Amber Heard has settled the highly-publicised defamation case made against her by former husband Johnny Depp. Taking to Instagram overnight the actress described the “very difficult” decision.
“It’s important for me to say that I never chose this,” she wrote in a post. “I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed. The vilification I have faced on social media is an amplified version of the ways in which women are re-victimized when they come forward.
“Now I finally have an opportunity to emancipate myself from something I attempted to leave over six years ago and on terms I can agree to. I have made no admission. This is not an act of concession. There are no restrictions or gags with respect to my voice moving forward.”
Heard was ordered to pay $10 million USD in compensatory damages and $5 million USD in punitive damages after a jury unanimously agreed that Heard libelled her ex-husband by writing the infamous 2018 op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “I spoke up against sexual violence and faced our culture’s wrath”.
She won just one of six claims after she countersued the Pirates of the Caribbean alum, claiming his lawyer Adam Waldman made statements on his behalf that lost her work. She is set to receive $2 million USD in damages.
The news comes after the actress had initially planned to appeal the decision.
In a post-trial interview the Aquaman actress criticised social media and the impact it had on the court proceedings. Speaking to NBC News Today, she said, “But even somebody who is sure I am deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I am lying, you still couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there’s been a fair representation. You can not tell me that you think this has been fair.”
In 2020 Depp lost a libel case against The Sun in the UK, suing the newspaper for calling him a “wife beater”. The judge at the time found the article was “substantially true”.
Heard and Depp began dating in 2012 and married in 2015. In 2016 Heard filed for divorce citing alleged abuse at the hands of Depp. He has always denied allegations made against him.
