16 h 28 mar 2020 ano - IRISH INDEPENDENT He said... she said... and all of it was on tape: The changing terrain of Johnny and Amber's war

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He said... she said... and all of it was on tape: The changing terrain of Johnny and Amber's war

As two court cases relating to their marriage are postponed due to Covid-19, Donal Lynch reports on how the tables have turned in the feud between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

In front of a room packed with besuited lawyers, Amber Heard smiles, rolls her eyes and takes a dainty bite of a biscuit.
She is listening to a tape, made during her marriage to Johnny Depp, in which she admits "clocking" him. The tape captures a row in which the then-couple discuss an incident from their marriage. Amid the grainy audio Depp is heard to say: "I'd just been hit in the head with a f**king corner of the door. And then I stood up and then you f**king clock me."

On the tape Heard denies slamming the door into him intentionally but apologises on tape for deliberately hitting Depp, saying: "I just reacted and I'm sorry. It's below me."

Heard listens to all this with a smirking insouciance. Despite her blithe reaction on the deposition tape, which was made public earlier this month, it represented a dramatic change of momentum in the long-running feud between her and her former husband.

For a long time Heard had the upper hand in that war.

For a long time she was the blameless victim. Four months before the deposition was made, she appeared on the cover of People magazine. The photo showed bruising to her right eye and her lip, and the story that accompanied it cast Heard as a victim of domestic violence.

In a restraining order application against Depp, which was quoted by the magazine, she said the incident which led to the visible injuries was severe and she "truly feared that my life was in danger". Her lawyers claimed that she suffered "years of physical and mental abuse" at Depp's hands.

The photos and Heard's legal declarations were a powder keg which threatened to detonate Depp's career. His casting in the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was met with such headlines as "Everyone but Hollywood agrees Johnny Depp shouldn't be in Fantastic Beasts" (HuffPost) and "Why is Johnny Depp still employed, you ask?" (The Mary Sue).

In December 2017, when Harry Potter author JK Rowling issued a statement saying that she had initially been concerned about the allegations but was now "genuinely happy" with Depp's casting, having been reassured, she was herself excoriated.

Depp himself later said he felt bad for Rowling over the casting backlash, even as he seemed set to become a Hollywood pariah on a par with Roman Polanski.

Now, almost three years later, Depp seems to be enjoying, if not redemption, then certainly a public awareness that the conflict between him and Heard was not all that it seemed.

His legion of online supporters saw Heard's deposition video and her insouciant smile as proof that he, not she, had been the victim throughout their tumultuous marriage. And as both sides geared up for dramatic defamation lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic, it has muddied the waters of a story which had once seemed so cut and dry.

Six years ago Depp and Heard were one of the hottest couples in Hollywood. They had met in 2009 on the set of The Rum Diary, a Hunter S Thompson adaptation which got poor reviews and flopped at the box office. Depp was then in the dying throes of his 15-year relationship with French chanteuse Vanessa Paradis, and Heard, who had recently come out as bisexual, was happily dating photographer Tasya van Ree.

The former co-stars remained friends, and by 2012, it was being reported that they were an item.

At first the couple kept their romance out of the spotlight. Depp went solo at the London premiere of his film Lone Ranger in July 2013, but Heard flew to Europe and was spotted celebrating with him at a post-premiere meal. Depp described his new girlfriend as "a Southern belle and sweet as can be, and very good for me".

As 2014 got underway, rumours began to swirl that the couple were engaged. In the same week that Heard was seen trying to conceal a large diamond on her ring finger, rumours became official when Depp wore the ring himself during a trip to Beijing. "The fact that I'm wearing a chick's ring on my finger is probably a dead giveaway," he said, when asked. "Not very subtle."

They were legally married in Los Angeles before a more lavish event on Depp's private island in the Bahamas, where the ceremony took place under a flower-fringed canopy on the sand. Heard wore a white Stella McCartney gown and veil, Depp wore a black suit.

To the horror of his business manager, he had married without a pre-nup. According to a later lawsuit by his management company, he spent $1m on the wedding. They looked worth every cent, she a pouting sorority queen, he the spindly eccentric who also somehow managed to be a heartthrob. Yet it never really seemed like happily ever after.

For one thing it looked like Depp might be going broke. At one time this would have seemed impossible. He had been a major star since the early 1990s, mixing Hollywood blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean and Edward Scissorhands with charming indie fare like What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He became Tim Burton's muse (the director once said for his role as Willie Wonka, Depp channelled "one part Michael Jackson, one part Anna Wintour") and it's estimated that he made around $650m on films that netted $3.6bn.

Almost all of that appeared to go up in smoke through the noughties - amid antics like blasting Hunter S Thompson's ashes into space at a cost of $5m.

Depp would later sue his management company, TMG, who in their counter-suit would allege that the actor had a $2m-a-month compulsory-spending disorder, offering quips like "wine is not an investment if you drink it as soon as you buy it".

Depp was also giving every impression of having a mid-life crisis. His boyishness was gone, and if he was still handsome, it was only in glimpses. Rolling Stone, when it came to interview him, compared him variously to an ageing Dorian Gray and to Elvis in his last days.

Before Heard, it must be said, Depp's relationships with women were generally peaceful.

He has a list of exes that includes Kate Moss, Winona Ryder and Penelope Cruz. When Cruz told Depp she was pregnant (with husband Javier Bardem's child) right before the beginning of the shoot for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean, she wondered if she should drop out of the project.

Depp told her that was ridiculous. "He protected me every day, and by the end, I was six months pregnant," she later said. "I'll never forget that."

Ryder, with whom Depp formed one of the It couples of the 1990s, this year said: "I truly and honestly only know him as a really good man - an incredibly loving, extremely caring guy who was so very protective of me and the people that he loves, and I felt so very, very safe with him."

From the outside there weren't many clues that Heard and Depp's marriage was quite as tempestuous as later billed. Their notorious video of contrition, for instance, hardly seemed like Taylor and Burton territory.

The background was that in April 2015, Depp and Heard broke Australia's biosecurity laws when they flew their Yorkshire terriers into Queensland without placing them in quarantine. The case rumbled on for a year before the couple were issued with a fine and a warning. They recorded a cringe-inducing video in which Heard describes Australia as "a treasure trove of unique plants, animals and people".

There was at least some coordination involved between the couple, and Depp said that had Heard been arrested, he would have flown to Australia to have himself thrown in prison with her.

The end came at a moment of intense grief for Depp; the death of his mother. On May 20, 2015, the night after she died, he and Heard got into a fight. Heard reportedly called the couple's friend, Tillett Wright, an artist, and asked her to phone 911, alleging that she [Heard] had been assaulted by Depp.

"The reports of violence started with a kick on a private plane, then it was shoves and the occasional punch, until finally she described an all-out assault and she woke up with her pillow covered in blood," Wright later wrote.

"I know this because I went to their house. I saw the pillow with my own eyes. I saw the busted lip and the clumps of hair on the floor."

Two days later, on the eve of Depp's mother's funeral, Heard filed for divorce. The couple had been together barely 18 months. As the details were argued between lawyers, a tape, filmed in the couple's home, made its way into the hands of entertainment news site TMZ.

The film showed Depp smashing cabinets and pouring himself a glass of red wine. When he realised Heard was filming the incident, he appeared to grab her phone.

Depp's lawyers would later say that Heard's allegations of physical abuse were part of a tactic to force a financial settlement.

In the end she received a reported $7m payment in 2017 - which she donated to charity - and they both signed non-disclosure agreements. That August they released a joint statement which read, in part: "Our relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile but always bound by love. Neither party has made false accusations for financial gain. There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm."

And yet the war was to continue, in person and by proxy. Over the following years allegation and counter-allegation would surface in the press.

In December 2018, Heard wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post in which she said that she felt "the full force of our culture's wrath" for daring to speak out about domestic violence.

While never mentioning Depp by name, she compared the structures of protection around a powerful man to the Titanic, noting that when the ship "strikes an iceberg, there are a lot of people on board desperate to patch up holes - not because they believe in or even care about the ship, but because their own fates depend on the enterprise".

She said that as a consequence of her stand "friends and advisers told me I would never again work as an actress - that I would be blacklisted. A movie I was attached to recast my role. I had just shot a two-year campaign as the face of a global fashion brand, and the company dropped me."

Depp is suing Heard for $50m for defamation in the US over the content of this article. In the lawsuit he says Disney dropped him from the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise after the op-ed, which his attorneys claim Heard wrote in an attempt to "generate positive publicity for Ms Heard and advance her career".

The Depp legal team also suggested that the op-ed was released to promote Heard's film Aquaman, which was released just three days after the piece was published. The actor James Franco, who lived in the same building as Depp and Heard, was subpoenaed last year and has asked to give a sealed deposition when the case resumes again in August.

Meanwhile another defamation suit, this time against the Sun in London, has been delayed due to the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

In defending the case, the Sun's lawyers have produced a series of texts which they say show that Depp was indeed abusive toward Heard.

Depp's previous legal team accidentally shared an archive of 70,000 messages with the Sun's lawyers. One of these, to the actor Paul Bettany, read: "I'm gonna properly stop the booze thing, darling… Drank all night before I picked Amber up to fly to LA, this past Sunday… Ugly, mate… No food for days… powders… half a bottle of whiskey, a thousand red bull and vodkas, pills, 2 bottles of Champers on plane and what do you get???… An angry, aggro Injun in a f**kin' blackout, screaming obscenities and insulting any f**k who got near… I'm done… I am admittedly too f**ked in the head to spray my rage at the one I love… For little reason, as well I'm too old to be that guy. But, pills are fine!!!"

The texts undoubtedly reveal a man on the brink, but whether they show that he really was abusive toward Heard remains to be seen. The ongoing court cases, involving major publications, seem to reveal that the third party in their marriage was always the media; and as with the Harvey Weinstein case, their dispute seems pivotal to the #MeToo and #Time'sUp movements (one of Heard's lawyers is #Time'sUp legal defence fund co-founder Roberta Kaplan).

Their war has now dragged on far longer than their marriage. Both have since definitively moved on: Heard was last week pictured with her girlfriend Bianca Butti; Depp has had the tattoo he got during their marriage changed from 'Slim' (a pet name she had for him) to 'Scam'. But as accusation and counter-accusation fly in courtrooms on both sides of the Atlantic, real closure seems very far away for both of them.

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