On Wednesday, a Virginia judge denied Amber Heard’s request to vacate the $10 million judgement against her in favour of her ex-husband, Johnny Depp.
In a high-profile civil trial last month, Depp won a defamation suit against Heard. On a counterclaim she filed against Depp, Heard was awarded a $2 million judgement. Heard filed a motion earlier this month to have Depp’s verdict overturned or a mistrial declared. Her attorneys cited a number of factors, including a possible case of mistaken identity with one of the jurors.
In a written order, Judge Penney Azcarate rejected all of Heard’s claims and said the juror issue specifically was irrelevant and that Heard can’t show she was prejudiced. “The juror was vetted, sat for the entire jury, deliberated, and reached a verdict. The only evidence before this Court is that this juror and all jurors followed their oaths, the Court’s instructions, and orders. This Court is bound by the competent decision of the jury,” Azcarate wrote.
Depp sued for $50 million in Fairfax County after Heard wrote a 2018 op-ed piece in The Washington Post about domestic violence in which she referred to herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article never mentioned Depp by name, but his lawyers said several passages in the article defamed him by implication by referring to highly publicized abuse allegations she made in 2016 as she filed for divorce.
Heard then filed a $100 million defamation counterclaim. By the time the case went to trial, her counterclaim had been reduced to a few statements made by one of Depp’s lawyers, who called Heard’s allegations of abuse a hoax.
On her counterclaim, the jury awarded Depp $15 million and Heard $2 million. Because punitive damages in Virginia are limited to $350,000, the $15 million judgement was reduced to $10.35 million. In Wednesday’s order, the judge did not explain why she rejected Heard’s other claims.
Heard argued, among other things, that the $10 million verdict is unsupported by the facts and appears to show that jurors failed to focus on the fallout from the 2018 op-ed piece — as they were supposed to — and instead looked broadly at the damage Depp’s reputation suffered as a result of the alleged abuse.
Heard’s lawyers also argued that the verdicts for Depp on the one hand and Heard on the other are illogical. “The jury’s contradictory verdicts are inconsistent and irreconcilable,” wrote her attorneys, Elaine Bredehoft and Benjamin Rottenborn.
The verdict was also challenged by Heard’s lawyers on the grounds that one of the seven jurors who decided the case was never summoned for jury duty. A 77-year-old county resident received a jury summons, according to court documents. However, the man’s son, who shares the same name and lives at the same address as his father, responded to the summons and served in his place. Heard’s attorneys argued that Virginia law is strict about juror identities, and that a misidentification case is grounds for a mistrial.
They presented no evidence that the 52-year-old son, identified only as Juror #15, sought to replace his father on purpose or insidiously, but they argue that possibility should not be dismissed. “The Court cannot assume, as Mr. Depp requests, that Juror 15’s ostensibly improper service was an innocent oversight.” “It could have been a deliberate attempt to serve on a jury in a high-profile case,” Heard’s attorneys wrote.
Heard can still appeal the verdict to the Virginia Court of Appeals. The issues presented to the appellate court may differ from those rejected by Azacarate on Wednesday.
