Amber Heard tells court she’s sent daily death threats: ‘They want to kill my daughter’
Amber Heard tells court of daily death threats to her and her child (Steve Helber/AFP via Getty Images)
Amber Heard told the court that she has received death threats directed at her and her child as hearings in her case with ex-husband Johnny Depp came to a close. Warning – violence.
Depp, 58, is suing Heard, 36, in a $50 million defamation suit over an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she spoke about being a victim of abuse. Heard has sued back, with a $100 million counterclaim against Depp, alleging “abuse and harassment”.
On Thursday (26 May), the last day of Heard’s testimony, she told the court that she wants “Johnny [Depp] to leave me alone”, that she has suffered harassment and death threats to her one-year-old daughter, Oonagh Paige Heard, and that she cannot be touched by friends for fear of anxiety attacks.
“My friends have to live with a set of unspoken rules about how they can touch me,” The Guardian reports Heard as saying.
“I am harassed, threatened, humiliated… every single day. People want to kill me and they tell me so. Every day,” Heard said when asked what the trial, which began on 11 April in Virginia, had been like for her.
“People want to put my baby in the microwave. They tell me that. Johnny threatened – promised me – that if I ever left him, I’d make him think of him every single day that I lived.”
She added: “The harassment and the humiliation, the campaign against me that’s echoed every single day on social media, and now in front of cameras in the showroom – every single day I have to relive the trauma… Perhaps it’s easy to forget I’m a human being.”
Amber Heard testifies at the Fairfax County Circuit Courthouse in Fairfax, Virginia (Jim Lo Scalzo/AFP via Getty Images)
The long-running trial has seen Depp accused of sexually assaulting Heard, and texting a friend hoping “Amber Heard’s rotting corpse was decomposing” in the trunk of a car, among other things. Depp has denied hitting Heard, stating that he would “never strike a woman”, and has denied the sexual assault claim.
The court also previously heard the couple’s marriage counsellor describe their relationship as “mutually abusive”.
Depp spent four days giving testimony in the trial ahead of Heard standing herself, in one case alleging that shortly after the couple were married, an argument had become so serious that it ended in his finger being sliced off.
During the fight in Australia in 2015, he claimed Heard had thrown two vodka bottles at him, one of which smashed and severed his finger.
He said: “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.
Lawyers for both Heard and Depp will deliver their closing arguments on Friday (27 May) and jurors will then be given deliberating instructions.
