What did Amber Heard say about settling her multi-million-dollar defamation suit with Johnny Depp?
The saga of the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp defamation lawsuit has come to an end with the former throwing in the towel on the appeal on her courtroom loss.
The nation and the world were gripped by the dueling defamation lawsuit trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp that played out in a Virginia courtroom this past spring. The seven-member jury found both party’s guilty of libel but awarded the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ star a total of $15 million in damages and the ‘Aquaman’ actress $2 million.
Edward Scissorhonds’ ex-wife appealed the June verdict with her lawyers citing “errors” made by the court. However, in a statement posted on Instagram on Monday she announced that “after a great deal of deliberation” she “made the very difficult decision to settle the defamation case brought against me by my ex-husband in Virginia.”
Amber Heard is still defiant: “This is not an act of concession”
Depp sued Heard for an op-ed article that she wrote in 2018, published in the Washington Post, titled “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.” Although she never mentioned her famous ex-husband by name, the Fairfax County jury found that she had maliciously defamed Depp resulting in the multi-million-dollar award to him.
In her statement, the Hollywood actress said that she has “made no admission. This is not an act of concession. There are no restrictions or gags with respect to my voice moving forward.”
Freedom for Depp’s ex-wife
Just as her ex-husband said after winning his lawsuit that “the jury gave me my life back,” so too does Heard feel similarly after her decision to put an end to the saga.
“Now I finally have an opportunity to emancipate myself from something I attempted to leave over six years ago and on terms I can agree to,” she wrote. “I make this decision having lost faith in the American legal system, where my unprotected testimony served as entertainment and social media fodder.”
“It’s important for me to say that I never chose this. I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed,” she said. “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.”
What are the details of the settlement?
Although Heard was ordered by the jury to pay Depp $15 million in damages, $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages, the latter sum was reduced to comply with a statutory cap placing it at $350,000. Minus the $2 million that the embodiment of Jack Sparrow was ordered to pay to his ex-wife, that left her with a balance of $8.35 million.
However, according to Benjamin Chew and Camille Vasquez, Depp’s lawyers “this was never about the money.” The attorneys said that the actress will only have to pay $1 million. In a statement they said that “Mr Depp is pledging and will (actually) donate to charities.”