Amber Heard sobbed uncontrollably on the stand Thursday as she recounted a wild fight with her then-husband Johnny Depp in Australia in which he allegedly penetrated her vagina repeatedly with a liquor bottle, leaving her retching and bloodied.
The March 2015 trip for the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean 5 was tumultuous from the start, Heard said during her second day of testimony in the trial over Johnny Depp’s $50 million defamation lawsuit. One day, after he had been drinking, he started calling her names like “slut” and “fat-ass” and slammed her up against a wall in their rental house, she said.
Heard said she shoved him back, prompting him to say, “Do you want to go, little girl?” It sparked a massive brawl between the pair in which she alleges he threw her on a table, whacked her in the face repeatedly, threw bottles at her, punched a wall beside her head, and ripped her nightgown off.
“At some point, he had a broken bottle up against my face, neck area, by my jawline, and he told me he’d carve up my face,” she testified.
Although she said she only had “flashes” of memory of the fight, she said, she recounted her feet slipping on floor tiles while she was naked and being slammed against walls and countertops. Depp has denied all allegations of abuse lobbed by Heard, and insisted that she, in fact, abused him—and that he is a survivor of domestic violence.
“The next thing I remember, I was bent over backwards on the bar,” Heard said Thursday. “I thought he was punching me, I felt this pressure on my pubic bone.... I remember looking around the room. I remember looking at all the broken bottles, broken glass, and I remember just not wanting to move because I didn’t know if it was broken or if the bottle he had inside of me was broken. I couldn’t feel it, I didn’t feel pain, I didn’t feel anything... I just remember thinking, ‘Please God, please I hope it’s not broken.’”
She said she remembered then being in a bathroom retching, losing control of her bladder, and bleeding from her vagina. After taking two sleeping pills, she said, she woke the next morning to hear Marilyn Manson music blaring, and the walls and furniture of the house smeared with mashed potato, dried blood, and paint. Depp was missing a finger, and he had ripped her nightgown into shreds and wrapped up pieces of raw steak in it, she said.
“I was heartbroken,” she said. “Eventually I realized I could be hurt because I was bleeding, but I convinced myself that the bottle wasn’t broken; otherwise it would be a lot worse.”
In previous testimony, Depp claimed his finger was lopped off by a vodka bottle Heard threw at him while at the house in Australia. But during cross-examination by Heard’s attorneys late last month, jurors were shown audio evidence that appeared to feature Depp referring to chopping off his own digit.
Depp appeared emotionless and stared at a desk on Thursday as Heard recounted the fight in a Virginia courtroom. In a statement released Thursday night, a spokesperson for Depp called Heard’s testimony “the performance of her life” and discounted her recollections as having grown “new and convenient details.”
Heard described another fight in December 2015 in which Depp allegedly pulled out a chunk of her hair, gave her two black eyes, left her with a split lip, and broke a bed “while on top of me.”
“I thought this is how I die,” she testified. “He is going to kill me and he wont even have realized it. I just could hear myself scream until I couldn’t hear myself anymore... And that he sounded like an animal in pain [as he said] he fucking hated me.”
She said she was booked to appear on James Corden’s Late Late Show the next day, and only did so after applying heavy makeup, being checked for concussion, and icing her face. Later that month, she decided to spend Christmas with Depp and his kids in the Bahamas.
“Every single time I went back or allowed him back, after this sort of thing would happen, I lost a piece of myself, a piece of my self-confidence, my trust in myself to leave and move on,” she said. “...I lost myself and it was somehow easier to stay.”
Heard also alleged Depp broke her nose after the 2014 Met Gala after accusing her of flirting with a woman. “We get back to the hotel room, he shoves me and grabs my collarbone. I remember he threw a bottle at me, missed me, hit the chandelier,” she said.
Then Depp allegedly punched her, breaking her nose, Heard claimed. “We were struggling, he’s bigger than me,” she said. “He hit me, I remember my nose being swollen, red. I made a remark to my friend of how bad.”
Depp has denied the claim, saying last week in court that a tissue Heard showed him after the incident, with red stains on it, was not soaked through with blood, but red nail polish.
Heard also testified Thursday that she began snapping pictures of Depp passed out during his increasingly frequent binges because it was the only way to get anyone to believe the superstar actor was abusing drugs and alcohol.
“I’d been in a relationship with Johnny for over a year, coming up on two years,” the actress testified on Thursday morning. “And I had already noticed that there was this pattern of behavior changes with him that would make my life significantly more complicated, or peaceful, difficult, or wonderful, depending on what... he was using. And I only could tell what he was using because I would have to look for clues.”
Depp would “pass out, and get sick and lose control of himself,” Heard said on the stand. “And then people would pick him up and clean him up and fix it. And he wouldn’t either remember, or he would deny it, or he would accuse me of saying that this had happened when it didn’t. And there was no one to back me up. [It was] just him, his employees, and everyone who had been taking care of him versus my word, and so I started to take pictures [to] say, ‘Look, this is happening.’”
Depp insisted previously that one of the pictures simply showed him sleeping. But, he has also conceded in the past that another showed him “on the nod” after taking drugs.
At the pair’s engagement party in 2014, Depp “shared drugs with my dad,” Heard testified, saying that her father, at the time, “was addicted to the same thing Johnny was.” Depp’s lawyer objected, calling the allegation hearsay. But Heard claimed that she was there at the time, and watched it happen.
Another exhibit submitted into evidence by Heard’s team was made up of three separate audio recordings she made of Depp aboard a private jet. In them, Depp can be heard moaning in pain after a particularly extreme binge, according to Heard’s description.
While struggling at one point to get off drugs, an addiction doctor prescribed Depp a regimen of medications, including opioid-based painkillers, to help him quit safely, Heard testified on Thursday. But Depp’s behavior and personality “changed drastically,” as he took to hallucinating, yelling at people who weren’t there, and falling asleep mid-sentence, Heard said.
She said she eventually discovered that Depp had been taking twice the amount of painkillers he was supposed to.
“I realized then that he had been lying to them and me about the amount, so that he could get extra high before he had to detox,” a visibly emotional Heard said.
The actress is testifying in a $50 million defamation lawsuit Depp filed against her over a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which Heard did not name Depp but referred to herself as a domestic violence survivor. Depp claims the piece damaged his career and falsely painted him as an abuser, coming two years after Heard sought a restraining order against him.
Heard said on Thursday that Depp kicked her to the ground in front of others, but that no one said anything or tried to stop it. She also described Depp as wildly jealous, saying he held a special contempt for actor James Franco.
“He hated James Franco,” said Heard. “He was accusing me of having a thing with him in the past, since I had filmed Pineapple Express with him.”
Heard also told the jury that she had become attached to Lily Rose and Jack, the two children Depp had with French model Vanessa Paradis, his ex-partner. She called them “these beautiful, wildly intelligent little weirdos... I was falling in love with them.”
In 2013, a then-14-year-old Lily Rose developed a “crush” on an unnamed “famous musician over the age of 18,” Heard said in court on Thursday.
“I didn’t agree that this gentleman... spend the night at the house,” Heard continued. “And I felt protective over Lily Rose, and concerned, and naturally, they’re not my children. And I understand that. So I understand why Johnny got so upset with me. But... she was so young, I just felt protective.”
After a fight, Depp always promised to change his ways, Heard testified.
In a 2014 text message to Heard, Depp said he had gone “too far,” and that he would put in “heavy work” with his therapist to fix things.
“I’m sorry for being less...” he wrote. “For your disappointment in me... For my behavior. I’m a fucking savage... Gotta lose that... Gonna lose that!!!”
The Aquaman actress started her testimony at the Fairfax County Circuit Court on Wednesday, saying, “I struggle to find the words to describe how painful this is. This is horrible for me to sit here for weeks and relive everything.”
She detailed the demise of their whirlwind relationship, saying that the first time Depp hit her, it “changed my life.”
“I was sitting on the couch having a normal conversation. He was drinking. I think he was using cocaine because there was a jar—a jar—of cocaine on the table. There’s music playing... and I ask him about the tattoo he has on his arm.”
The tattoo on Depp’s upper right arm initially read “Winona Forever,” in honor of his then fiancée Winona Ryder. However, when the pair split in 1993, he altered the tattoo to “Wino Forever.”
“To me, it looked like black marks, I didn’t know what it said,” Heard testified. “I said, ‘What does it say?‘ He said, ‘It says Wino,’ and I thought he was joking and I laughed. He slapped me across the face and I laughed.
“I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. I thought this must be a joke. Because I didn't know what was going on.”
She went on to detail several incidences of alleged physical and verbal abuse, including Depp performing a forced “cavity search” of her vagina in search of his cocaine.
Heard will return to the stand on May 16 after the trial takes a one-week break.