Amber Heard has said that Johnny Depp fulfilled his promise for “global humiliation” and added that she’s “not a good victim”.
In her first interview since a jury sided with Mr Depp in the couple’s bombshell defamation trial, Ms Heard was asked by NBC’s Savannah Guthrie: “There’s a text message where Johnny promises total global humiliation for you. Do you feel like that came true?”
“I know he promised it, I testified to this,” Ms Heard said. “I’m not a good victim, I get it. I’m not a likeable victim, I’m not a perfect victim, but when I testified I asked the jury to just see me as human and hear his own words, which is a promise to do this. It feels as though he has.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Ms Heard shared her fear that Mr Depp could sue her again over remarks made after the trial.
“I’m scared that no matter what I do, no matter what I say or how I say it, every step I take will present another opportunity for this sort of silencing,” she said. “Which is what I guess a defamation lawsuit is meant to do, it’s meant to take your voice.”
Of the claims she made that sparked her legal battle with Mr Depp, she added: “I took for granted what I assumed was my right to speak.”
A jury handed down the verdict on 1 June in the defamation trial between the former married couple, awarding Mr Depp $8.35m after they determined Ms Heard defamed him in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, in which she claimed to be a domestic abuse survivor.
In the piece entitled “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change”, Ms Heard wrote that “like many women, I had been harassed and sexually assaulted by the time I was of college age. But I kept quiet — I did not expect filing complaints to bring justice. And I didn’t see myself as a victim”.
“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,” she added.
While Mr Depp wasn’t named in the piece, his legal team argued that it contained a “clear implication that Mr Depp is a domestic abuser”, which they said was “categorically and demonstrably false”.
Mr Depp was awarded $10.35m in damages in total because Virginia state law caps punitive damages at $350,000. Ms Heard was awarded $2m in compensatory damages because of comments made by Mr Depp’s previous lawyer.
Speaking to Ms Guthrie in the second instalment of her interview on Wednesday, Ms Heard reiterated that her op-ed was “not about Johnny”.
Asked why she wrote it more than two years after their divorce, she said: “Because the op-ed wasn’t about my relationship with Johnny.”
Pressed by Ms Guthrie, who called it “unmistakable”, Ms Heard said it was about “loaning my voice to a bigger cultural conversation we were having at the time”.
She went on to say she “absolutely” still loves her ex-husband.
“Absolutely. I love him. I loved him with all my heart,” she said. “I have no bad feelings or ill will toward him at all.”
“I tried the best I could to make a deeply broken relationship work. And I couldn’t. I have no bad feelings or ill will toward him at all.”
Ms Heard’s lawyer has previously said she plans to appeal the verdict.
The interview with Ms Heard will be broadcast on Dateline NBC at 8pm ET on Friday and the programme is available on Peacock.
