Katherine “Kate” James has addressed the extreme working conditions she allegedly endured as a former personal assistant to Amber Heard.
During Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against his ex-wife on Thursday (14 April), Heard’s personal assistant answered questions – in a pre-recorded video deposition completed in February – regarding her past employment with the film star, which she said lasted from 2012 to 2015.
In the video, James explained that her job duties included “too many to mention” and when asked to summarise them she said: “I mean if you’re ready for a really really long time of me explaining all of the details that’s fine.”
“It’s everything you could possibly do to run someone’s life. It is grocery shopping, it is taking care of admin, it is running errands, it is getting the car fixed, it is getting the dogs groomed, it is picking up flowers, it is dealing with the decorator, it is dealing with the housekeeper,” she said.
She continued: “It is going on and on and on and on and it goes on every single day – arranging travel, dealing with all of the surplus stuff around the travel, booking all the greeters, dealing with the changing of travel, ok, liaising with people that she’s working with on films, updating her calendar accordingly, liaising with the people on set every single day to update her calendar to ensure that she knows what scenes she’s doing each day, what her call time is.
“Every day it’s something different. But it’s a lot. It’s a myriad of things that go across the board daily.”
The attorney further inquired about James’s salary, confirming that she was indeed paid by Heard.
“Very poorly,” James claimed. “She paid me $25 an hour to start off with and she finally agreed after screaming abuse at me that she would pay me $50,000 a year once I went to full time. This was after me working for well over 10 years as a personal assistant, so it was very insulting to me, but I did it anyway.”
Depp has sued Heard for alleged defamation over an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in 2018. Heard has filed a countersuit accusing Depp of allegedly orchestrating a “smear campaign” against her and describing his own lawsuit as a continuation of “abuse and harassment”.
The Virginia trial is expected to last for six weeks.
