Johnny Depp testifies that Heard subjected him to an ‘endless parade of insults’

Johnny Depp’s courtroom exploration of his life and marriage with Amber Heard continued in the US on Wednesday, with the actor recounting how his deteriorating marriage mirrored his relationship with his mother.

Depp recalled how Heard subjected him to an “endless parade of insults”, how he’d “wanted to try to make it work, to help her. The Amber Heard I knew was not this opponent. She wasn’t my girl, she’d become my opponent.”

Frequently the focus of their conflict, he said, was his drinking. “She’d been pretty brutish about telling me I needed to stop drinking,” Depp said, telling the actor he was “weak, a complete mess, an alcoholic ruining everything”.

Depp said the exchanges frequently escalated into full-scale arguments. “Her need for conflict and violence erupts out of nowhere,” he said. “I learned to deal with it exactly as I did as a child, which was retreat.”

A strategy of placation only seemed to inflame his partner, Depp said, thought he persisted with it because “placation seemed the best route if I was unable to escape her clutches”.

The court in Fairfax, Virginia, has yet to hear Heard’s version of events but over a day and a half of Depp’s testimony so far, jurors have been given a tour of an unstable celebrity marriage colored by addiction.

Depp is suing Heard for $50m, accusing her of defamation after she alleged violent domestic abuse.

At issue throughout much of their marriage, Depp said, was Heard’s anger at his inability to stop using substances. At one point, he convinced Heard to stay at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills hotel while he attempted to come off Roxicodone, a brand of potent prescription opioid painkillers, under the care of his doctor, David Kipper.

“You won’t have to sit around ‘Mr Shakey’,” he told the jury he’d said to his wife. He continued in his second day of testimony: “She wasn’t happy with it but she did eventually leave. So for a few days I sat around in a metal chair with one song a on loop so I could focus on the lyrics and the power of the song to help me get through it.”

On another, after returning from Boston where he had been filming the movie Black Mass in May 2014, Depp said he paid for Heard and her friends to stay at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, while he again attempted to kick his habit.

He’d not been drinking to excess on the plane, where Heard alleges that an assault took place, but had taken two painkillers and locked himself in the bathroom to avoid her badgering, he said. “If I had [been drunk], I’d have been hugging the porcelain,” he said, a reference to vomiting.

Depp said that Heard had become enraged when he’d started drinking in Australia during the filming of one of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise films and had thrown a bottle of vodka at him, severing the top of his finger.

Depp testified that he’d suggested Heard also stop drinking and taking drugs, which Depp has itemized as wine, ecstasy, mushrooms, and “a high-velocity speed”.

He told the court: “I said, ‘How about this? You stop drinking, stop drinking to help me through this.’ She said no, she didn’t have a problem.”

Depp’s testimony has sometimes appeared to tend towards the simplistic, such as when the actor said he “was doing anything I could bring a smile to her face, as opposed to a frown”.

“I tried to bring her mood up. I wanted to try. Not understanding fully what I was up against, I kept trying, but to no avail whatsoever,” he said.

Through this extended life story, Depp has weaved in aspects of his history with other women. Heard has said that the first time she was assaulted was when Depp slapped her in 2013 after she mocked a tattoo that had once said “Winona Forever” – a reference to actor and former girlfriend Winona Ryder – but had since changed to “Wino Forever”.

“It didn’t happen,” he said of the alleged assault. “Why would I take such great offense to someone making fun of a tattoo on my body? That allegation never made any sense to me.” Heard, he suggested was jealous that Depp had not had himself inscribed with her name.

Despite the difficulties in their brief marriage, Depp maintains that he never assaulted Heard, the allegation that goes to the heart of the defamation he claims she made in a 2018 Washington Post column.

On Wednesday, he repeated that denial saying that his disputes with Heard would never cause him to hit her. “Violence isn’t necessary,” Depp said. “Why would you hit someone to make them agree with you?

The trial continues.

 

Source: The Guardian