Former Depp estate manager tells court Amber Heard abuse pictures were a 'hoax'
Words by ITV News Correspondent Juliet Bremner
The estate manager who was called to the penthouse suite that Johnny Depp shared with Amber Heard after an alleged fight has told the court he saw no physical sign of an attack on Ms Heard.
Kevin Murphy who looked after their penthouses in Los Angeles said that Ms Heard had called him up and he found her sitting on the bed crying.
She claimed that Mr Depp had attacked her and pulled her hair out.
However, he told the court that he had become suspicious because she was wearing no make-up and “there were no marks, no bruising, no redness, no sign of a physical confrontation”.
Mr Murphy was then shown a photograph of Amber Heard with bruising under her eyes which metadata proved was taken on the same day December 16th, 2015.
When asked if that was how Ms Heard had looked when he saw her, he replied, “I am not an expert on bruising, but I reiterate that when I saw her there were no marks, no bruises, no redness.”
He admitted that he saw a clump of hair on the floor which Amber told him Johnny Depp had pulled out during a fight and he saw a broken bed which she said had been caused by Johnny punching her violently.
But he indicated that he did not believe her because there was no physical evidence to support her claims.
Mr Murphy told the court he had taken his own photographs of the clump of hair and the broken bed and they were not the same as Ms Heard’s photographs.
He told the court that he believed it was a set up or hoax.
Asked by Sasha Wass QC for the Sun “are you suggesting some sort of conspiracy, some sort of fraud?” Mr Murphy replied, “I am not suggesting, I am saying it was some sort of hoax.”
The court has been told that allegations that Amber Heard defecated in the bed of her then husband Johnny Depp were false and were intended “to make Ms Heard look disgusting and absurd”.
The court heard that a photograph of the mess that was left in his bed was sent to Kevin Murphy by the cleaner who told him she believed it was human faeces.
Sasha Wass indicated that it could have been the dog Boo who had left the deposit, but Mr Murphy disagreed as he felt it was too large.
Text messages between Mr Depp and Ms Heard were shown to the court, one text from Depp read “my wife left a poop on my bed. Amber Turd. Ha ha ha”, which Ms Wass said showed that he had a “lavatorial sense of humour.”
Mr Murphy said that when Johnny Depp told him about the faeces “he was very upset” adding “he was not joking at that moment.”
Mr Murphy claims that Amber Heard said to him that it “was just a harmless prank “but it was alleged that he had made this up.
Sasha Wass QC said: “That conversation never took place, it was to make Ms Heard look disgusting and absurd in the public eye.” But the estate manager said, “that’s not true.”
Johnny Depp, 57, is suing The Sun's publisher News Group Newspapers (NGN) and its executive editor Dan Wootton over a 2018 article that labelled him a "wife beater".