Amber Heard is seeking to appeal the verdict in Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against her or have it thrown out entirely due to ‘inconsistencies’ in the verdict. Depp was awarded $15 million in damages from Heard as a result of a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”
- Heard’s lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, filed a 48-page document on Friday, July 1. In the filing, Bredehoft said Depp’s team “proceeded solely on a defamation by implication theory, abandoning any claims that Ms. Heard’s statements were actually false.” She pointed to the “inconsistent verdicts” as a reason that the previous judgment should be struck off or a new trial should take place.
- Heard makes several claims to prove her innocence. She says one of the three statements in contention in the lawsuit that was deemed defamatory, the headline, wasn’t written by Heard. While the court ruled that Heard retweeting the piece was considered “actional republication,” Bredehoft insists “nothing in Ms. Heard’s tweet constituted a legally enforceable republication.”
- There’s a question about one of the jurors who served in the trial. According to the filing, Juror 15 appears to have a 25-year age difference between their date of birth on court documents and on publicly available information. According to Bredehoft, the court lists the juror’s birth year as 1945 but that he “was clearly born later than 1945. Publicly available information demonstrates that he appears to have been born in 1970. This discrepancy raises the question of whether Juror 15 actually received a summons for jury duty and was properly vetted by the court to serve on the jury.”
- Heard says the amount of compensation Depp was awarded was “indefensible” and excessive. Depp’s legal team says the filing is “what we expected.” It remains to be seen what will happen and whether a new trial will go ahead.
