Johnny Depp took the stand for a second time during his $50 million defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard on Wednesday and made a bizarre claim about the graphic texts about Heard sent from his phone. Depp claimed they may have been sent when someone else was using his phone, although he and his legal team offered no evidence to support this. Depp again denied being abusive towards Heard during their relationship on Wednesday.
Depp confirmed he texted former UTA agent Christian Carino in summer 2016 that he was “So happy this c— guzzler is out of my life” and “I can only hope karma kicks in and takes the breath out of her” after Depp and Heard’s divorce was settled out of court, reports Deadline. Strangely, he then claimed other violent texts may have been sent when someone else started using “my phone.” Depp and his attorneys did not further explain this claim. Heard’s defense team also did not ask questions about this claim.
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The Pirates of the Caribbean actor also sought to justify the extreme language in the texts jurors have seen. “When you are accused of horrific acts and things you have not done when actually it is some very ugly things are going out there into the world about you, you get very irate and angry,” Depp said. He also tried to divert attention to Heard. “You do wonder why this person is doing this to me,” he said.
Earlier in his testimony Wednesday, Depp again denied Heard’s allegations that he physically abused her during their brief marriage. He called her allegations “unimaginably brutal, cruel, and all false.” Although “no human being is perfect,” Depp said, “I have never in my live committed sexual battery, physical abuse.” He called the allegations “outlandish, outrageous stories of me committing these things” and said he waited six years “to bring the truth out.”
Depp and Heard married in 2015 and split in May 2016 after Heard filed for divorce and a restraining order against Depp, accusing him of abuse. In December 2018, Heard published an op-ed in the Washington Post, referring to herself as a survivor of domestic violence. Although she did not name Depp, he sued her in 2019 for defamation. Heard counter-sued for $100 million in 2020. The trial finally started in April in Fairfax, Virginia, where the Washington Post‘s online servers are based.
When Depp testified for the first time in April, Heard’s attorney, Ben Rottenborn, read graphic text messages Depp wrote about Heard to others. In one message, Depp referred to himself as a “f—ing savage” and fantasized about killing the actress, reports Variety. “Let’s drown her before we burn her,” Depp wrote to Paul Bettany in June 2013. “I full f— her burnt corpse to make sure she’s dead.” These are the same text messages that surfaced in Depp’s libel trial against The Sun publishers who referred to him as a “wife-beater.” Depp lost that legal battle in 2020 and his appeal was rejected.
On Wednesday, Rottenborn read another graphic message attributed to Depp about Heard. “She’s begging for total global humiliation… She’s gonna get it,” the text read, reports TMZ. “But, she sucked Mollusk’s crooked d— and he gave her some s—y lawyers … I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion, or what I once thought was love for this gold-digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market… I’m so f—ing happy she wants to go to fight this out!!!”