The jury in the trial between Johnny Depp and ex-wife Amber Heard was shown a photo of Mr Depp asleep on a couch with ice cream spilt across his lap.
Mr Depp said he had worked a 17-hour day, taken some opioids, and that Ms Heard gave him the ice cream “because she knew what was going to happen”.
The defamation trial between Mr Depp and Ms Heard began on Monday 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”.
Mr Depp said the photo had been taken in Boston and that “Ms Heard asked me to hold the ice cream as she noticed that I was on the nod – that means falling asleep – from the 17-hour day that I had worked and also the opiates that I had ingested”.
“And if you’ll notice, my right hand is in my pocket, so I wasn’t participating in the festival of ice cream,” Mr Depp added. “I was holding her ice cream because she knew what was going to happen – that I would fall asleep and it would drop and that was a wonderful picture to take for her.”
Ms Heard’s lawyer Ben Rottenborn asked Mr Depp if it was her fault that the photo had been taken.
“She snapped it,” Mr Depp said.
In her 2018 op-ed, Ms Heard partly 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.
