Amber Heard 'abuse' started a month after her wedding to Johnny Depp, High Court hears
Video report and words by ITV News Correspondent Juliet Bremner
As the third day of Johnny Depp's libel trial against The Sun continues, the court heard that a month after the wedding, Johnny Depp allegedly subjected his new wife to a three-day ordeal of physical assault that left her with various injuries including a split lip, swollen nose and cuts all over her body.
Mr Depp had gone to Australia to film one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films while Amber Heard filmed London Fields with Billy Bob Thornton in Britain. She joined him in Australia in March 2015.
When the allegations were put to him in court today, he said: “I would go so far as to say it’s all fiction.”
There were a series of texts between Depp and his assistant while they were in Australia which suggest that they were looking for or had got hold of cocaine and ecstasy.
One of the texts from his assistant Nathan Holmes spoke about “coke” and “happy pills” but when Mr Depp was asked to explain what he was talking about in the texts he replied: “I can’t explain it. Is it possible he bought it and put it somewhere and I wasn’t aware of it?”
Mr Depp insists he was not using illegal drugs at this time but was taking various medication prescribed by his doctors to help with his detox process.
“I never took possession of cocaine in Australia … I know we didn’t get either ecstasy or cocaine.” He suggested the “happy pills” may refer to his medication.
Amber Heard said the violence started in Australia after she tried to stop Mr Depp from taking ecstasy pills.
She snatched the bag of pills from him and it is alleged this is when he pushed her into the fridge and slapped her.
As the argument escalated, it is claimed that Mr Depp grabbed Ms Heard around the throat and held her up against the fridge telling her that it would be easy to crush her neck. He replied: “Fabricated and malicious.”
It’s further alleged that when she tried to snatch the bottle of Jack Daniels from him, this “set him off” and he threw bottle after bottle at her while he screamed “I hate you”. She escaped by barricading herself in a bedroom.
Amber Heard claims that in his rage and “completely off his face” he ripped a retro style telephone from the wall and smashed it, which severed the end of his index finger.
Ms Heard claims that she only realised that Mr Depp had injured himself when she came downstairs.
She also saw that the house had “been destroyed” with the windows smashed and described in court as “complete carnage”.
However, Mr Depp insists that he was the victim and that his fingertip was severed when Ms Heard threw a bottle of vodka at him which smashed.
“After Ms Heard threw the second bottle of vodka at me which severed the tip of my finger that is when I started to have a nervous breakdown,” he said.
Asked if he was very upset Mr Depp replied: “I had just lost the tip of my finger, it’s a little upsetting when you see the bone sticking out.”
He was shown photographs of graffiti on the walls partly written in his blood. He accepted that he had written some of the text which had a reference in it to the Carly Simon song Nobody Does It Better and which said, “good luck.”
Explaining why he had written this, he said: “For me, it was the end. The end end. I was convinced it was not going to get any better and it should end,” referring to his marriage to Amber Heard.
He clarified this by saying he thought he was having a breakdown and “I didn’t want to live”.
Asked if he had delayed going to hospital because he was unaware of the pain after taking alcohol and drugs, he said: “That’s not true. I knew exactly what I was doing.”
He told the court that he had not drunk alcohol for at least nine months and he only started to drink again on the night of the fight, which he insists lasted for one day not three days.