JWeinCom said:
It really depends on how you interpret the terms abuse or sexual abuse. I would argue, if I were on Heard's side, that the statements only meant that Heard found his behaviors to be abusive. If abusive means abusive by Heard's standards, then you would need to show that she didn't actually consider the behaviors abusive. And again, when she has a personality disorder, as Depp's team argued, I think you could make a case that she simply had a warped perspective, and believed herself to have been abused. But she didn't want to make that case. On the other hand, you could take her statement to mean that Depp's behavior met the standards that society in general would find to be abusive. In that case, actual malice would not be super hard to prove. The really weird part to me is that the jury also found that Johnny Depp's statement, through his lawyer, that the whole thing was a hoax designed to hurt him was also found defamatory against Heard. And I'm not quite sure how the jury could seemingly hold both that Johnny Depp was lying when he said it was a hoax, but that she knowingly lied about the abuse. Those two things don't square up for me. It's possible that the jury kind of compromised, which sadly happens alot. Like, there was one person on the jury who wanted to find for Heard, but they appeased them by calling one of Depp's statements defamatory. Or of course, it could just be something I'm missing. Unfortunately, jury deliberations are private, so I guess we'll never know. |
I'd say her putting on a fake bruise the one day she's not wearing makeup to get a TRO when Johnny's out of town and can't defend himself and tipping off TMZ to photograph it at the courthouse, telling them exactly where to take the picture, then going out with Raquel with a fresh face the very next day is clear proof she knows she's lying as is this audio, editing photos and stalling the examination process during discovery to boot (there's only ONE reason she would do that) and her constantly changing her story.
It wasn't Depp's statement they found defamatory BTW, it was his (ex-)lawyer's. Basically, she "won" $2 mil for something his lawyer said about her, she owes him $10 mil for everything she said about him, and the two aren't mutually exclusive. Just because "they" didn't find one incident of staged damages believable (and it WAS a compromise BTW) doesn't necessarily hold that she never lied about him abusing her (her friends easily could've not touched anything and still made that whole abuse incident up, which was proven by police bodycam), which she lost on all 3 counts. She's also the only one who was levied punitive damages between the two. She objectively lost, the media acknowledged it.
She even admits she lost (in the most snarky, self-absorbed way possible):
Talk about learning nothing. That narcissism is exactly why she lost and why no studio will want to work with her ever again.
Last edited by KManX89 - on 03 June 2022
