Amber Heard has announced on Instagram that she has decided to settle the defamation case brought against her by Johnny Depp in Virginia. The 36-year-old actor said the ‘very difficult decision’ comes after losing faith in the American legal system.
‘It’s important for me to say that I never chose this,’ Heard wrote on Instagram. ‘I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed. The vilification I have faced on social media is an amplified version of the ways in which women are re-victimised when they come forward. Now I finally have an opportunity to emancipate myself from something I attempted to leave over six years ago.’
Heard went on to explain that she has made no admissions in the settlement, nor are there any restrictions or gags on her voice moving forward. ‘This is not an act of concession,’ she said.
However, Heard says that she has lost faith in the American legal system after unprotected testimony ‘served as entertainment and social media fodder.’
In June, after the Depp vs Heard verdict found that Heard defamed Depp three times in her 2018 Washington Post op-ed and Depp defamed Heard once when his attorney Adam Waldman referred to her allegations as ‘an abuse hoax’, domestic abuse charity Refuge put out a statement warning about the harrowing way the trial was used as content on social media.
‘The verdict sends a chilling message to many survivors of domestic abuse that their experiences are invalid and open to public scrutiny,’ CEO Ruth Davidson said.
Now, Amber has condemned the legal system in the US and compared it to the UK system, which is where the 2018 Depp vs News Group Newspapers Ltd took place. In that case, Depp brought a libel suit against NGN for labelling him a ‘wife beater’ in a 2018 article, but the presiding judge ruled that ‘the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms. Heard by Mr. Depp [12 out of the 14] have been proved to the civil standard’ and rejected his claim of a hoax, accepting that allegations Heard had made against Depp had damaged her career and activism. Depp appealed the verdict but was rejected in March 2021.
‘When I stood before a judge in the UK, I was vindicated [and] protected from having to give the worst moments of my testimony in front of the world’s media, and where the court found that I was subjected to domestic and sexual violence,’ Heard said.
In the US however, Heard says it was a different story and that even if her US appeal was successful, she would be forced to endure a re-trial saying, ‘I simply cannot go through that for a third time.’
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Attorneys for Mr Depp, Benjamin Chew and Camille Vasquez released a statement saying: 'We are pleased to formally close the door on this painful chapter for Mr. Depp, who made clear throughout this process that his priority was about bringing the truth to light. The jury's unanimous decision and the resulting judgement in Mr. Depp's favor against Ms. Heard remain fully in place. The payment of $1M - which Mr. Depp is pledging and will (actually) donate to charities - reinforces Ms. Heard's acknowledgement of the conclusion of the legal system's rigorous pursuit for justice.'