Johnny Depp has won his defamation case for $ 50 million (£ 40 million) against his ex-wife Amber Heard on charges of domestic violence.
A seven-judge civilian jury in Virginia found that Ms. Hurd slandered the Pirates of the Caribbean and Fantastic Beasts when she hinted that he had abused her in a 2018 Washington Post article.
The jury also upheld one of Ms. Hurd’s three lawsuits in a $ 100 million counterclaim against Mr. Depp and his attorney, who called her initial allegations in 2016 “ambush” and “fraud.”
However, neither side received the full amount of damages they wanted.
How much money did Depp and Hurd get?
Depp received $ 10 million in damages and $ 5 million in criminal damages from the jury, compared to $ 50 million demanded by his lawyers.
Ms. Hurd was awarded $ 2 million in damages and no punitive damages, compared to the $ 100 million claimed by her counterclaim.
Because Virginia law limits criminal damages to $ 350,000, the actress is required to pay Mr. Depp a total of $ 10.35 million.
In all, that leaves Depp $ 8.35 million in the lawsuit, although it’s unclear who will be ordered to pay whose costs.
Damage to either side could not be avoided due to the bankruptcy Mr Depp reportedly was close to in 2009.
(AP)
Where does this result leave both sides?
Dan Abrams, founder of the Law and Crime test news network, described the result as a “real surprise” and a “complete loss for Amber Heard”, claiming that the $ 2 million awarded was a “truly symbolic profit”.
He said: “It seems to me that the conclusion of this case is that these jurors believed Johnny Depp and did not believe Amber Heard. I don’t think there is another way to interpret all these sentences together. “
The sentence contrasted with another similar case in the United Kingdom, in which Mr Depp unsuccessfully sued The Sun for calling him a “woman fighter”. His appeal was rejected in March 2021.
Although the British defamation law has traditionally been more favorable to the victim than in the United States, a judge found that the newspaper had proved that his article was “essentially true” and that 12 of the 14 alleged incidents of domestic violence were indeed happened.
To complicate matters, Depp previously paid Hurd $ 7 million as part of a divorce deal they finalized in 2017. Although Hurd publicly promised to donate to charity, she testified in the process that she could not complete it. because of the process, which she said cost her “over $ 6 million” in legal fees.
A spokeswoman for Hurd told The New York Times she planned to appeal the result.
Why was the damage so great?
The amount awarded to Mr Depp reflects the jury’s conviction that Ms Hurd acted with “genuine malice”, which means that she either knew that her allegations were untrue or that she acted with “reckless disregard”. of truth “when she wrote her article and republished it by retweeting it on Twitter.
The article did not mention Mr Depp’s name, but Ms Hurd had already publicly accused him of domestic violence two years earlier. Mr Depp’s lawyers therefore claim that she apparently mentioned it.
Prior to the verdict, the judge instructed the jury to choose a level of compensatory damages that would “fairly compensate” the plaintiffs for financial losses due to defamatory statements, damages to their business, damage to their reputation and “any pain, embarrassment, humiliation, or mental suffering.”
They were told to award criminal damages only if they believed that Hurd’s or Depp’s lawyer’s statements were knowingly false or made “so recklessly as to deliberately disregard the truth” – meaning that the speakers had a high degree of of the realization that the allegations are probably untrue. “
Apparently, the jury believed that at least one of Hurd’s statements justified the criminal damages, while only one of Depp’s lawyer’s statements cleared the bottom line for compensatory damages.
What were the statements in question?
Hurd first accused Depp of harassing her in 2016, when she filed for divorce and received a temporary restraining order against him.
“Throughout our relationship, Johnny has been verbally and physically abusive to me. “I suffered excessive emotional, verbal and physical violence from Johnny, which included angry, hostile, humiliating and threatening attacks on me when I questioned his authority or disagreed with him,” she said at the time.
Following their divorce, they issued a joint statement saying: “Neither side has made false accusations of financial gain. There was never any intention of physical or emotional harm. “
In 2018, however, Hurd wrote an article about sexual violence in which she identified herself as a survivor. Depp’s lawsuit focused on three parts of this book that he claims are false and defamatory.
The first was the title that Hurd did not write, which read: “I talked about sexual violence – and faced the wrath of our culture.” The second was her statement that “two years ago I became a public figure representing domestic violence and felt the full force of our culture’s anger at women who speak openly.”
The third part reads: “I had the rare view to see in real time how institutions protect men accused of abuse.
According to the judge’s instructions, the jury had to believe not only that all three of these allegations were untrue, but that they would be read by others as referring to Depp, that they were “designed and intended” by Hurd to slander him, and that she made them with real malice.
Hurd’s counterclaim, meanwhile, concerns three statements by Depp’s lawyer, Adam Waldman. In the first, he accused “Hurd and her friends in the media” of “us.”[ing] false allegations of sexual violence such as swords and shields.
In the second, he claims that Hurd and her friends deliberately “set up Mr. Depp” by fabricating damage to their home, coordinating their stories together, and then making a fake emergency call. In the third, he described Hurd’s allegations as “fraud for abuse.”
The jury decided that only the second request met all the criteria for defamation, which means that it was both false and made with real malice.
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