Johnny Depp’s house manager recalls finding severed finger after alleged fight with Amber Heard
Johnny Depp testifies in the courtroom at the Fairfax County Circuit Courthouse on 25 April, 2022. (AFP via Getty/ Pool/ STEVE HELBER)
The house manager of an Australian property used by Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has recalled finding the actor’s severed finger on the floor after a fight.
The Pirates of the Caribbean star, 58, is suing ex-wife Amber Heard, 35, in a $50m (£38m) defamation suit after she claimed in 2018 that she had been a victim of abuse. Heard has filed a $100m (£79m) countersuit seeking immunity from Depp’s allegations of defamation.
Last week, Depp told Virginia’s Fairfax County district courthouse that while staying in Australia in 2015, shortly after the couple were married, an argument had become so serious that it ended in his finger being sliced off.
During the fight, he claimed Heard had thrown two vodka bottles at him, one of which smashed and severed his finger.
He said: “I felt no pain at first all. I felt heat and as if something was dripping down my hand… I was looking directly at my bones sticking out. Blood was just pouring out.
“I don’t know what a nervous breakdown feels like, but that’s probably the closest that I’ve ever been. Nothing made sense and I knew in my mind and in my heart that this is not life.”
Johnny Depp said his mental state was so bad that he began “to write in my own blood on the walls”, before eventually texting his doctor to come to the house.
On Monday (25 April) Ben King, who managed the house Depp and Heard were staying at in Australia, told the court how he arrived at the house on 8 March, 2015, to find Heard “sobbing”.
He also saw that Depp’s doctor, David Kipper, was at the house and was “rummaging through a bin” for the actor’s severed finger.
In the end, King said, he was the one to find the fingertip, locating it “directly below the bar” with blood and paper towels and putting it in a bag so it could be taken “to the hospital quickly to see if it could be reattached”.
Johnny Depp insisted his comment about ‘f**king’ Amber Heard’s ‘burnt corpse’ was a Monty Python joke
The court has been shown many examples of expletive-filled texts from Johnny Depp since the defamation trial began on 10 April.
On Thursday, 21 April, the jury was read messages sent by Depp to his friend and British actor Paul Bettany in 2013, before he was married to Heard.
Depp wrote: “Let’s burn Amber… Let’s drown her before we burn her!!!”
He added in a further text: “I will f**k her burnt corpse afterward to make sure she is dead.”
But on Monday, Depp insisted that the texts constituted “humour” and that they were inspired by a Monty Python sketch about burning witches.
He said the texts were never “intended to be real”, and added: “This is a film we’d all watch when we were 10 – it’s just irreverent and abstract humor.”
The trial continues.
