Despite their widely publicized court struggle, Heard spoke up about her personal feelings for Depp in part two of her sit-down interview with NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie. “Absolutely. I love him. I loved him with all my heart,” shared. “I tried my best to make a deeply broken relationship work. I have no bad feelings or ill will toward him at all.”
Their six-week trial began a little more than three years after Depp filed his $50 million defamation case against Heard in March 2019 in response to her Washington Post op-ed detailing her experience with domestic abuse. While Depp’s name was not mentioned in the story, it was published as their bitter 2016 divorce remained in the press. Depp eventually won the lawsuit when a unanimous jury gave him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive penalties.
Heard admitted to Guthrie that she was neither a “likeable” or “perfect” victim. “When I testified, I asked the jury to just see me as human,” she stated. “I took for granted what I assumed was my right to speak,” Heard revealed referring to how scared she was of speaking out loud at the trial. “I’m scared that no matter what I do, no matter what I say, or how I say it, every step that I take will present another opportunity for this, sort of, silencing.”
The jury sided with Depp while agreeing that Depp was defamed by Heard but Heard claims that the op-ed was not about him, despite the fact that it referred to it. Heard shared, “The op-ed wasn’t about my relationship with Johnny. What the op-ed was about was me loaning my voice to a bigger, cultural conversation that we were having at the time. It was important for me to not make it about him or to do anything like defaming him. I had lawyers, teams of lawyers, review all the drafts of this.”
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