[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Amber Heard returned to the stand on Monday after a week’s hiatus in the defamation trial against Johnny Depp — and things only got messier.
This time, as she continued direct examination from her own legal team, the line of questioning seemed to specifically target the biggest issues folks have had with her side of the story. Something tells us she’s paying attention to how many signatures that petition to get her fired from Aquaman is racking up. (It’s over 4 mil now btw!)
Related: Amber Fired Her PR Team Mid-Trial!
She discussed the fact they always seemed to be secretly recording one another, the bed pooping incident, and most crucially the tape in which she seemingly admits to abusing him.
Get all the latest (below):
Why All The Tapes
Before she got started defending what she said on multiple tapes, Amber clarified for the jury exactly why there were so many recordings. After all, how many people tape their conversations with their spouses — or anyone — unless they’re actively trying to get evidence?
But Amber says it wasn’t a Kim Kardashian/Taylor Swift snake sitch here at all — and that the recording was all mutually consensual. She explained:
“Well, at first it was meant to be a way to get to the heart of some of our communication issues, as a way to discover in a therapeutic fashion what were some of our issues in communication.”
OK, so that’s why there are tapes. But why does it seem like they never know they’re being recorded? Both Amber and Johnny act completely different when they’re the one doing the recording. When Amber filmed Johnny going on his kitchen rampage, slamming cabinets and such, she sounded the whole time like a lilting flower, a damsel in distress. But when he was recording her in conversations about her having hit him, she takes command and even mocks and taunts him. It’s two very different Ambers, and two very different Johnnys.
Did they consent to be recorded but never to know they were being recorded? So the therapy would be more accurate? Hmm.
Hitting VS Punching
Next was the big question. How does Amber account for the admissions on these tapes that she hit Johnny? It was this apparent smoking gun that we’re guessing has turned the most casual followers of the case against her.
Not only does it paint a very different picture if she’s abusing him — or even if the domestic violence is mutual, frankly — but also she just comes across as a classic abuser in the tapes. She downplays her behavior, tells Johnny no one will believe him. It’s pretty awful.
Her lawyer asked her Monday about the tape in which she infamously draws a distinction between hitting and punching her husband, saying in the recording:
“You’ve been in a lot of fights, you’ve been around a long time. You didn’t get punched. You got hit. I’m sorry I hit you like this, I didn’t punch you. I did not f**king deck you. I f**king was hitting you. I don’t know what the motion of my actual hand was. You’re fine. I did not hurt you, I did not punch you, I was hitting you. I’m not sitting here bitching about, am I? You are. That’s the difference between me and you.”
What does she have to say about that? She backed up:
“There’s two different situations that we’re referencing in this fight. Two different altercations between Johnny and I, involving the door.”
OK, wait, so twice they were on either side of a door while fighting — and they were talking about both simultaneously? Man, that’s not confusing at all, huh?
She continued:
“The first of which, which we first start talking about, where I’m talking about hitting him, I am talking about…what that conversation is about is about the disparity…the disparity between Johnny and I in our physical fights. The disparity of how he would proactively punch me and I would have to resort to reactively hitting him. I am talking about the difference between a punch, which Johnny did often, and me having to hit him in my defense.”
Ah, now we get it. She’s admitting to hitting him, but she’s hitting him in retaliation, in self-defense. We’re still not clear on the punching/hitting distinction. However, Amber said she is:
“I know the difference between those two, and I’m highlighting the difference between those two, even if he wasn’t twice my size. They’re very different.”
What is clear is that she’s intending to say that the times she hit him were all defensive, only because he was abusing her.
Once again, she says that she was the one hiding behind the door as Johnny tried to get in:
“I was trying to shut a door or bedroom door. Actually, I was trying to barricade myself behind this door, and Johnny was trying to get through the door. He was using his body and his limbs to try to bust through the door, as I was trying to keep it closed because I knew what he would do to me when he got to me on the other side. And I was hitting his arms, his arms, his body, as he was trying to to prevent me from closing the door. And that is a separate incident that we later talk about in the second half of that recording.”
This is of course the opposite of Johnny’s version, in which he was hiding out in the bathroom. Even Amber seemed to corroborate that as she lashed out at him in previous recordings, saying:
“You escape the solution. We cannot work it out if you run away to the bathroom!”
In an audio recording made by Johnny, Amber even admitted to having started a “physical fight” with him. Like we said, these stories just do not add up. In Johnny’s version of a conflict on either side of the door, he opened the door a crack after she wouldn’t stop banging on it, and she “tried to burst in.” He said in his testimony last month:
“She was pushing all her weight on the door trying to get in and I was pushing back, I didn’t want to let her in. When it was almost closed she yelped in pain and screamed, ‘Ow my toes!’, so in that second I thought possibly her foot had gotten caught under the door. I thought she was injured so I knelt down to have a look. When I knelt down on my hands and knees to look at her foot, she kicked the bathroom door into my head.”
Are these the “two different situations” with a door to which Amber was referring? Johnny and his legal team have only ever referred to one situation. It’s only Amber who is saying they were talking about two at once. Hmm.
Johnny Abused Himself?
This is a new one on us. Amber seems to be explaining away some of Johnny’s injuries by saying he harmed himself during their fights.
Obviously we already know she blamed the finger injury on him, saying he cut off the tip of his own finger by smashing a rotary phone while abusing her. (He maintains, of course, that it was cut as she threw glass bottles at him and one shattered.)
Now she’s extended that explanation to other injuries, saying he often committed self-harm during their arguments — and that he did that kind of thing “often”:
“I almost called 911 in New York in 2014, August of 2014 I believe, because I thought he had done himself an injury. He often, in fights, would cut his arms or hold a knife to his chest or draw blood, superficially at first. But later, in like 2016 — especially as our relationship was ending.”
This seems to be tied to the audio her team played earlier in the trial about him offering to cut himself when they met up after the divorce — after she had already gotten a domestic violence restraining order against him. As Johnny put it in his own testimony on the matter:
“I was talked into going there and met with her in hopes that she would retract her lies that the world was now fed. In no way was she ready to do that, and I couldn’t understand why I was there…”
He said he was “really just at the end” and “couldn’t take it anymore” which led him to offering her the knife:
“I don’t know what she was after, so I had a knife in my pocket and I just took the knife out and said, ‘Here — cut me, that’s what you want to do. Ultimately you’ve taken everything. You want my blood? Take it. Have my blood.’ And then she said, ‘No, no’ and then I said, ‘Look, if you’re not going to take it and you want it, I know you want it — that’s all I’ve got left — take it.’ If she wasn’t going to do it, I would’ve done it because that’s psychologically, emotionally where I was. I was at the end, I was broken.”
If that’s the only evidence of this self-harm with a knife, it’s a far cry from what she’s describing.
She also added that he burned himself with cigarettes, an apparent denial of his claim that she put out a cigarette on him. She said:
“He also put cigarettes out on himself. He’d flick them at me and once or twice tried to put one out on me, but mostly he would do it while screaming at me. He once did it right in front of me, screaming at my face as he put the cigarette out on his cheek.”
The Bed Poop: Amber’s Version
And of course, hot off the heels of an SNL sketch about it — which interestingly seemed to favor Johnny — Amber is telling her side of the poop on the bed.
Johnny has claimed Amber — or one of her friends — pooped on his side of the bed. Not physical abuse but completely disgusting, obviously. He has said it shocked him so much, he had to laugh when he first heard it. Previously we’ve heard that Amber just considered it a practical joke — but in her testimony on Monday she denied that take completely, saying:
“First of all, I don’t think that’s funny. I was not, also, in a pranking mood. My life was falling apart.”
She insists, despite the size of the poop — quite a lot for such a small dog — that it was in fact Boo’s feces. She says that the good boy had “bowel control issues” ever since he was a puppy, and even that is Johnny’s fault because it began when he ate some of the Pirates star’s weed.
As for the joke question, she says it absolutely was not a “prank”:
“I had just been attacked on my 30th birthday by my violent husband, with whom I was desperately in love and knew I needed to leave… It was not really a jovial time, and I don’t think that’s funny, period. That’s disgusting.”
Are y’all buying her side? Are the new allegations — that he enacted some of this violence against himself — compelling? Let us know what YOU think in the comments (below) and we’ll continue to update you on all the latest from this ongoing debacle.
If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.
[Image via Law&Crime Network/YouTube.]
