Heard denies affair with Elon Musk and lying about alleged injuries at Johnny Depp libel trial
Video report and words by ITV Correspondent Juliet Bremner
Amber Heard has insisted that she did not have an affair with the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk during her marriage to Johnny Depp.
Asked by Mr Depp’s lawyers if she had a relationship with him, the 34-year-old actor replied: “No - not that it matters.”
Juliet Bremner reports from outside the High Court in London
It was suggested by Mr Depp’s legal team that he was not “illogically jealous”, that he had a reason to suspect that she was having an illicit relationship with Mr Musk while they were still married.
She said that she only started to communicate with Elon Musk in 2016.
“We were friends at this moment, we had just become friends,” she said.
The court was read a series of text messages between the Ms Heard and Mr Musk when he offered her 24/7 security if she needed it.
The court was also shown a video of Ms Heard in the lift at their penthouse apartments in Los Angeles with her friend and co-star actor James Franco.
They were filmed arriving at the apartment at 11pm on the night after Ms Heard had a violent argument with Mr Depp when she alleged he had harmed her by throwing a telephone in her face.
She told the court that when Mr Franco saw her face he had said: “Oh my God what happened to you? "What the f***?”
Ms Heard admitted they had turned away from the camera to have “a discreet conversation”.
Ms Heard was also challenged about her alleged injuries. She has shown the court several photographs with injuries she claims were inflicted by Mr Depp.
But in court video, she was shown going to the hotel reception and the mail room with the concierge who earlier told the court he had not seen any injury.
She was taken through the days following the alleged attack on 21 May 2016 when various people, including Isaac Baruch who lived in one of the penthouses, the cleaner Hilda Vargas, her stylist Samantha McMillan and interior designer Laura Divenere, have all told the court that they could see no sign of physical violence on her face.
Ms Heard said that she had been wearing make-up on several occasions and that she couldn’t recall if she had seen some of the claimed witnesses.
She insisted her face did have red marks on it.
"I don’t know what they saw or didn’t see,” she told the court.
Ms Heard told the court she wanted privacy when she filed for divorce, adding she was trying to save her then husband from the “embarrassment” of going public.
“I didn’t want to do this to him, to do this to us," she said, referring to details of their relationship when she claims the 57-year-old actor had repeatedly abused and injured her.
She described Mr Depp’s view that he was some kind of victim as “skewed” and “absurd.”
“He knew better, I knew better - I didn’t want him to do this because it would all come out,” she said when speaking about a phone conversation with Mr Depp about the divorce.
She agreed that she “had become angry at times” during the call because she claimed she was “heartbroken.”
Ms Heard admitted that during the conversation in May 2016 they had spoken about violence towards Mr Depp when she threw an object at him.
“That’s not what we were talking about. I was just trying to point out to him how violent, how nasty this whole thing had been,” she told the court.
The Sun newspaper, which is being sued for libel after calling Mr Depp “a wife beater”, and Ms Heard are relying on 14 incidents of alleged violence against her.
Amber Heard has admitted that she once hit her then husband Johnny Depp but insists she was defending her younger sister.
During an incident at their apartment Ms Heard was accused of being “very violent” but the actor said she was only ever violent "in defence of myself and my sister".
Mr Depp’s lawyers suggested Ms Heard spat at Depp and threw a can of Red Bull at him, but she denied ever spitting at anyone, adding "I don't even drink Red Bull”.
But Ms Heard did admit that she hit Mr Depp in the face.
”I did strike Johnny that day, in defence of my sister".
Ms Heard claimed the reason for this was that she had "heard the rumour he pushed an ex-girlfriend down the stairs - I think it was Kate Moss - and that was fresh in my mind... So I reacted quickly."
She went on: "I have been Johnny's punching bag for years... And I remember this, as it was the first incident when I ever struck him back.”
There has been a bad tempered exchange in court over an alleged fight when Heard claims she was hit in the face by Depp and her blood splattered on the walls.
She has told the court about an alleged violent incident in March 2013 when she said that Mr Depp became jealous about a painting from her ex-wife, Tasya Van Ree, and, she claims, lashed out at her.
She says that his heavy rings hit her in the mouth and the blood from the injury hit the wall.
Asked by Mr Depp’s legal representative Eleanor Laws QC to describe how the blood got on the wall, Ms Heard “He back handed me… I felt his ring hit my face and my teeth.”
She was repeatedly pressed to describe the blood splatter but said she could not recall it.
“That's because there was no blood on the wall, was there?” Ms Laws said. She replied: “That’s not true.”
Ms Heard has been accused of deliberately changing dates of the attacks to explain why no visible injuries were apparent on photographs shown to the court.
She was shown a picture of her and Johnny Depp with Keith Richards taken shortly after the alleged incident and it was put to her that there was no obvious sign of an injury.
When shown this picture in court, Ms Heard said: “I can’t tell if there is any injury”. She admitted that she had made a mistake about the date of this alleged attack in her original statement and that it had actually happened two weeks earlier.
It was suggested by Ms Laws that she had done this to explain why she had no obvious injury.
Ms Heard now claims that there was an earlier incident which she refers to in court as “the disco blood bath incident” and this was when her face was hit so hard she had bled.
She says the confusion occurred because “he hit me a lot in March.”
However Ms Laws produced her sister Whitney’s statement which talks about Amber having “a split lip” after the argument over Tasya’s picture, the day before the photograph of her and Keith Richards.