LogFAQs > #964776332

DAY 13

So today is the day that Johnny Depp finally ends his case in chief and Amber Heard starts her defense. And there was a motion to strike thrown in there. More on that later.

First, we finish up with Nurse Erin's testimony. I mentioned it would be more spicy but it was not. They reflected on her addictions to alcohol and cocaine a bit more before just having her relate that Amber never reported injuries to her, just those pictures without context. She mentioned once Amber had surgery on a sty she had on her eye, presumably because she'll have a picture of her with a swollen eye to claim Johnny hit her then. She confirmed Amber drank too much, laughed at her when she said she shouldn't do so many drugs, and that she was prone to rage and anger issues. Also, she had talked to the nurse about how she was jealous of Johnny's fame and became more anxious when he was GONE not when he was there. More or less things we mostly knew.

Next up is an in-person witness, Michael Spindler, who is a forensic accountant who looked at how much damages Johnny lost after the op-ed came out. Skipping through the boring stuff, he is estimated to have lost $40,318,237 as of today. Quick and easy. On cross, Rottenborn tried to rattle him, but Spindler was surprisingly chill and nonplussed throughout it all. Rottenborn was fine with his questioning, just weirdly antagonistic. Redirect was quick and simple.

And then the Plaintiff rests, finally! I think it would have been better with a witness who could kind of summarize everything, but this was fine.

So we have the Motion to Strike now, which is the Defense's opportunity to get the case dismissed. It fails like 99% of the time, but you kind of have to still do it. It's a matter of procedure. The Defense gets an opportunity to explain their side, then the Plaintiff does. Rottenborn was our guy for this, and Ben Chew was speaking for Depp.

I'm going to just go through greatest hits, but the Judge wasn't buying into dismissing it when Rottenborn was speaking, and Ben Chew kept speaking up to counter outright exaggerations from Rottenborn and at one time went "I'm sorry, I just can't wait to respond." There's just a difference in confidence between both of them, likely because one knows their case is stronger. Like I can't knock Rottenborn here. He has to do it, he knows the facts from the Plaintiff's case is strong enough that it won't be dismissed. This was fine. It was essentially denied because he tried to argue that Amber didn't have anything to do with the title of the article and the Judge was like "Okay but you need to provide proof, so I can't really make a judgment until then." Which is fair. What was crappy was him saying "They didn't call Ms. Heard in their case in chief to prove this" when both parties agreed that Amber would only be called in her Defense.

Ben Chew, in fact, could not wait to respond because he got up there and just spit fucking fire. I really recommend trying to find their response to the motion to strike because it was pretty amazing. I'll hit the key parts.

He started out by saying that they had many credible witnesses to prove that she had made her statements with malice and they were a lie, then pointed at her and said "And we even proved that SHE was the abuser in this courtroom!" That got quite a look from Amber, understandably. He used plenty of cases to back up his argument, and recited rules. He said that she co-signed the article's title by sharing it on Twitter (skeptical if this one holds, there's plausible arguments both ways). But he proved malice and intent to do more damage. He called out the ACLU for being corrupt as fuck for what they did. He brought up it was pitched to Washington Post of "Amber Heard has an article about domestic abuse, as you might recall she was beaten up by her ex husband Johnny Depp." And also brought up how the ACLU legal director said that everyone knew it was about Johnny.

He said that they specifically had to use Johnny's name, and specifically chose to release it before Aquaman, because otherwise nobody would have cared about what Amber Heard had to say, and that the only article that was interested in printing her story without the references to Johnny Depp was Teen Vogue. Absolutely fucking brutal.

He brought up that the ACLU was reprehensible because they lied about her donating all of the promised money to them. "I hope they start making these arguments. I can't wait to correct them."

He also brought up how Amber got a bogus restraining order and waited until Johnny was out of the country to file it, when she knew she would be safe, and everyone who saw her has testified that she had no bruises on her before then, including the police, and it was all part of a scheme to get $7 million that she lied about donating to the ACLU and sick and dying children so she could pocket it all.

This all feels targeted directly to Amber to rattle her before she testifies. He talked about everything she lied about, including her "final surprise she left in his bed". This was awesome.

And Rottenborn came up and said it was "clearly tailored for the media" which... he's probably not entirely wrong there. lol But he didn't have a great rebuttal, which again is fine. I can't judge. And, obviously, the Judge denied the motion to strike. The Defense has to go next.

I should also say it's been confirmed that Amber's new PR person was in the court room and got in trouble twice for using his phone. Like FFS this isn't difficult just don't use your phone you guys KNOW this. They were passing notes and stuff to him throughout the day, which whatever. It's worth noting this because of what we have up next.

So I'm trying to find a positive out of Amber's first witness. Dr. Dawn Hughes is a forensic psychologist, just like Johnny's Dr. Curry, who you might remember me saying presented herself incredibly well. Dr. Hughes has many, many qualifications, and she's done 100 court cases, and spoke about herself for at least half an hour which seemed excessive, and... if I'm frank, she did not seem very credible despite all of this.

I'm going to be completely honest and say she made me very uncomfortable on a personal level because of my own experiences, because she spoke about domestic abuse, and rather than using neutral pronouns and terms (such as how Dr. Curry did), Dr. Hughes said "she" when referring to a victim and "he" referring to an abuser. Dr. Hughes described every single abusive behavior she could in these terms, but we just got done listening to Johnny's case, and everything she said, all that jury is probably going to think is how Amber did all of that to HIM. Like she described exact things we heard in audio clips. She spent a significant amount of time on this, and she came across as horribly bias. Obviously, any expert is going to be bias to whoever they are presenting for, but she seemed well above and beyond.

For instance, she claimed that everything Amber may have done such as hitting Johnny or insulting him was fine because she was just responding to Johnny's "abuse" and excusable, but anything that Johnny said or did was inexcusably abuse. It came across as very disingenuous and I don't see a jury really supporting this. It felt like this whole thing was downplaying the existence of male victims of domestic abuse, which was especially grody. I frankly don't really want to listen to it again, so I won't get into the specifics and refresh myself, but you can go back and listen to excerpts to understand what I mean.