The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard abuse allegations have introduced another A-lister into the mix: actor James Franco. Lift surveillance footage has surfaced from the building that Heard and Depp used to live in together, which reportedly shows Heard and Franco together 24 hours after she claimed Depp threw a phone at her face in 2016.
Depp filed a $50 million defamation suit against his former wife earlier this March, claiming that her framing of his alleged abuse was “an elaborate hoax to generate positive publicity [for Heard]” and damaged his career. Depp’s lawyers have since announced they are planning to subpoena Franco.
In the video obtained by The Blast dated May 22, 2016, Heard can be seen entering a lift in a bathrobe. After leaving the lift to what Yahoo claims is the parking area of the building, she is seen re-entering with Franco. While initially Heard stands at the opposite end of the lift, she eventually approaches Franco who then appears to lay his head on her shoulder as they talk.
The pair then leave together on what is believed to be the penthouse floor, where Depp and Heard lived together. Throughout the entire video, Franco shields his face from the surveillance camera with a baseball cap and Heard also appears to deliberately hide her face with her hair.
Yahoo matched the exact hat that Franco is wearing in the video to one that Franco was seen wearing in a similar time period, more specifically at a May 14, 2016 book signing in Los Angeles.
Based on the video, Depp’s lawyers told The Blast that they would be subpoenaing Franco to testify about whether or not Heard’s face appeared to be bruised in his encounter with her. Heard, who has previously written about living as a survivor of domestic violence for the Washington Post, appeared in court in the same month with bruises on her face. However Depp claimed earlier this May 2019 that she had ”painted on ‘bruises’”.
Lawyers for Depp said, “We are interested in James Franco and Elon Musk as fact witnesses because we have evidence they are men who saw Amber Heard’s face in the days and nights between when she claimed Mr. Depp smashed her in the face on May 21 [in 2016] and when she went to court with painted on ‘bruises’ to obtain a temporary restraining order on May 27.”
Depp’s team announced earlier this April that they had issued a subpoena to “Amber Heard, her hoax assisting friends, Elon Musk and other witnesses”, which makes Franco the latest in a long list to be pulled into the case.
Speaking to Fox News, Heard’s lawyer Eric George said, “This bogus story is just another lame attempt by Johnny Depp and his team to spread deliberately misleading information through the tabloid media so that he can continue to attack and abuse his ex-wife.”
George continued that the pair “once lived in the same apartment complex and were simply taking an elevator at the same time”, confirming that the man in the video was indeed Franco. George also called the attempt to subpoena Franco “pathetic”.
Depp’s defamation suit hinges on an op-ed that Heard wrote for the Washington Post titled “I spoke up against sexual violence - and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.”
In the piece, Heard claims that she “became a public figure representing domestic abuse” after alleging that she had been domestically abused by Depp. She also claimed that her career had suffered as a result and that she saw “in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse”, adding that she received weekly death threats as a result.
While Depp is never named in the piece, his lawyers claimed that the op-ed “depends on the central premise that Ms.Heard was a domestic abuse victim and that Mr. Depp perpetrated domestic violence against her”.
In response to the $50 million defamation suit, Heard claimed that Depp’s reported dependency on drugs and alcohol a year into their marriage turned him into “the Monster”. She detailed instances of alleged abuse at his hands, saying that he first hit her in 2012/2013 after laughing at something he said. Franco’s name came up again as she claimed that in 2014, Depp reportedly kicked and threw objects at her after becoming angry that she was filming with James Franco.
She wrote, “At some point I stood up, and Johnny kicked me in the back, causing me to fall over. Johnny threw his boot at me while I was on the ground. Johnny continued to scream obscenities until he went into the plane bathroom and passed out locked in the bathroom for the remainder of the flight.”
Depp has since said that there is “no truth to it whatsoever” and said that he would “never stop fighting” Heard’s domestic abuse claims in an interview with British GQ.
His suit also claims that Hears is a “perpetrator” of domestic abuse and claimed that her abuse claims were “conclusively refuted by two separate responding police officers,a litany of neutral third-party witnesses, and 87 newly obtained surveillance camera videos".
Heard’s lawyers said in response that Heard would “not be silenced”.
