In the wake of the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard defamation trial, the Washington Post has affixed an editor’s note to the December 2018 op-ed in which Heard made the defamatory claims.
Since 2016, Heard has claimed to have “endured excessive emotional, verbal and physical abuse from Johnny, which has included angry, hostile, humiliating and threatening assaults to me whenever I questioned his authority or disagreed with him.”
While Heard did not explicitly mention Depp in the op-ed, titled “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change,” her public break-up with the movie star left little doubt about whom she was referring to.
The editor’s note reads:
In 2019, Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation arising out of this 2018 op-ed. On June 1, 2022, following a trial in Fairfax County, Va., Circuit Court, a jury found Heard liable on three counts for the following statements, which Depp claimed were false and defamatory: (1) “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.” (2) “Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” (3) “I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.” The jury separately found that Depp, through his lawyer Adam Waldman, defamed Heard in one of three counts in her countersuit.
Depp was awarded $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages from Heard by the jury, which found that all three statements identified in the note were false, defamatory, and made with actual malice. Heard was awarded $2 million in punitive damages for a defamatory statement made by one of Depp’s attorneys. Depp is owed $10,350,000 while Heard is owed $350,000, since Virginia has a $350,000 limit on punitive damages.
Previously, Depp had lost a defamation suit in the United Kingdom against the British tabloid the Sun, which called him a “wife beater.”
Testimony from ACLU general counsel Terence Dougherty in the Depp–Heard trial revealed that the organization had named the actress an ambassador for women’s rights and helped draft the Heard op-ed as well as placing it in the Post. It also revealed that Heard had directly paid only $350,00 of the $3.5 million she had pledged to the ACLU. (Other ACLU donations were made on her behalf from investment funds, one of which was “believed” to be “set up by Elon Musk,” according to court testimony from Dougherty.)
During the trial, Depp alleged that it was Heard who was the abuser in their 15-month marriage, recounting instances of her defecating on his bed and throwing a vodka bottle at him, which shattered on impact and cut off the tip of his finger, requiring surgery and a cast. Depp issued a statement after the verdict proclaiming that “truth never perishes.”
Theoretically, the Post also could be sued for having published the Heard op-ed, but Depp would need to prove that the paper knew Heard’s claims were false when it made the decision to run the article.
The Post did not respond when asked whether they will be revising their internal processes to avoid publishing defamatory claims in the future.