Johnny Depp refuses to pay him the two million that the jury awarded to Amber Heard in his media trial for defamation. Although he was the winner of the legal battlethe actor of Pirates of the Caribbean He has filed an appeal against the small victory his ex-wife achieved.
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Depp and his legal team have described said verdict as “incorrect” and are “working” on “overturning the decision”, according to reports Entertainment Weekly.
Last June, a seven-person jury concluded that the actress of Aquaman intentionally and maliciously defamed her ex-husbandwhen he wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post in 2018 where she described herself as a victim of domestic abuse.
Although she never named Depp in the text, he claimed the article destroyed his career and reputation. The Fairfax, Virginia, jury agreed, awarding the 59-year-old performer $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages (the judge later reduced punitive damages to the Virginia statutory limit of $350,000). Dollars).
But Amber won a small victory in her countersuit, arguing that Depp, through his lawyer Adam Waldman, had defamed her by calling her statements of abuse a “hoax”. Thus, the jury decided to award 2 million dollars in compensation to the 36-year-old model.
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This Wednesday, the 59-year-old actor’s legal team filed an appeal with the Virginia Court of Appeals, claiming that he should not be responsible for the comments made by his lawyer.
In court documents released by Law & Crime NetworkDepp’s lawyer, Benjamin Chew, argues that while much of the June trial was successful, “the trial court was confronted with a number of new and complex legal and factual issues, and while the trial court of first instance decided the great majority of those questions in a sensible and correct way, some rulings were erroneous”.
The documents state: “Ms. Heard did not present any evidence at trial that Mr. Depp was personally involved in directing or making any of Waldman’s three statements. In fact, Mr. Depp testified that not even I had seen the Waldman Statements before August 2020.”
His legal team adds that “Mr. Waldman is an independent contractor, whose conduct is not automatically attributable to Mr. Depp” and “no evidence of Mr. Waldman’s actual malice was presented at trial” by the legal team. heard.