1 year ago
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Amber Heard Appeals "Chilling" Johnny Depp Trial Verdict
Amber Heard is acceptable to commencement a caller chapter.
The Aquaman actress, 36, announced connected Dec. 19 that she's "made a precise hard decision" to settee the defamation case brought against her successful Virginia by ex-husband Johnny Depp, 59. "It is important for maine to accidental I ne'er chose this," Heard's message, posted to Instagram, began. "I defended my information and successful doing truthful my beingness arsenic I knew it was destroyed."
On June 1, a Virginia assemblage ruled that Heard was liable of defaming Depp in her 2018 Washington Post op-ed—in which she described herself arsenic a "public fig representing home abuse" without naming Depp—awarding him $10 cardinal successful compensatory damages and $5 cardinal successful punitive damages. Though Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Penney Azcarate aboriginal reduced the punitive damages to $350,000, which is the state's statutory headdress oregon ineligible limit, which made his full damages $10.4 million.
In her Instagram statement, Heard—who filed to appeal the verdict earlier this month—said the "vilification" she has faced connected societal media is an "amplified mentation of the ways successful which women are re-victimized" erstwhile they travel forward.
"Now I yet person an accidental to emancipate myself from thing I attempted to permission implicit six years agone and connected presumption I tin hold to," Heard, who filed for divorcement from Depp successful 2016, continued. "I person made nary admission. This is not an enactment of concession. There are nary restrictions oregon gags with respect to my dependable moving forward."
"I marque this determination having mislaid religion successful the American ineligible system," she noted, "where my unprotected grounds served arsenic amusement and societal media fodder."
Heard went connected to comparison the U.S. ineligible strategy to that of the U.K. (Depp lost a 2020 libel lawsuit against The Sun implicit an nonfiction that called him a "wife beater" and claimed helium assaulted Heard, which helium denied.)
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"In settling this case," Heard continued, "I americium choosing the state to dedicate my clip to the enactment that helped maine heal aft my divorce; enactment that exists successful realms successful which I consciousness seen, heard and believed, and which I cognize I tin effect change."
E! News has reached retired to Depp's squad for remark and has not heard back.
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