WARNING: This article contains allegations of physical and sexual violence that some readers may find distressing.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard nearly ran into each other as the court took a break shortly after her testimony on an alleged sexual assault by Mr Depp.
Court security stopped Mr Depp from walking out of the courtroom at the break, allowing Ms Heard to leave the witness stand and head back to her legal team on the other side of the room.
The former married couple appeared to make brief eye contact.
The moment came not long after Ms Heard gave harrowing testimony, claiming that Mr Depp sexually assaulted her with a vodka bottle.
“He was throwing these bottles, one after the other, and I felt glass breaking behind me,” she said, adding that he ripped off her nightgown.
“He’s screaming at me that he hates me and that I ruined his life,” Ms Heard said. “I f***ing hate you, you ruined my f***ing life,” she quoted him as yelling.
Ms Heard said Mr Depp’s eyes went “black” and that she “couldn’t see him anymore”.
“I’ve never been so scared in my entire life,” she added. Ms Heard said Mr Depp was on top of her and that she tried to tell him that he was “really hurting me”.
“I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t get through to him, I couldn’t get up ... I don’t know what happened next,” Ms Heard said.
“I could feel this pressure on my pubic bone,” she added, saying that it “looked like” Mr Depp was “punching” her, adding that there were “broken bottles, broken glass” all over the room.
She said she didn’t want to move “because I didn’t know if it was broken, I didn’t know if the bottle that he had inside me was broken”.
“I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t feel pain,” she added, saying that she remember thinking “please God, I hope it’s not broken”.
“I don’t know how that ended,” Ms Heard said, adding that she remembers being in the bathroom “retching” and that she “lost control of my bladder”.
“There was blood on the floor,” she said, adding that she took sleeping pills to fall asleep that night.
Mr Depp’s testimony concerning the same incident, which occurred in Australia in 2015, tells a different story.
Mr Depp said, “I was a mess, I was a wreck, I was shaking” as he tried to avoid Ms Heard.
He recalled pouring himself two or three “stiff shots of vodka”, adding that it was the “first taste of alcohol I had had for a long time”.
The actor said Ms Heard yelled “oh, you’re drinking again” when she found him.
“She walked up to me, grabbed the bottle of vodka and then just stood back and hurled it at me,” he said. “It just went right past my head and smashed behind me.”
Mr Depp testified that he grabbed another, larger bottle of vodka and poured himself another shot as Ms Heard was “flinging insults left, right, and centre”.
“She then grabbed that bottle and threw that at me,” Mr Depp said, demonstrating to the jury how he was sitting at the time. He said his fingers were resting on the edge of the bar and that the large vodka bottle “made contact and shattered everywhere”.
“I felt no pain at first all,” he said. “I felt heat and as if something was dripping down my hand.”
“I was looking directly at my bones sticking out,” he added. “Blood was just pouring out.”
“I don’t know what a nervous breakdown feels like, but that’s probably the closest that I’ve ever been,” he said. “Nothing made sense and I knew in my mind and in my heart that this is not life.”
“No one should have to go through this,” he added.
Being in the middle of something like a nervous breakdown, Mr Depp said he started “to write in my own blood on the walls”.
The defamation trial between Mr Depp and Ms Heard began on 11 April in Fairfax, Virginia following Mr Depp’s lawsuit against his ex-wife in March 2019. Mr Depp is arguing that she defamed him in a December 2018 op-ed published in The Washington Post titled “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change”.
In the op-ed, 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 at the time.
While Mr Depp isn’t named in the piece, his legal team argues that it contains a “clear implication that Mr Depp is a domestic abuser”, which they say is “categorically and demonstrably false”. Mr Depp is seeking damages of “not less than $50m”.
Ms Heard has filed a $100m counterclaim against Mr Depp for nuisance and immunity from his allegations.
