Appearing as a witness for Mr. Depp, whom she dated in the 1990s, the British model countered testimony by the actor’s ex-wife, Amber Heard, who had alluded to a rumored incident between them.
Lawyers on each side of the defamation case between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard worked on Wednesday to undermine the credibility of the other as the trial wound down and the moment approached when the jury would be tasked with deciding whether to believe that Mr. Depp abused Ms. Heard, she abused him or mutual abuse occurred.
Mr. Depp’s legal team brought forward testimony from the British model Kate Moss, a former girlfriend, to rebut a rumor Ms. Heard had alluded to earlier in court suggesting that Mr. Depp had pushed Ms. Moss down the stairs in the 1990s. And Ms. Heard’s team confronted Mr. Depp with a series of text messages in which he appeared to use vile language in reference to women, writing in 2016 that Ms. Heard was “begging for total global humiliation.”
Mr. Depp said that message reflected his shock that Ms. Heard was making false allegations about him, but he denied sending a pair of separate messages that included the words, “I need. I want. I take,” in reference to a woman.
“You read it right but I did not write that,” he said, later calling the texts “grotesque.” “Perhaps someone else had my phone.”
A lawyer for Mr. Depp, Benjamin Chew, questioned Ms. Moss in response to a detail from Ms. Heard’s testimony earlier in the trial. Ms. Heard described a fight in 2015 in which, she said, she struck Mr. Depp because he had swung at her sister while she was standing at the top of a staircase.
“I just, in my head, instantly think of Kate Moss and the stairs and I swung at him,” Ms. Heard said.
Ms. Moss denied that Mr. Depp had ever pushed her down the stairs.
In Ms. Moss’s brief testimony over a video call, she told the jury sitting in Fairfax County, Va., that she recalled slipping down the stairs at a resort in Jamaica during their relationship, which she said lasted from 1994 to 1998.
“There had been a rainstorm and as I left the room I slid down the stairs and I hurt my back,” Ms. Moss said. “He came running back to help me and carried me to my room and got me medical attention.”
“He never pushed me, kicked me or threw me down any stairs,” Ms. Moss said.
Ms. Heard had also discussed that “rumor” in testimony at an earlier trial in Britain in 2020, a case also associated with the question of whether Mr. Depp had physically abused his wife. In that case, Mr. Depp sued a British tabloid company and editor after The Sun newspaper called him a “wife beater” in a headline. The judge in that case found that Mr. Depp had assaulted Ms. Heard repeatedly during their marriage and that he had put her “in fear of her life.”
Ms. Moss did not testify during the proceeding in London. But Mr. Depp’s legal team chose to call her as a witness in Virginia after Ms. Heard again referred to Ms. Moss in the courtroom. When she did, on May 5, Mr. Depp’s lead lawyer, Mr. Chew, pumped his fist, appearing to celebrate the mention, which opened the door for Ms. Moss to be called to testify about her relationship with Mr. Depp.
The jury is expected to get the case by the weekend. Technically the members are empaneled to determine whether the reputation of either member of the former couple has been damaged by false statements about their tumultuous relationship. To do so, jurors will have to decide whether either side presented credible evidence that abuse had occurred.
Another witness for Mr. Depp on Wednesday was Beverly Leonard, who said she saw Ms. Heard get into an altercation with a companion in 2009, when Ms. Leonard was working at an airport in Seattle. Ms. Leonard said Ms. Heard grabbed the other woman and pulled a necklace off her before she stepped between them. (Ms. Leonard was a police officer at the airport and arrested Ms. Heard on suspicion that she had assaulted her then-partner, Tasya van Ree, according to court papers. Ms. Heard was not charged, and Ms. van Ree called the situation “over-sensationalized.”)
Under cross-examination, Ms. Leonard, an unexpected witness, acknowledged that she had reached out to Mr. Depp’s team on Tuesday night, offering to testify. A lawyer for Ms. Heard, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, questioned whether she had done so to “get on television,” but Ms. Leonard denied that.
Ms. Heard, 36, has accused Mr. Depp, 58, of repeated physical abuse, as well as several instances of sexual assault, and has said she only ever hit back in defense of herself or her sister. Mr. Depp has denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting Ms. Heard, and has described her as the abuser in the relationship.
Earlier in the trial, Ellen Barkin, with whom Mr. Depp was also romantically involved in the 1990s, called him a “controlling” and “jealous man,” recounting an incident in a Las Vegas in which, she said, Mr. Depp threw a wine bottle across a hotel room. She said there had been a fight going on between Mr. Depp and other people in the room, but she could not remember the cause of it.
The Virginia case was sparked by a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post, in which Ms. Heard said her career suffered after she became a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article did not mention Mr. Depp by name, but he has asserted that its allusions to their relationship “devastated” his acting career.
The seven-person jury is also considering Ms. Heard’s countersuit, which says Mr. Depp defamed her when the lawyer representing him at the time made statements to the British tabloid The Daily Mail saying that her abuse accusations were a hoax.
Ms. Heard has testified that Mr. Depp’s rages were fueled by his drug and alcohol use and triggered by his suspicions that she was having affairs, which she has repeatedly denied. Mr. Depp, she said, would punch, slap and kick her, and had torn out clumps of her hair and sexually assaulted her with a bottle.
Over four days of testimony earlier in the trial, Mr. Depp described Ms. Heard as someone with a “need for conflict” and a “need for violence.” He said she had lashed out at him physically over a number of issues, including a potential postnuptial agreement, her desire for Mr. Depp to abstain from drugs and alcohol, and his tardiness to her 30th birthday dinner.
On Wednesday, one of the texts that Mr. Depp was confronted with included his saying of Ms. Heard in 2016, “I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion, or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market.”
Mr. Depp said the text portrayed his anger at the false accusations that turned him into “scum” in the eyes of many.
Kate Moss Testifies That Johnny Depp Did Not Push Her Down Stairs - The New York Times
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