Emotional Amber Heard Details Johnny Depp’s Alleged Abuse While on Stand in Defamation Trial: ‘He Slapped Me For No Reason’

Amber Heard took the witness stand Wednesday to defend herself amid her ex-husband Johnny Depp’s defamation trial, detailing the alleged abuse she faced throughout their marriage.

“I didn’t know what to do — I, as a woman, had never been hit like that. I’m an adult, and I am sitting next to the man I love, and I missed the point. Second slap: I know he’s not kidding, so I just stared at him,” Heard recalled of an alleged abusive incident while on the stand. “I didn’t say anything, I didn’t react, move, freak out. I just started at him because I didn’t know what else to do. He slaps me one more time — hard.”

Depp is suing Heard for $50 million, alleging that she defamed him in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2018. While Heard never named Depp in the column, she heavily implied that Depp abused her throughout their marriage.

Heard later filed a countersuit accusing Depp of orchestrating a “smear campaign” against her via his lawsuit.

While on the stand, Heard claimed that Depp’s demeanor changed throughout their relationship after they had initially fallen “head over heels in love” after working together on 2011 film The Rum Diary. 

“I felt like this man knew me and saw me in a way that nobody else had,” Heard said while on the stand. “He made me feel seen, made me feel like a million dollars. That kind of feeling where he just lavished gifts, lavished expressions of love, and how he’d never met a woman like me. I remember he took the foil off of this bottle and put it on my ring finger and I had only been with him like, days, maybe it was weeks at the time. It just felt very intense.”

Despite how their relationship began, Depp would allegedly “blow up” and smash things during arguments later on, Heard claiming that he broke furniture and threw things that would often come close to hitting her.

Heard claimed that the first time Depp hit her was when she asked him what the tattoo on his arm said, which the actor changed from “Winona Forever” to “Wino Forever” after his split with Winona Ryder. 

Depp allegedly slapped Heard across the face when she laughed after he told her what the tattoo said.

“I thought, ‘This must be a joke’ because I didn’t know what was going on, just laughing still. I thought he would tell me it’s a joke, but he didn’t. You think you’re funny bitch? He slapped me again. It was clear it wasn’t a joke anymore and I stopped laughing, but I didn’t know what else to do,” she said.

Heard went on to detail more alleged abuse:

I am all the sudden realizing that the worst thing just happened to me. I realized, ‘I wish so much he said he was joking.’ It didn’t physically hurt me, I was just sitting there on this carpet, looking at the dirty carpet how I wound up on this carpet. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to react. I just sat there thinking, ‘God, did he just hit me?’ No, I didn’t want to leave him. I didn’t want to have the man I was in love with. I know you don’t come back from that. I know you can’t hit a woman, you can’t hit anyone, you can’t just hit somebody — I knew it was wrong, and I knew I had to leave him.

I wish I could say I walked out of that house and I stuck up for myself, but I was just looking at the dirty carpet, trying to walk out the door because I knew I needed to, and I really slowly stood up, and I remember looking at him in the eye because I didn’t know what else to do. Before I know it, he starts crying. I have never seen an adult man cry.

“He slapped me for no reason it seemed like,” she added.

Depp would allegedly later apologize following abusive behavior, promising never to do anything like that again.

“‘I will never do that again. I am so sorry, baby. I put the fucker away. I thought I put the monster away, it’s done,'” Heard recalled Depp saying. “I didn’t have words, I didn’t know what to say. I just remember thinking, he was crying. I knew I couldn’t forgive him, it means it will happen again.”

Depp previously took the stand on April 19, and testified until the 25th, meaning the actor and his team of attorneys had largely controlled the narrative prior to Heard’s testimony.

The public has clearly sided with Depp throughout the trial, which prompted Heard to drop her crisis management team at Precision Strategies, co-founded by former President Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter. 

Heard fired her PR team amid the trial, later acquiring the services of Shane Communications, a move confirmed to NBC News by the firm’s CEO David Shane.

Depp had previously lost a libel case against the publisher of Britain’s The Sun in 2020. The British High Court ruled that the claim Depp was a “wife-beater” was “substantially true.”

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