Amber Heard is reportedly so upset with the negative press during her ongoing court battle with Johnny Depp that she suddenly switched public relations teams late last week. Heard is expected to take the stand as the first witness in her defense this week. Depp filed a defamation lawsuit against Heard in 2019 in response to her December 2018 Washington Post op-ed about surviving domestic abuse.
Heard fired PR firm Precision Strategies Thursday because of the negative headlines that surfaced since the trial began on April 11. “She doesn’t like bad headlines,” one source told Page Six. Another source said the Aquaman star is “frustrated with her story not being told effectively.”
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Heard’s new firm is Shane Communications. She hopes they can do a better job of swaying public opinion to her side, sources told Page Six. The firm previously helped bring media attention to Depp’s dispute with his former management firm, The Management Group, which claimed Depp needed a psychiatrist because of a “compulsive spending” habit.
The PR switch follows testimony from Depp and the witnesses Depp’s team called to the stand. Last week ended with the court hearing recording testimony from ACLU COO Terence Dougherty, who said Heard never finished paying a $3.5 million donation. After Heard and Depp reached a $7 million divorce settlement in 2016, Heard said she would evenly split the money between the ACLU and the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. During his testimony, Depp also made allegations of abuse against Heard.
Communications insiders told Page Six that Shane would have an uphill battle, especially three weeks into the trial. “It’s crazy to change teams in the middle of a trial like this because you don’t like the headlines,” Lis Smith, who worked on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, told Page Six.
Smith suggested Heard had unbelievable expectations for Precision Strategies. She called Precision “one of the best crisis firms… but they can’t rewrite the history of what’s happened.” Heard’s representatives and Shane Communications would not comment on the PR switch.
Although Heard did not name Depp in the Washington Post op-ed at the center of the case, he filed a $50 million defamation suit against her, claiming that the allegations against him are not true. The lawsuit was filed in Fairfax County, Virginia, where The Washington Post‘s servers are located. In 2020, Heard counter-sued Depp for $100 million.
Heard is expected to testify as soon as Monday, Deadline reports. “It’s hard to see how Amber won’t prove to be a highly effective weapon against Depp in her own advocacy,” an industry insider with links to Depp and Heard told Deadline. “Regardless of how they have tried to characterize her, she has been nothing but well composed and pretty conservative in court without having said a word.”
