Johnny Depp jokes about punching Amber Heard, friend testifies

In a videotaped testimony in a Virginia courtroom on Tuesday, a former mutual friend of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard described the actor making comments about the spousal abuse directly following the pair’s seaside Caribbean wedding.

“While we were walking back from the ceremony … I was walking with Johnny and congratulating him that he pulled it off, that he did it,” Io Tillett Wright said in footage on March 10. “And then they said, ‘We’re married; now I can punch her in the face and no one can do anything about it.'”

The revelation about Depp’s outspoken jokes came as his $50 million defamation lawsuit against Heard, which centered on his ex-wife’s domestic violence allegations, reached its seventeenth day.

Depp and Heard threw a wedding party for friends and family on Depp’s private island in February 2015, beginning a marriage that quickly fell apart.

Wright, a multi-hyphenate producer, became friends with Heard and later Depp when he was working as a photographer for The New York Times nearly a decade ago, he said, adding that he himself was a slew of actors for each of the actors. Described as a lifelong confidante.

He described a toxic relationship in which Depp regularly humiliated Heard, dismissed his career as being based solely on his looks, and Heard retaliated verbally.

Wright was clear that he had never seen Depp hit Heard. But he said he saw some obvious consequences, like a clump of blond hair on the carpet, allegedly torn by Depp during a fight. He also said he saw Depp throwing “glasses and utensils” at Heard, “which I would characterize as violent,” Wright said.

Depp says he never physically harmed Heard or any other woman. In response, Heard has him reversed at a cost of $100 million.

The couple’s divorce was finalized in January 2017. In 2020, after Depp’s former attorney Adam Waldman attacked Heard’s domestic violence allegations as a “hoax,” Wright said he saw Heard “back down.”

“Amber became isolated, confused and extraordinarily distressed,” he said.

Heard testified about attacks on his credibility by Depp’s team earlier in the day when Depp’s attorney Camille Vasquez finished his cross-examination.

Hurd, like Depp, testified over the course of four days in total.

“Just look at me up. You’ll see,” she said as Vasquez accused her of having no evidence that Depp’s team had called an “orchestrated smear campaign” against her.

Throughout the defamation trial, Depp’s supporters have certainly been loudly flocking, with fans showing up outside the courtroom to cheer on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star as he comes every day since proceedings began in April.

While the suit is indeed objectively complicated, not so much on social media, where Johnny Depp is portrayed as the victim of a toxic lie by someone less famous than him. Popular hashtags include #AmberHeardIsALiar and #AmberTurd, a reference to the part of Depp’s testimony where he said that Heard defecated on the edge of his bed so they could return. (Hurd blames the couple’s aging dogs.) Countless moments of the trial, which have been streamed live, have provided minable content and memes day after day.

In his testimony, Heard suggested that a campaign against him dates back several years to the current trial, alleging that one of Depp’s lawyers had ties to TMZ and used the celebrity news and gossip site to make him look bad. information—including an audio recording in which Heard admitted he hit Depp and told him he was “fine.”

Her time on the stand came to an end after a protracted fight between Elaine Breedhoft and Vasquez, one of Hurd’s attorneys, who interrupted Bredehoft’s interrogation with almost-constant objections, with the judge necessitating several exaggerated sidebars.