Johnny Depp‘s legal battle has gained a lot of attention in the media recently, and on Wednesday, the actor appeared in London’s High Court for his libel case against the Sun‘s parent company, News Group Newspapers. The case involves an article from 2018 claiming he’d allegedly been abusive to his ex-wife, Amber Heard. Depp is suing News Group Newspapers over the article.
At the preliminary hearing, text messages in reference to Heard, which one could only describe as “disturbing,” were read aloud, and Depp’s lawyer responded.
Up until the preliminary hearing, the text messages had gone unseen. The messages were between Dep and the actor Paul Bettany.
News Group Newspapers’ legal team had gotten ahold of around 70,000 texts after Depp’s previous lawyers had accidentally shared them, according to Page Six. The texts reach back a few years and some of them definitely fit the description of “disturbing,” saying things like these texts from 2013:
“Let’s burn Amber.” (Nov. 6, 2013)
and
“Let’s drown her before we burn her!!!” (Nov. 7, 2013)
Page Six went on to report other texts that were sent to Bettany the following year. This group of texts seems to highlight some of the struggles the Pirates of the Caribbean star was going through.
“I’m gonna properly stop the booze thing, darling… Drank all night before I picked Amber up to fly to LA, this past Sunday…Ugly, mate.”
“No food for days…powders…half a bottle of whiskey, a thousand red bull and vodkas, pills, 2 bottles of Champers on plane and what do you get..???”
“I am admittedly too f* in the head to spray my rage at the one I love…For little reason, as well I’m too old to be that guy But, pills are fine!!!”
Adam Waldman, Depp’s US attorney, had some things to say about the texts and the Sun in reference to them being used in the case. Here’s what he had to say to Yahoo Entertainment:
“This is why Johnny Depp seeks justice in court and not the media. The media will not report that at the end of a demonstrated abuse victim’s single frustrated text to a friend, Johnny confides to Paul Bettany that he could in fact never ‘spray my rage at the one I love’ and says he will use pills instead to numb the pain. This is the best text of 70,000 the desperate Sun tabloid could muster to save their skin.”
According to David Sherborne, Depp‘s UK lawyer, at the hearing Wednesday, Heard was the “aggressor” not the victim. Sherborne says:
“One person, one side, is lying, and one is not,” Sherborne added. “Obviously, we say that it is Ms. Heard [who is lying], Mr. Depp is 100% clear about that.”
According to Vanity Fair, Sherborne went on to say:
“Nowhere, I repeat, nowhere, is there a single smoking gun, text, or email, no document—unlike Ms. Heard’s own taped confession we looked at before; there is no document where Mr. Depp says ‘I hit Ms. Heard’ let alone ‘I hit her on numerous occasions.”
