Amber Heard Plans To File Appeal After Attorney Says She Was 'Demonized'

On Wednesday, Amber Heard lost the defamation trial against ex-husband Johnny Depp.

The jury awarded Depp with $15 million dollars, including $10 million dollars in compensatory damages and $5 million dollars in punitive damages. Those five million dollars were later reduced to $350,000 dollars, the maximum that the state of Virginia will allow. Heard, meanwhile, was only awarded $2 million, marking Depp as the clean victor in the case.

On Thursday morning, one of Amber Heard’s attorneys, Elaine Bredehoft, was already on TV saying that the “Aquaman” actress “absolutely” plans to appeal the jury’s decision.

As reported by Deadline, Amber Heard’s attorney, Elaine Bredehoft, appeared on NBC’s “TODAY” show and spoke with Savannah Guthrie. Bredehoft said that Heard “absolutely” plans to appeal the jury’s decision, which found that her 2018 Washington Post op-ed was defamatory against the “Pirates of the Caribbean” actor.

Bredehoft told Guthrie that “The Adderall Diaries” actress “has some excellent grounds” for an appeal. During the interview, Bredehoft said that she believed there were multiple factors that led to Heard’s loss, including the presence that social media had on the trial. The popular hashtag #JusticeForJohnnyDepp, which had been debated throughout the trial, exploded with support for Depp after the jury’s verdict was announced in the courtroom in Fairfax, Virginia on Wednesday afternoon.

Bredehoft said that Heard “was demonized here,” adding, “A number of things were allowed in this court that should not have been allowed, and it caused the jury to be confused.” Bredehoft also referenced Depp’s 2020 libel case against the British tabloid, The Sun, which he lost. The “Fantastic Beasts” actor had sued The Sun after they labeled him a “wife-beater.”

Heard’s attorney went on to talk about the U.K. judgment, saying that it “skewed” the jury’s understanding of the case. “The damages are completely skewed. There are no damages,” Bredehoft claimed. “It stopped at November 2, 2020, which is when the judgment came down in the UK.”

When Savannah Guthrie asked if Amber Heard will be able to afford the nearly $10.4 million dollars that the jury awarded Depp, Bredehoft replied, “Oh no. Absolutely not.”

Although Johnny Depp was not in the courtroom when the verdict was announced, having been performing around the U.K. with Jeff Beck over the Memorial Day weekend, Heard was in the courtroom. She was dressed in black and kept her eyes cast down to the floor as the jury read the verdict in Depp’s favor.

Immediately after the verdict was read, Bredehoft claimed Heard said, “I am so sorry to all those women out there. This is a setback for all women in and outside the courtroom, and she feels the burden of that.”

“Really what happened here is a tale of two trials,” Bredehoft added, claiming that she and attorney Ben Rottenborn were not allowed to tell the jury that the U.K. case had “found that Mr. Depp had committed at least 12 acts of domestic violence, including sexual violence, against Amber.”

“So what did Depp’s team learn from this? Demonize Amber and suppress the evidence,” Bredehoft stated. “We had an enormous amount of evidence that was suppressed in this case that was in the UK case.”

She added that Depp’s team was somehow able to “suppress the medical records, which were very, very significant because they showed a pattern … going all the way back to 2012 of Amber reporting this to her therapist, for example. We had [a] significant amount of texts, including from Mr. Depp’s assistants, saying, ‘When I told him he kicked you, he cried. He is so sorry.’ That didn’t come in.”

Although the jury was instructed not to look at media coverage of the trial, she claims that they had checked social media, which showed overwhelming support for Depp.

“They went home every night. They have families. The families are on social media. We had a 10-day break in the middle because of a Judicial Conference,” Bredehoft told TODAY. “There’s no way they couldn’t have been influenced by it, and it was horrible. It really, really was lopsided.”

“It was like the Roman Colesseum, how they view this whole case,” she continued, adding that putting cameras in the courtroom turned the trial into “a zoo.”

Bredehoft said that the jury siding with Depp sends a “horrible message” to domestic abuse survivors. “It’s a significant setback because that is exactly what it means,” she said. “Unless you pull out your phone and you video your spouse or your significant other beating you, effectively, you won’t be believed.”