Officially, Amber Heard has appealed her conviction
Amber Heard officially appealed, citing 16 reasons, four months after a jury awarded her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, $10.3 million in damages.
During the trial, which ended in June, Depp claimed he was defamed by a 2018 op-ed Heard wrote at the request of the ACLU to support victims of domestic abuse. The article of washington post didn’t mention the actor’s name, but he successfully argued that readers could infer that she was talking about him in two of her sentences, and in her title, “Amber Heard: I Speak Up Against Violence sexual – and I faced the wrath of our culture. The jury also awarded Amber Heard $2 million in damages for her counterattack regarding a statement by Depp’s attorney, Adam Waldman, in which he called Amber Heard’s abuse allegations a “hoax”. As soon as the case was over, Heard was expected to appeal.
Admissibility of evidence
According to documents obtained by Vanity Fair, the grounds for the appeal range from the absence of “clear and convincing evidence” of actual malicious intent, the standard by which defamation cases are judged, to the trial court’s failure to strike down damages and interests that the jury awarded after finding that Heard and Depp defamed each other, something “intrinsically and irreconcilably inconsistent.”
Some of these reasons had already been mentioned in court or in post-trial interviews by his former lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft. Several of the points relate to admitted evidence that should not have been, and not admitted evidence that should have been admitted, including various communications with healthcare professionals as well as with employees, friends and members of family.
In another point, the document says: “The trial court erred in allowing Mr. Depp to argue or suggest at trial that the jury might award damages based on statements or conduct prior to the publication of the contested article. In other words, Johnny Depp filed a lawsuit because of the article in question, claiming that he had lost professional opportunities and was owed damages because of it, but made believe members of the jury that Amber Heard was on trial for statements or events prior to the publication of the article in the washington post in 2018 (they reached a divorce agreement in 2016).
Change of lawyers
In August, a Heard spokesperson announced that she had parted ways with Bredehoft and retained David L. Axelrod and Jay Ward Brown of Ballard Spahr to handle the appeal, while Ben Rottenborn of Woods Rogers would remain as a co-adviser. Ballard Spahr recently defended the New York Times against former Republican vice-presidential candidate’s libel suit Sarah Palinand won.
A Heard spokesperson told Vanity Fair in August that “a different court warrants a different representation, especially as so much new evidence is now coming to light”.
The filing of the complaint in the court of Virginia comes just after the appearance of Johnny Depp in the United States. He was photographed signing autographs in New York, while touring North America with Jeff Beck. He performed in New Jersey on Tuesday night.
Amber Heard was recently photographed in Spain.
