Amber Heard will “absolutely” appeal the verdict reached this week in her defamation trial against ex-husband Johnny Depp. Her attorney announced Thursday morning.
Elaine Bredehoft, who represented the “Aquaman” actor at the trial in Fairfax, Va., told NBC’s “Today” show that her client has “excellent grounds” for an appeal after a jury awarded $15 million in damages to Depp and $2 million in damages to Heard. (Judge Penney Azcarate reduced Depp’s total to about $10.4 million, per Virginia’s statutory cap.)
Depp previously lost a similar libel case against the Sun tabloid in London, where a justice ruled in 2020 that “the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms. Heard by Mr. Depp have been proved to the civil standard.”
“We even had tried to get the U.K. judgment in to dismiss his case because he already had his shot,” Bredehoft told “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie. “That’s one of the issues. But also … there was so much evidence that did not come in.”
In 2019, Depp filed a $50-million defamation lawsuit against Amber based on a 2018 op-ed Heard wrote for the Washington Post in which she called herself “a public figure representing domestic abuse” but did not mention Depp by name.