Johnny Depp and Amber Heard: How everyone is a loser in this Hollywood blockbuster
ITV News Correspondent Juliet Bremner sat through the hearing and gave her thoughts once all the evidence had been presented
It has been an extraordinary three weeks in the Royal Courts of Justice suddenly, a building where legal disputes have been settled for hundreds of years became the temporary stage for a Hollywood blockbuster.
After Johnny Depp decided that in the #MeToo era being labelled “a wife beater” was simply too toxic, he took The Sun newspaper to court accusing them of libel.
He said that his reputation had been unfairly and untruthfully ruined and it could cost him his career in the film business.
The stakes were high but the blows were very low.
This was an unsavoury peek behind the curtain normally discreetly drawn across celebrity life and the picture that emerged wasn’t pretty.
Everyone knew that Johnny Depp was a hell-raiser; after all his heroes were the gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson and Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones.
However, in court we saw a man who had spent years fighting his duel demons of alcohol and drugs - both illegal and prescribed.
We heard about him snorting cocaine through a tampon applicator, taking MDMA (apparently the purest form of the drug ecstasy), and plenty of magic mushrooms .
There were also drugs prescribed by doctors that he became addicted to and all this was washed down with copious quantities of red wine and whiskey.
Johnny Depp, the star of Edward Scissorhands and the The Pirates of the Caribbean, was far removed from the person depicted in court.
Pictures showed him slumped in a corner with ice cream dribbling down his legs, we heard a long growling sound recorded on a phone or that even Mr Depp admitted was more “like an animal in pain” than a human.
In one particularly eye-watering episode he admitted using his own blood, from the end of his sliced off finger, mixed with paint to write graffiti on walls and mirror expressing his love and despair for Amber Heard.
Despite all this he remained adamant that he had never hit or physically abused his ex wife.
He tried to turn the tables, accusing Ms Heard of having a hot temper and provoking arguments and hitting him.
It seemed from his evidence that he was upset to find himself married to an ambitious woman who nagged him about getting sober and clean and who he accused of sleeping with other men.
For her part, Amber Heard claimed she never wanted to be dragged into this court case. She came as a witness and then described in appalling detail the alleged attacks on her.
She told the court about being dragged by her hair, punched so hard that a bed splintered beneath her and thinking her nose was broken when she was head butted in the face.
We heard about their gilded existence in not one penthouse but five linked suites in Los Angeles.
Friends lived here for free but none of this seemed to make Johnny and Amber happy.
It’s alleged that Mr Depp was very jealous, he hated her sex scenes with co-stars and accused her of numerous affairs with men and women, including Tesla founder Elon Musk and James Franco.
Theirs was described in court as “a complicated relationship".
But for most of us who listened to the evidence it seemed that this was a toxic and destructive union.
The trial was best summed up by American crisis manager Evan Nierman of Red Banyan, who said “everyone is a loser in this case".