affected’ by the fact that Depp’s mother had died and reluctantly agreed to let him come to her penthouse to talk.

Depp arrived and at first he was inebriated but ‘relatively peaceful.’

Heard said: ‘He wasn’t incoherent and he starts talking about the feces again this prank one of my friends he said left for him in our bed. I pointed out it didn’t make any sense and my friends wouldn’t do that. That’s not something a bunch of 30 year old women think is funny.’

Heard tried calling one of her friends who could prove it didn’t happen and they could move on.

She said: ‘I thought if I could get my friend on the phone to prove this didn’t happen we could move on and talk about the issues we could talk about. Our marriage was over and falling apart in front of our eyes, his mother had just passed. I couldn’t believe he wanted to talk about feces’.

When the friend didn’t answer, Heard called her friend iO Tillet Wright who tried to explain on speakerphone.

Heard said: ‘It made Johnny madder, he got more upset, grabbed the phone and started screaming at iO.

‘Started screaming at the top of his lungs, dyke bi**h, screaming expletives. Telling iO he can have me and f**k off, screaming at him.

‘He tosses the phone down on the couch and heads upstairs. I pick up the phone and try to apologize for the fact my husband at the time just screamed at my friends on a cold call. It sounded crazy.

‘iO said something to me on speakerphone and reminded me I wasn’t safe. He said Amber get out of the house, you’re not safe, get out of that house.

‘Johnny hears this, he’s on the stairs, turned around, came bolting down the stairs, grabbed the phone from my hand and really started screaming. Lit into iO, called iO every imaginable horrible name you can say to an LGBTQIA person, just screamed. Really nasty stuff

‘When he’s done he says you want to have my bi**h, you take her, you can have her. Pulls his arm back with the phone and throws it at my face. Hit me in what felt like my eye.

‘I put my head in my hands and immediately started crying. I said Johnny, you hit me. I’m sitting on the couch. I didn’t have time to put my hands up, still sitting cross legged in my socks on the couch, I haven’t seen him for a month.

‘He comes over to me as I’m crying and he does that taunting thing, he says oh I hit you yeah and he whacks me on top of my head, grabs me by the hair, yanks me off the couch. I don’t know if he was intending to hit me in the face or grab my face but he was making this gesture to expose my face, let me see your face, what if I pull your hair back. He yanks my hair back. I’m trying to prevent him from landing blows on my face. I remember this mocking taunt as he’s yanking me around the room’.

Heard’s friend Rocky Pennington came in and got between the two of them, Heard told the court.

Heard curled up on the couch as Depp screamed 10 times: ‘Get the f**k up! Amber get the f**k up!’

Depp’s security arrived and escorted him out and one of Heard’s friends called the police to report a domestic violence incident.

But when they arrived Heard refused to cooperate with them, and struggled with her emotions as she sought to explain why.

She said: ‘I wanted to protect Johnny. I didn’t want him to be arrested, I didn’t want the world to know. I didn’t want this to come out. I didn’t want this to be…I wanted to protect Johnny.’

‘I HAD THE DATE WRONG’ AMBER SAYS FIRST ACT OF VIOLENCE  WAS 2012 – NOT 2013 

Wearing a grey blazer, Heard began her testimony by saying that the first act of physical violence happened in 2012, not 2013 as she has previously claimed. 

The incident was when Depp allegedly slapped Heard repeatedly when she laughed at his ‘Wino Forever’ tattoo, which he changed from ‘Winona Forever’ after breaking up with Winona Ryder, his ex-girlfriend.

Heard said: ‘You never forget it, that’s how I remember it. It changes your life. You never forget the time someone hits you like that. I just had the date wrong.’

Asked how she could forget the date, Heard said: ‘I am embarrassed to say I would have liked to have believed the period of time I had to fall in love with Johnny and he was sober and he wasn’t violent to me lasted a lot longer than it did.

‘I would have liked to have believed I wasn’t hit so early in the relationship.’

‘I’d allowed myself to forget that the beginning of that period, 2012, before he got sober, was really violent and chaotic as well. I’m embarrassed to say that.’

Heard described how she had to detail every instance of abuse during her nearly five year relationship with Depp as part of this case.

She said she reviewed her therapists’ notes, calendars and other materials for a list of incidents that was ‘far too long.’

Asked why she didn’t just remember this, Heard said ‘that’s not how your memory or my memory works.’

She said: We were together for five years almost and it was a very violent, chaotic at times very loving emotional relationship. As anyone can imagine there was a lot going on.

‘Unfortunately the violence became almost normal, especially towards the end it was just – it’s hard to say that now but the violence was almost normal.

‘Your brain does with trauma what it does, put it away best you can. Frankly I was shocked to see a lot of the information presented to me through my therapist’s notes.’

Heard said that she and Depp used to use the word ‘couch’ as a ‘safe word’ and that’s why it cropped up a lot in audio recordings.

She said: ‘Like a word like truce where you put down the proverbial guns and say truce, we’re not fighting any more. Couch was supposed to be a word as a truce, I don’t want to fight any more. Let’s stop this.’

‘JUNKIE JOHNNY’ ARGUMENT – MARCH 2015

The court was shown a series of photos of Heard at red carpet events with injuries she claimed she sustained during fights with Depp. 

The court heard an audio recording taken by Depp or Heard during an argument on March 26, 2015. In the recording Heard tells Depp he is a ‘person I recognize for a brief moment and he disappears.’

She tells him he is an ‘insecure scary version of him that lashes out, very different every time.’

Heard says on the recording: ‘Adderall junkie Johnny, he’s abusive and he’s mean, he’s reactionary, anything I do and say is cause for violence. If I argue back then I’m abusive. If I don’t say anything then I’m dismissive. If I engage with him I’m part of the problem. If I don’t engage with him. If I look at him the wrong way it’s a problem. If I say the wrong thing I’m the problem.’

Asked in court what she meant by that, Heard said that the different versions of Depp ‘acted like independent versions of this person depending on what combination of drugs and alcohol he was on.’

Shortly after this Depp and Heard returned to Australia where Depp finally got sober.

Heard said: ‘I thought we had finally done it, he was going to be clean and sober for good. We had a wonderful period, we fell deeper in love than before. We were talking about having kids. When Johnny wasn’t using it was so peaceful.

‘We went back to Australia, we had my parents come and visit, we were talking about babies, a farm, buying a home in California. It was a beautiful peaceful period. It was wonderful’.

HONEYMOON BLOW UP, JULY 2015 

Heard claimed that her honeymoon with Depp was ‘peaceful’ until he started drinking ‘brown alcohol’.

‘The train trip itself was peaceful up until Johnny would start drinking brown alcohol. He’d already started drinking champagne when he wrapped on Pirates 5,’ Heard said.  

‘I wasn’t ready to accept we’d gone back to a pattern at all. On the last night on the train after this was taken Johnny and I got into argument about him wanting me to agree to him drinking liquor. An argument followed in our sleeping car.

‘Johnny slapped me across the face and got a hold of my neck and pushed me up against the wall of the car. It was a small narrow sleeper car.

‘He was standing on the floor. I was trying to get his arms off my neck and he was squeezing my neck for what felt like a very long time.

‘Every time he’d pull me away from the car he’d slam me up against the wall. I remember trying to get his arms off my neck and remember thinking he could not even mean to kill me

‘I remember being scared he wouldn’t even mean to do it. Clawing at him, trying to get his arms away from my neck. At one point he tripped the top of my shirt, I had a breast exposed

‘I pull at the lapel of his shirt and he rips the shirt off of him and wraps it around my neck and that’s how I woke up the next morning, I woke up with it still around my neck and a giant knot in the back of my head’.

The defamation case hinges on a December 2018 opinion piece Heard wrote in the Washington Post. The article never mentioned Depp by name, but his lawyer told jurors it was clear Heard was referencing him. 

The couple’s divorce was finalized in 2017 after less than two years of marriage.

Depp, once among Hollywood’s biggest stars, said Heard’s allegations cost him ‘everything.’ A new Pirates of the Caribbean movie was put on hold, and Depp was replaced in the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ film franchise, a ‘Harry Potter’ spinoff.

Heard’s attorneys have argued that she told the truth and that her opinion was protected free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

A state court judge in Virginia’s Fairfax County, outside the nation’s capital, is overseeing the trial, which is expected to last until late May.

Less than two years ago, Depp lost a libel case against the Sun, a British tabloid that labeled him a ‘wife beater.’ A London High Court judge ruled he had repeatedly assaulted Heard.

Depp’s lawyers have said they filed the U.S. case in Fairfax County because the Washington Post is printed there. The newspaper is not a defendant.