Amber Heard V/s Johnny Depp: The legal drama gets a ‘new season’!

Amber Heard has submitted her own brief with the Virginia courts, and her attorneys have reportedly filed a new 68-page long appeal against Johnny Depp, claiming that the verdict will have a “chilling effect” on women who are trying to speak out against the abuse by powerful men. This emerges less than a month after Johnny Depp appealed against Amber Heard being awarded $2 million in their high-profile defamation case.

Johnny Depp won his defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife earlier this year. A jury also awarded Amber $2 million for a portion of her own counterclaim. Now, five months later, Heard’s legal team has filed a second appeal against Depp in a Virginia appeals court, claiming that the trial should have taken place in a different state and that the verdict should be overturned. According to Amber’s claims, the deletion of portions of her treatment notes, in which she described being assaulted by Johnny, led to an unfair trial.

According to Deadline, Amber’s new attorneys Jay Ward Brown and David L. Axelrod said, “The trial court erroneously refused to dismiss this action on the ground of forum non-conveniens, based on its mistaken conclusion that Depp’s claims arose in Virginia because the Washington Post’s servers are located here.”

Due to Amber’s op-ed in The Washington Post from 2018 in which she wrote about being a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” Johnny sued her for defamation for $50 million in March 2019. The seven-week defamation lawsuit that followed was won by Johnny.