Actor Amber Heard arrives in the courtroom at the Fairfax County Circuit Court in Fairfax, Va., Thursday, April 28, 2022. Actor Johnny Depp sued his ex-wife actor Amber Heard for libel in Fairfax County Circuit Court after she wrote an op-ed piece in The Washington Post in 2018 referring to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” (Michael Reynolds/Pool Photo via AP)
Amber Heard’s attorneys are looking to appeal or throw out the jury verdict in the widely aired defamation case between the actress and her ex Johnny Depp.
Heard’s attorney sent a 43-page filing to a Virginia court on Friday, arguing that the verdict lacked sufficient evidence.
In one filing, Heard’s team argues that Depp’s claim to have lost his role in “Pirates of the Caribbean” film series because of the Washington Post op-ed, where Heard wrote that she was abused but did not name her abuser, was incorrect.
Her lawyers argued that Depp “proceeded solely on a defamation by implication theory, abandoning any claims that Ms. Heard’s statements were actually false.”
The defense team for the Aquaman actress also said that one of the jurors who participated in the trial were not thoroughly screened. The individual who was called to appear in court was born in 1945, but Heard’s team contends that the person who really served was considerably younger.
The juror, identified in the filing as Juror 15, “was clearly born later than 1945. Publicly available information demonstrates that he appears to have been born in 1970,” the motion states.
Depp had filed a defamation suit against Heard in reaction to her 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post describing herself as a survivor of domestic abuse.
The seven-member jury in Virginia awarded Depp $15 million in damages after finding that a 2018 article penned by Heard on the “sexual violence” she had suffered was defamatory to Depp.
The jury also found that Heard was defamed by statements made by Depp’s lawyer, Adam Waldman, who told the Daily Mail that her abuse claims were a “hoax” and awarded her $2 million in damages.