Johnny Depp’s attorney Camille Vasquez has claimed that he only decided to appeal the outcome of his defamation case because his ex-wife Amber Heard did first.
Ms Vasquez opened up about the ongoing legal saga in a sit-down interview with CBS Morning’s Gayle King on Thursday morning, one week after the former spouses both filed motions to appeal against their multi-million-dollar defamation awards.
The firebrand attorney, who shot to fame and gained a bizarre fan following through her involvement in the case, told Ms King that the Pirates of the Caribbean star would have moved on from the case if Ms Heard didn’t insist on “continuing to litigate this matter”.
“Is it safe to say if she hadn’t appealed y’all would not have appealed either? You would have moved on?” asked Ms King.
“Yes,” Ms Vasquez responded, adding that “that is a very fair statement”.
However, Ms Vasquez said that Ms Heard’s move to appeal didn’t come as a surprise to Mr Depp’s legal team.
“It was expected,” she said. “I mean she’s indicated since the day she lost the trial that she was going to appeal.”
Mr Depp’s legal team had planned its own strategy for when the Aquaman actor filed an appeal, she said, and so responded by filing his own appeal less than 24 hours later.
“She insists on continuing to litigate this matter,” said Ms Vasquez. “We have to protect our client’s interests.”
Ms King went on to question Ms Vasquez about previous comments made by Mr Depp and his legal team, where they insisted that the case was “never about money” and that he wanted both sides to “heal” and “move on”.
“How do heal and move on when both sides are still in court arguing?” she asked.
Ms Vasquez responded that “it’s pretty standard legal procedure”, saying: “We’re hopeful that the court will uphold the verdict, which we think was the right verdict, and allow both parties to move on.”
Ms Heard’s legal team told CBS that it was not commenting at this time.
Mr Depp sued his ex-wife for defamation over a 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post where she described herself as a victim of domestic abuse and spoke of feeling “the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out”.
Following the dramatic televised trial, a jury of seven determined in June that Ms Heard had defamed him on all three counts.
Jurors awarded Mr Depp $10m in compensatory damages and $5m in punitive damages, before Fairfax County Circuit Judge Penney Azcarate reduced the latter to the state’s legal limit of $350,000.
Ms Heard won one of her three counterclaims against her ex-husband, with the jury finding that Mr Depp – via his lawyer Adam Waldman – defamed her by branding her allegations about a 2016 incident “an ambush, a hoax”.
She was awarded $2m in compensatory damages but $0 in punitive damages, leaving the Aquaman actor $8.35m out of pocket.
Last Thursday, Ms Heard filed an appeal against the $10.35m award with her attorneys arguing that they believe “the court made errors that prevented a just and fair verdict consistent with the First Amendment”.
The following day, Mr Depp filed a notice to appeal the $2m defamation award the jury ordered him to pay his ex-wife.
