June 16, 2022 — A juror from the Amber Heard trial came forward to CBS’ news show, Good Morning America to tell explain how they came to the decisions they did.
Here is everything they got wrong, which was nearly everything:
Disclaimer: Not all of the quotes attributed to this juror were gathered in one place, and these three different sources were used:
- Good Morning America article (June 16, 2022)
- Good Morning America video (June 16, 2022)
- ENews (June 16, 2022)
I used direct quotes where I could and the article’s interpretation when necessary. For a visual aid, this was the composition of the jury:
The Breakdown:
“[Amber] would answer one question and she would be crying, and two seconds later she would turn ice-cold…Some of us used the expression ‘crocodile tears’. It didn’t seem natural.”
Trauma experts say how Amber Heard emoted on the stand doesn’t indicate she was lying about abuse.
- Kate Porterfield (clinical psychologist at the Bellevue Hospital Program for Survivors of Torture in New York City) explains:
“Some survivors may react to recounting their experience and appear frightened, agitated, or distressed, but then quickly “flip” as their body tries to calm the agitation. Thus, the person can then appear flat, detached, and disconnected. All of this is difficult for juries to understand because it seems counterintuitive that a person could look flat or maybe even bored, or that a person would have difficulty remembering details of something horrific that she suffered.”
- Jim Hopper (clinical psychologist and nationally recognized expert on psychological trauma and assistant professor at Harvard) further adds:
“The courtroom was packed with Johnny Depp fans who were constantly directing massive hostility at Amber Heard and all of her witnesses. So it’s not just was a person really traumatized, and what would that look like? But, also, what is it like to remember your trauma in public with a bunch of hostile people staring you down and giving you dirty looks the whole time?”
“[On Depp’s side] A lot of the jury felt what he was saying, at the end of the day, was more believable…he just seemed a little more real in terms of how he responded to questions. His emotional state was very stable throughout.”
This was a fascinating 27 page paper by Julie A. Owens, an expert consultant for Violence Against Women. She weighed nearly every piece of evidence presented in the trial using something called the “Power and Control Wheel” and concluded that Johnny Depp was the likely abuser over Amber. Here are some of her insights into his state of mind:
One of the most significant determinations was that EVERY domestic violence victim always had one thing in common. This was FEAR of their abuser. Johnny Depp is clearly not in the least bit afraid of Amber Heard, even though he claims she harassed and abused and hit and punched him, cut his finger off, made him hide in bathrooms, etc. Even when survivors say they’re not afraid, because they don’t want to appear weak, statements like this that indicate a complete lack of fear are unlikely. In addition, no victim or survivor actually pursues or gleefully looks forward to a fight with their abuser. To the contrary, they usually bend over backward to be nowhere near them, and certainly do not purposely provoke them. It would be extremely unusual for a survivor to doggedly pursue and legally harass the person who terrifies and traumatizes them.
Not all, but most victims, particularly males abused by females, are very embarrassed and ashamed when people find out they’ve been abused. They usually try to keep it quiet and may feel humiliated and fear being considered weak or spineless. Johnny Depp clearly doesn’t mind one bit telling the world that he has been abused. To the contrary, he appears to revel in and actually enjoy the constant public attention and sympathy extended to him by his masses of fans. He has been quoted as saying, “I can’t say I’m embarrassed because I’m doing the right thing.”
Victims may do some of the same things abusers do such as hit, slap, deny, lie, etc., in response to abuse. This should come as no surprise. Yet, instead of saying things like, “My God, it’s terrible how Johnny Depp’s abuse has changed her,” the general reaction of the public seems to have been, “My God, what a lying bitch!” “She’s acts crazy!” which translates to, “No wonder he abused her! She’d drive anyone nuts!” They’ve gotten it completely backwards. This victim-blaming phenomenon is one of the reasons so many of them are arrested for domestic violence. By contrast, Johnny Depp is just as charming, attractive, relaxed, upbeat and fun as he ever was because he hasn’t been changed by abuse.
“The crying, the facial expressions that she had, the staring at the jury. All of us were very uncomfortable.”
Most people who go up on the witness stand are advised to look at the jury. But there was another reason why Amber might have been doing it so often: she didn’t know where else to look.
Johnny and his team were sitting right in front of her. His fans filled the courtroom in front of her. To the far left were her own lawyers, and to the right, the jury.
Amber’s mom is dead, her father estranged, leaving just her sister in the courtroom for support.
This was something Camille Vasquez used against her in her closing arguments:
“As you may have noticed, no one showed up in this court room for Ms. Heard other than her sister. This is a woman who burns bridges. Her close friends don’t show up for her.”
(Eve Barlow, a close journalist friend, actually did show up for Amber but was banned from the courtroom early on for live-tweeting.)
Amber chose to share the most harrowing moments of her relationship with a dispassionate jury instead of a hostile audience, who were so dedicated to Depp they camped outside the courtroom overnight just to sit through 8 hours of court for him.
And in a sad twist of irony, the jury took Heard’s eye contact as a sign of manipulation.
I think it’s telling that no one on this jury (including the juror who came forward) wanted to a public interview, which would allow the world to see their faces and judge their expressions while an interviewer asked them the hard questions.
I’m not explicitly saying the jury are hypocrites, but it is ironic that Amber Heard and her lawyers sealed the jurors’ identities for a year, while Johnny and his team couldn’t be bothered.
“If you have a battered wife or spouse situation, why would you buy the other person, the ‘aggressor,’ a knife? If you really wanted to help Johnny Depp get off drugs, why are you taking drugs around him?”
Amber Heard gave Johnny Depp a knife as a present in the early days of their relationship in 2012. She said that she was not afraid of him stabbing her with it. Inscribed on the blade were the words “hasta la muerte” — meaning “until death” in Spanish (which Amber speaks fluently).
Counterpoints:
- Amber gave him a knife in 2012 — before she alleged he first became physically abusive.
- A knife is a common gift.
- Johnny collected guns and knives.
- Johnny gave knives to her father around this time.
- Amber never accused Johnny of cutting her with sharp objects at any point in their relationship.
- Presumably the couple already had all kinds of knives and scissors in their kitchen, making this argument sort of moot.
- Johnny did show signs of emotional abuse using a knife; two months after their divorce in 2016, Johnny did brought a knife to their meeting and told Amber to cut him with it because his blood “was the only thing she didn’t have”. She begged him to put the knife down.
- There probably is a tendency on his part to self-harm, but it’s hard to tell how Amber would have known this in the early days of their relationship.
Drugs:
- Amber made many, increasingly fruitless attempts throughout the years of their relationship to help Johnny detox.
- In at least one circumstance, Amber’s attempts to rehabilitate Johnny was met with physical punishment:
- The Justice Nicol upheld her allegation in the UK 2020 trial:
- Johnny had referred to this incident as a bloodbath in an audio recording:
- A year later, Johnny said that Amber’s lectures about his cocaine use were inappropriate because she is half his age. He thus acknowledged the power imbalance between them while also deriding her as a “lesbian camp counselor”:
- In July of 2015, Johnny sent texts to Paul Bettany, fantasizing “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she is dead…” (No, this wasn’t a Monty Python reference.) Johnny explained this as him being “resentful of the fact that Ms. Heard was very aggressive and quite insulting about my use of alcohol, or if cocaine came into the picture.”
- Other audio clips insinuate Depp had a problem with Amber taking authority in their relationship:
“Johnny: Don’t fucking pretend to be authoritative with me. You don’t exist.”
“Amber: I’m trying to help us! Johnny: You’re not helping, you stupid fuck!”
- Amber may have done drugs with Johnny to appease him.
- Even if Amber did (some) drugs with her husband recreationally, this does not perclude him from abusing her.
“If you mix alcohol and marijuana, that’s where you usually end up — passed out. We discussed at length that a lot of the drugs she said he used, most of them were downers. And you usually don’t get violent on downers. You become a zombie, as those pictures show.”
- Right, because no one has ever been known to become violent after drinking.
- Medical explanation: Alcohol weakens brain mechanisms that normally restrain impulsive behaviors, including inappropriate aggression. By impairing information processing, alcohol can also lead a person to misjudge social cues, thereby overreacting to a perceived threat.
- Depp didn’t just take downers with alcohol, he took uppers and hallucinogenics:
- In his testimony in both court cases, the UK (2020), and the US (2022), Depp admitted to cocaine use (a stimulant) and Heard testified he was frequently doing the drug in her presence.
In at least two incidents, his addiction to ecstasy appears to have escalated violence:
- On or around March 3, 2015, Depp had taken 8 ecstasy pills and alcohol overnight. He then took more pills in the morning, when he allegedly sexually and physically assaulted Heard in Australia (page 12; 61).
- In 2016, Depp had been taking MDMA and mushrooms on his birthday trip to Coachella for several days. He was also using MDMA and mushrooms on May 9, 2016 when he and Heard had “a horrible fight” (Day 10: page 13; 1548)
The juror also said the jury essentially dismissed all witnesses on both sides who were employees, paid experts, friends or family from either side.
What?
Do they think domestic violence only happens if it is witnessed by complete strangers and cops?
Some of those paid experts costed thousands of dollars. What did they think they were there for? Why didn’t they compare them side by side to see who were the best qualified?
One of the people who didn’t fit this criteria was a Disney executive, who said that Heard’s op-ed did not factor into their decision concerning Pirates. This would suggest her op-ed had no impact on his career.
Two photos presented near the end of the trial were not credible to the jury. They believed the accusation by Depp’s team that one photo was edited to artificially redden Heard’s face to suggest bruising. Heard testified the photos looked different because of a “vanity light.”
“Those were two different pictures. We couldn’t really tell which picture was real and which one was not.”
The images in question:
- There is a third possibility; the differences in the photos may have been because one was the HDR version. They should have the same date, same timestamp, but different file name. This used to be an automatic feature of iPhones, and would automatically alter any picture taken in contrast and saturation/vibrancy of color. The tech expert who reviewed the pictures should have known this was an iPhone feature back in 2016.
- Contrary to the US jury, UK Justice Nicol accepted that both of these photographs showed some reddening to her cheek and appreciated the different lighting conditions.
- But even if intentionally manipulated by Amber, the bruises look about the same.
- There were also two other pictures of facial bruising from this incident, taken in the penthouse:
- And more photo evidence from other incidents:
- Although not entirely relevant, it seems worth mentioning that Johnny’s team may have also submitted a doctored photo into evidence:
The juror also said the defense failed Heard by telling them that the actress “never goes outside without make-up on,” he said. “Yet she goes to file the restraining order without make-up on. And it just so happens her publicist is with her. Those things add up and starts to become hard to believe.”
Amber Heard testified her ex-friend Raquel Pennington was the one who told her not to put make up on that morning.
Even if this statement is false, Amber went to court to show a judge that she was in danger from an abusive husband. Why would she put makeup over the bruise for that particular outing?
The evidence Amber presented did convince the judge to grant her that temporary restraining order that day.
The juror said the four-hour debate over the difference between a pledged donation and an actual donation ended up “a fiasco” for Heard. Heard testified that a pledge and a donation are “synonymous with one another” and “mean the same thing.”
That’s probably because pledge/donation is used as a synonym by many, many other celebrities besides Heard.
- Here is a twitter thread full of examples of media/donors using pledge/donation interchangeably:
- A person who was in major gifts fundraising for 12 years says that she also uses pledge/donate interchangeably, and attests that pledges are usually paid out over a period of 10 years:
- The ACLU also used “Donation Payment” and “Pledge Payment” interchangeably on their official documentation of Heard’s payments:
- Note: As their marriage had no pre-nup, Amber was entitled to $30+ million under California law from their divorce settlement — even if she had not come forward with claims of abuse.
- Amber would have also been entitled 1/2 of the income from Pirates of the Caribbean 5, which Disney payed Depp a whopping $90 million for. However, she waived her rights to this “community property asset” and all other back-end deals:
- Amber’s actions are not indicative of someone who is a gold digger.
- Even if unwilling to fulfill her financial obligations, what Amber chose to do with her divorce settlement has no bearing on whether she was abused.
“[Amber] goes on a talk show in the UK. The video shows her sitting there telling the host she gave all that money away. And the terms she used in that video clip were ‘I gave it away’, ‘I donated it’, ‘it’s gone’,” he added. “But the fact is, she didn’t give much of it away at all.”
These words were so specific that I went back to the video clip in question and rewatched all of it.
This is all Amber said about it:
“$7 million dollars in total was donated to — I mean I split it between the ACLU and the children’s hospital of LA.”
The three things the juror claimed she said:
- ‘I donated it’. → She did say.
- ‘I gave it away.’ → She did not say.
- ‘It’s gone.’ → She did not say.
If you’re a juror that decides to go to the press to explain that you didn’t believe Heard because she was disingenuous with her words, maybe don’t attribute false quotes to her.
Also, it was a Dutch television show, not a UK one.
When discussing legal teams, he said he “thought Depp’s team was sharp,” while Heard’s lawyers had “sharp elbows,” explaining that “they were abrupt and frequently interrupted.”
“They would cut people off in cross because they wanted one specific answer without context. They were forcing people to just answer a very narrow question … which was obvious.”
He must have ignored Camille Vasquez’s entire existence, just like he did all of the witness testimonies.
“She needs better advice,” he said of Heard.
She also needed a better jury.
Publishing the 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post that defamed Depp was a poor choice, he said. “If she didn’t do any of this stuff with the op-eds, Johnny Depp could have helped her out in her career. They didn’t leave things on a nasty turn when they divorced. It turned nasty after the op-ed.”
I didn’t realize that getting a temporary restraining order was an amicable end to a marriage.
Reminder: Johnny Depp sent this text on 15 August 2016 to his former agent, a few months after Amber got a TRO in late May:
But yeah, I’m sure if Amber had never published that op-ed on December 18, 2018, their relationship would have been lovey-dovey.
“We only looked at the evidence.”
No, you didn’t.
“They had their husband-wife arguments. They were both yelling at each other. I don’t think that makes either of them right or wrong. That’s what you do when you get into an argument, I guess. But to rise to the level of what she was claiming, there wasn’t enough or any evidence that really supported what she was saying.”
You threw most of it out.
“What I think is truthful was that they were both abusive to each other.”
If they were both abusive to each other, how did she defame him? He only needed to abuse her once to make her statements true.
Heard, the juror said, was considered the aggressor in the relationship by the majority of the jury.
Oh, okay, so the verdict wasn’t really about the legal threshold of defamation, it was about making a point.
[The juror] added that he believed that Johnny did not hit Amber.
Doubt.
“We followed the evidence…Myself and at least two other jurors don’t use Twitter or Facebook. Others who had it made a point not to talk about it.”
- There were 7 people on that jury, and he can only speak for two others.
- Even if the others made a point not to talk about it, it does not mean they weren’t on social media.
- He never talked about the fans in and out of the courthouse and how they might have influenced their decisions.
- He never talked about what was said at home.
- EDIT: Oh look, here’s evidence that a jury member was watching YouTube videos of Amber Heard and talking to a friend, inside the courtroom:
“Some people said we were bribed. That’s not true. Social media did not impact us. We didn’t take into account anything outside [the courtroom]. We only looked at the evidence,” he said. “They were very serious accusations and a lot of money involved. So we weren’t taking it lightly.”
- The court stenographer caught the jurors dozing off during some of the dispositions.
- This was a six week trial (6 weeks x 4 days x 8 hours ≈ 192 hours).
- The jury spent 12 hours, or just over three days deliberating, which was about 6% of the total trial time.
- They spent 4 of those 12 hours (1/3 of the deliberation time) discussing the donation/pledge ‘fiasco’.
- In comparison, the UK trial was 16 days long and the judge spent over three months going through all of the evidence. That’s 6x longer than the actual trial. He outlined his reasoning in 129 pages, and two appellate judges upheld his decision.
The juror said they were given “no guidance on the amount of money both stars were awarded,” adding that “each juror threw out a number they thought was fair.”
I think I can see why the jury didn’t initially fill out the damages on the compensation forms now; they were hoping the judge would do it for them. They were kids stuck in a group project asking the teacher for help.
The juror also said that no one on the jury was starstruck and their individual celebrity never played a factor in their decision. While he admitted he knew of Depp more than Heard, he hadn’t seen many of his films. “None of us were really fans of either one of them,” he said.
Asked whether he would go see a future movie starring Depp or Heard, the juror said it would depend on the movie.
“What they do in their personal lives doesn’t affect me whatsoever. Going to movies is entertainment. I go for the quality of the movie or the storyline,” he said. “Not for the acting.”
Name one good movie Johnny Depp has been in from the last decade. Go on, I dare you.
