10h 30min, jul 27, 2020 y - THE TIMES Johnny Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman accused of dishonesty

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Johnny Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman accused of dishonesty

By David Brown

Johnny Depp’s Hollywood lawyer was accused of preparing “false witness statements” for the actor’s libel claim.

Adam Waldman arranged leaks to the media and was instrumental in obtaining evidence for Depp’s case after The Sun accused the actor of being a “wife beater”, the High Court was told.

Sasha Wass, QC, for News Group Newspapers, the publisher of The Sun, said “the brute force of Mr Depp’s PR machine is deployed” after his wife, Amber Heard, secured a domestic violence restraining order in May 2016.

The QC said that Mr Waldman was “prepared to deploy threats and improper tactics to secure [Depp’s] objective of ‘burning’ Ms Heard and subjecting her to ‘total global humiliation’”.

Sean Bett, Depp’s security guard, claimed to have produced a photograph he said he had taken showing Depp injured by Heard after her 30th birthday dinner in April 2016. Information on the digital photograph showed that it was taken a year earlier, when Heard admitted punching Depp because she feared he was about to push her sister down a flight of stairs, the court was told.

Mr Bett, a former Los Angeles police officer, said that he had been sent the photograph by Mr Waldman and had not realised it was from a different date as it looked similar to one he had taken. Ms Wass said that this was an example of Depp’s employees “forging evidence on his behalf”. She added: “It is looking like, more and more, that witness statements have been prepared by Adam Waldman — false witness statements.”

Mr Waldman, who attended the High Court hearing, was accused by the defence team earlier in the trial of posting “macabre, threatening and sinister” messages about witnesses. He wrote “in memoriam” above tweets about evidence relating to Laura Divenere, an interior decorator, and Amanda de Cadenet, the British TV presenter.

David Sherborne, for Depp, said that Mr Waldman had written “in memoriam” in relation to posts that highlighted “Ms Heard’s lies” which have been “put to bed”. Mr Justice Nicol said that the use of the phrase was “unwelcome”.

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