The trials of ‘the sexiest man alive'

Spectator

30-07-2025

This is an account of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard court cases with a top-dressing of pretentious tosh about the meaning of celebrity, etc – but you can easily ignore the tosh because the basic story is so gripping.
Depp was 46 and already a global superstar when he met Amber Heard in 2009. She was a relatively unknown 22-year-old actress, but he auditioned her for the female lead in a film he was making of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary. Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson were also up for the role, but as soon as he saw Heard he decided 'Yep… That's the one.'
Amber arrived for filming with her girlfriend Tasya van Ree, whom she introduced as her wife. The director Bruce Robinson panicked: 'She's gay?!' But Depp reassured him: 'Don't worry, no leading lady of mine stays gay for very long.' People magazine had voted him the Sexiest Man Alive for the previous two years. But he was supposed to be in a long-term relationship with the Parisian actress and singer Vanessa Paradis, the mother of his two children.
Nevertheless, he split from Vanessa and married Amber in February 2015. All his friends urged him to get a prenup, but he didn't. He was supremely insouciant about money. He spent $500,000 a month just on storing his collections of Hollywood memorabilia, vintage guitars and cars, and he owned 14 properties around the world, including a private island. He spent a further fortune on drugs and alcohol.
The marriage lasted only 15 months and was characterised by violent fights from the start. Depp's bodyguard apparently noticed that 'every time I see him, he's got marks or scratches. She has a scary, scary temper.' One time when they were filming in Australia, Depp apparently showed him his bloody hand and said: 'She cut my finger clean off… she slapped me with a vodka bottle.' The bodyguard dragged him to a car to take him to hospital while Heard kept screaming: 'You're a fucking coward, you big man.' The butler managed to find his severed fingertip, but it was too late to sew it back on, and Warner Bros put out a press release that Depp had been injured in a go-karting accident.
In May 2016 Heard filed for divorce, accusing Depp of 14 incidents of domestic violence, and was granted a $7 million settlement which she said she would donate to charity. She then had a relationship with Elon Musk, which Depp later described as 'brutal'. Musk's brother Kimbal said: 'She was just so toxic.'
On 27 April 2018 the Sun described Depp as a wife-beater, and he sued for defamation. Then Heard wrote an article for the Washington Post, speaking out against domestic violence. It didn't mention Depp by name, but still he sued for $50 million and she countersued.
The Sun defamation suit opened at the Royal Courts of Justice in July 2020. Heard was the paper's star witness and testified to 14 different incidents of domestic violence. The judge believed her in 12 of the incidents and ruled that the Sun had not defamed Depp when it called him a wife-beater. He also rejected Depp's case that Heard was responsible for him losing a finger in Australia and found that he had in fact assaulted Heard on that occasion. Warner Bros then dropped Depp from its forthcoming Fantastic Beasts film.
The bigger Washington Post trial was delayed by Covid for almost a year, and Heard spent the time having another lesbian relationship and producing a daughter, Oonagh, by surrogate. The trial was held in the town of Fairfax, Virginia, where the Washington Post was printed. The place was quickly overrun by TV teams and fans who queued all night to get a wristband admitting them to the courtroom. (One of the wristbands later fetched $4,000 oneBay.) Many fans came dressed as Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean – but there was also a woman who appeared as a turd, in reference to 'Poopgate', when Depp's housekeeper claimed to have found faeces in his bed.
This time the trial did not go all Heard's way. Depp's lawyer established that she had not actually donated her $7 million divorce settlement to charity as she claimed. She said she had 'pledged' it, and 'I use pledge and donation synonymous with one another'. But the fact was the charity hadn't received it. Then jurors were shocked by an audio recording of Heard ranting at Depp, calling him a 'washed up piece of shit', where she was obviously goading him into a fight. And there was photographic evidence that her face could look bruised one day and flawless the next.
After a six-week trial, the jury found in favour of Depp and awarded him $10 million damages. One of the jurors later claimed that they believed him rather than her because her evidence had so many inconsistencies and also 'having him on the stand was a breath of fresh air'. After the verdict, Depp retreated to his island in the Bahamas with his personal therapist Beechy Colclough and Heard moved to Spain. The newspapers wrote heavy op-eds asking if this marked the end of the #MeToo movement, and maybe it did. Anyway, the circus had moved on.