Amber Heard says she ‘doesn’t blame’ jury for siding with Johnny Depp at trial: ‘I actually understand’

‘I actually understand. He’s a beloved character and people feel they know him,’ Heard says of Depp

Amber Heard said she doesnt blame the jury for siding against her in her defamation battle against Johnny Depp as she sat down with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie for her first televised interview since the verdict.

In a clip of the interview released Monday, Ms Guthrie told Ms Heard: “There’s no polite way to say it, the jury looked at the evidence you presented, they listened to your evidence and they did not believe you. They thought you were lying.”

Ms Heard replied: “How could they make a judgement, how could they not come to that conclusion? They had sat in those seats and heard over three weeks of non-stop relentless testimony from paid employees, and towards the end of the trial, randos.”

“So you don’t blame the jury,” Ms Guthrie asked.

“I don’t blame them. I actually understand. He’s a beloved character and people feel they know him. He’s a fantastic actor,” Ms Heard said.

“Their job is to not be dazzled by that, their job is to look at the facts and the evidence and they did not believe your testimony or your evidence,” Ms Guthrie said.

“Again, how could they after listening to three and a half weeks of testimony about how I was an uncredible person, not to believe a word that came out of my mouth,” Ms Heard responded.

Elsewhere in the interview, Ms Heard said, “I don’t care what one thinks about me or what judgments you want to make about what happened in the privacy of my own home, in my marriage, behind closed doors”.

“I don’t presume the average person should know those things,” she added. “And so I don’t take it personally. But even somebody who is sure I’m deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I’m lying, you still couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there’s been a fair representation. You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair.”

The interview will be shown on NBC’s Today on Tuesday and Wednesday as well as on Dateline NBC at 8pm on Friday.

A jury handed down the verdict on 1 June, awarding Mr Depp $10m in compensatory damages and $5m in punitive damages following Ms Heard’s 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post, in which she claimed to be a domestic abuse survivor.

The trial began on 11 April in Fairfax, Virginia following Mr Depp’s March 2019 lawsuit. Mr Depp argued that Ms Heard defamed him in the op-ed titled “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change”.

Ms Heard wrote that “like many women, I had been harassed and sexually assaulted by the time I was of college age. But I kept quiet — I did not expect filing complaints to bring justice. And I didn’t see myself as a victim”.

“Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out,” she added at the time.

While Mr Depp wasn’t named in the piece, his legal team argued that it contained a “clear implication that Mr Depp is a domestic abuser”, which they said was “categorically and demonstrably false”.

Mr Depp was awarded $10.35m in damages in total because Virginia state law caps punitive damages at $350,000. Ms Heard was awarded $2m in compensatory damages because of comments made by Mr Depp’s previous lawyer.