Chronological View
The whole case, in order
Every substantive step, from the events the case is about through to the last filing in the public record. The rail sets the page’s rule: one side on the left, the other on the right, the court down the middle.
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Before the suit
The events the trial was about. None of it is what he sued over — that is the line further down.
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2009
They meet
On the set of The Rum Diary. They marry in February 2015.
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21 Apr 2016
The birthday argument
Her declaration later describes a magnum of champagne thrown at a wall and a wine glass that shattered. She did not call the police.
Asked under oath whether she had sworn to that account, she said yes. Asked whether the bottle ever touched her, she said no; asked about the wine glass, “Uh, pieces of it did.” She testified she never called the police on him herself, and that she “tried to protect him.”
Heard Dep. 246:2, 247:11, 248:12, 249:15
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21 May 2016
The penthouse, and two 911 calls
Police attend, and attend again. What happened between the two calls is the only thing either side ever won a verdict on twice over.
Six years later this evening produces the single statement on which Heard prevails: the assertion that she and her friends staged the scene between the calls. The jury found that assertion false.
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23 May 2016
She petitions for dissolution
In re the Marriage of Amber Laura Depp and John Christopher Depp II, No. BD641052, Los Angeles Superior Court.
Heard Dep. Ex. F
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27 May 2016
Declaration, and a restraining order
She files a sworn declaration in support of a domestic violence restraining order. It is the document she is cross-examined on for much of the deposition three months later.
Asked whether she had been trying to hide the marriage’s condition when she filed it, she answered: “It was unhideable because the cops had been called.”
Heard Dep. Ex. K · 248:16
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13 Aug 2016
She is deposed in the divorce
Ten hours, in Los Angeles. The transcript is filed six years later as an exhibit in the Virginia case, which is how it reached the public record at all.
Heard Dep. (2016), Vol. II
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Jun 2018
He sues a newspaper in London
Depp v News Group Newspapers Ltd, over a column in The Sun calling him a wife beater.
This case and the Virginia one are about different statements by different publishers. That distinction is what the Virginia court relies on three years later, and it is the single most misread fact in the whole affair.
Op. 17 Aug 2021 at 2
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18 Dec 2018
The op-ed
The Washington Post publishes “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath.” It never names him.
Three sentences from it are what he sues over. One of the three is the headline, which the newspaper wrote rather than her — a point her side pressed at trial and lost anyway.
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18 Dec 2018
Six sentences
Everything below this line is the case. Three sentences from this op-ed, and later three from a lawyer’s statement to a newspaper, are the entirety of what any jury was ever asked about. Nothing above the line was on trial.
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The case
Filed in Virginia, where the Post’s servers are, and tried there.
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1 Mar 2019
Complaint filed
Fairfax County Circuit Court. He asks $50m, on the theory that the op-ed defames him by implication: it never names him, but any reader knows who it means.
Defamation by implication does not require the plaintiff to be named. It requires that the statement be “of and concerning” him, that it be false, and — because he is a public figure — that she published it knowing it was false or reckless as to whether it was.
Op. 17 Aug 2021 at 1
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Jul 2020
The London trial
Three weeks in the High Court, with Heard giving evidence as the newspaper’s witness rather than as a party.
Op. 17 Aug 2021 at 2
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Aug 2020
Counterclaim
She asks $100m over three statements Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman gave the Daily Mail in April and June, each calling her allegations a hoax.
From here the case is two defamation suits tried together. He must prove three of her sentences false; she must prove three of his lawyer’s false. Each of the six is scored on its own.
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Oct 2020
Waldman is removed from the case
His admission to appear in Virginia is revoked after leaks to the press. The statements stay in the case; the lawyer does not.
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2 Nov 2020
London: he loses
Nicol J finds the great majority of the alleged assaults proved to the civil standard, and the newspaper’s wife-beater characterisation therefore substantially true.
Op. 17 Aug 2021 at 2
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10 Nov 2020
He is deposed
Volume 1, in Reston, Virginia. Eight days after losing in London.
On the accounting that underpins his damages claim: “No, I was forced to borrow large sums of money to pay the United States government millions, tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars because they had not paid my taxes in 17 years.”
Depp Dep. 248:14
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25 Mar 2021
The Court of Appeal refuses permission
Depp’s application to appeal the London judgment is refused as having no real prospect of success.
Op. 17 Aug 2021 at 2
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Apr 2021
The UK judgment should end this, she argues
She moves to amend her plea in bar: collateral estoppel, res judicata, comity, and the Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act. A court has already found he did it. He should not get to relitigate.
Op. 17 Aug 2021 at 2
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17 Aug 2021
Plea in bar overruled
Azcarate, C.J. The London finding gets no preclusive effect, on three independent grounds.
She and The Sun were not in privity: the newspaper was defending its own statements, not hers. Virginia still requires mutuality and has repeatedly declined to follow the modern trend away from it. And even if an exception applied, he had no full and fair opportunity to litigate against her — she was never a party, was not subject to party discovery, and the UK judge had refused his application for third-party disclosure against her. She could not have been a defendant there: her statements came after that action began.
Op. 17 Aug 2021 at 5–6
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12 Jan 2022
She is deposed
Day 1, in Irvine, California. Volume 1 of 341 pages.
Heard Dep. (2022), Vol. 1
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Feb 2022
The trial will be televised
Cameras are allowed over her objection. It is the decision that turns a docket into a spectacle, and neither side’s lawyers asked for what followed.
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Mar 2022
Summary judgment sought, and refused
The facts are disputed, which is the whole point of the motion and the reason it fails. The case goes to a jury.
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The trial
Six weeks in Fairfax, carried live. A seven-person jury.
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11 Apr 2022
Trial begins
Jury selection. Seven jurors and four alternates.
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12 Apr 2022
Opening statements
His sister, Christi Dembrowski, is the first witness.
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19–25 Apr 2022
He testifies
Four days on the stand: direct from 19 April, then cross from the 20th, finishing on the 25th. The most-watched part of the case, and the part that has almost nothing to do with the six sentences.
Asked on direct to tell the jury why he was there, he said that six years earlier she had brought “these disturbing criminal acts against me that were not based in any species of truth,” and that he had never struck her “nor have I ever struck any woman in my life.” He put the purpose of the suit as clearing his name for his two children, who were 14 and 16 when the allegations broke.
The line that travelled furthest online came from that same first afternoon: “It’s very strange when one day you’re Cinderella, so to speak, and then in 0.6 seconds, you’re Quasimodo.” Cross-examination opened in the last minutes of the following day, on the clause in their divorce settlement in which both sides agreed that neither “has made false accusations for financial gain,” and then took the whole of the day after that. Across some 760 questions Ben Rottenborn put to him on 21 April, the subjects were his drug and alcohol use, his text messages, the audio recordings, the night he lost the top of a finger, and Australia. The op-ed itself did not come up once.
Pool TV feed, 19 Apr 2022 · professionally transcribed, and not the official court record
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4–17 May 2022
She testifies
Four days: 4 and 5 May, then 16 and 17 May. She is recalled on 26 May as the last witness either side calls.
Called by Elaine Bredehoft on the afternoon of 4 May, immediately after her own expert had been cross-examined on an audio recording in which she is heard saying “I did start a physical fight.” Her first substantive answer was the narrowest possible statement of the case: “I am here because my ex-husband is suing me for an op-ed I wrote.”
Asked almost at once about the London trial, she said she “was not party to that lawsuit, I was a witness, I suppose the primary witness” — the same fact the court had relied on nine months earlier, from the other direction, when it refused to let that judgment end this case. Cross-examination was conducted by Camille Vasquez.
Pool TV feed, 4 May 2022 · professionally transcribed, and not the official court record
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27 May 2022
Instructions, then closing arguments
The jury is sent out with a verdict form running to 42 questions: for each of the six statements, the same chain of findings, scored separately.
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1 Jun 2022
Verdict
All three op-ed statements: false, defamatory, and published with actual malice. One of the three Waldman statements: the same. $10m compensatory and $5m punitive to him; $2m compensatory and nothing punitive to her.
The statement she won on was the claim that she and her friends staged the penthouse between the two 911 calls. The two she lost on were the broader assertions that her allegations were an abuse hoax and a sexual violence hoax.
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After
Everything that could have tested the verdict, and none of it happening.
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Jun 2022
Judgment entered
Final judgment on the verdict: $10.35m to him, $2m to her. He is $8.35m up, net.
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1 Jul 2022
Motion to set aside the verdict
She asks for judgment notwithstanding the verdict or a new trial, and separately raises a question about the identity of one juror.
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13 Jul 2022
Denied
Every post-trial motion, including the juror objection.
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Oct 2022
She notices an appeal
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Nov 2022
He cross-appeals
The $2m she won is the only part of the verdict he contests.
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19 Dec 2022
Settled
She pays $1m, through her insurer. Both appeals are withdrawn. Neither is ever heard.
She said the settlement was not an act of concession and that she could not face a retrial. He donated the $1m to five charities the following June. The practical effect of the settlement is that no appellate court has reviewed any ruling in this case — not the plea in bar, not the evidentiary rulings, not the verdict.
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19 Dec 2022 · the record ends
What the jury actually decided
The whole trial came down to six sentences, and it is worth being concrete about which. Three of them are from the op-ed, and Depp said they painted him as an abuser. Three are things his own lawyer told a newspaper, and Heard said those painted her as a liar. The jury took them one at a time and asked the same thing about each: was the sentence false, and did the person who put it out know it was false? Six sentences, six separate answers — here is how they came out.
- HeardThe headline: “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath.” She did not write it; the newspaper did — Depp won this one
- Heard“Two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse” — Depp won this one
- Heard“I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse” — Depp won this one
- His lawyerThat she and her friends wrecked the penthouse themselves and got their story straight before calling the police a second time — Heard won this one
- His lawyerThat her abuse allegations were a hoax — Heard lost this one
- His lawyerThat her sexual violence allegations were a hoax — Heard lost this one
So he won all three of his, and she won one of hers. That is the entire result. Note what is not on the list: the jury was never asked whether he actually abused her. No question on the form put it to them, and none of the six answers above says it either way. That is the thing this trial is most often assumed to have settled, and it is the one thing it did not touch.
Read as a whole the case is far narrower than its reputation, and the reputation is what survived. Both sides were found to have defamed the other; the awards differ by an order of magnitude, and the smaller one is the only finding either side actually tried to appeal. Because the settlement withdrew both appeals, no appellate court has reviewed a single ruling in this case — not the plea in bar that allowed it to be tried at all, not the evidentiary rulings, not the verdict. A London court and a Virginia jury reached opposite conclusions on overlapping facts, and both results stand.
Terms
Plain English
Words this page uses because the court uses them. Nothing here is special to this case.
The paperwork
- Docket
- The court’s numbered list of everything filed in a case. Entry 42 is the forty-second thing filed.
- ECF No.
- How a filing is cited: its docket number. A number after a dash, like 42-4, is an attachment to it — usually an exhibit.
- Complaint
- The document that starts a lawsuit and sets out what the plaintiff says happened. An amended complaint replaces it.
- Answer
- The defendant’s formal response to the complaint, admitting or denying each allegation.
- Declaration
- A written statement signed under penalty of perjury. It counts as evidence without the witness appearing in person.
- Exhibit
- A document, screenshot or record attached to a filing as proof of something asserted in it.
- Transcript
- The word-for-word record of a hearing or a deposition. Cited by page and line, so 55:7 means page 55, line 7.
- Errata
- A formal correction a witness files to their own sworn testimony after reading it back.
- Under seal
- Filed with the court but kept off the public record. Both sides and the judge can read it; nobody else can.
How a case moves
- Motion
- A formal request that the court do something. The other side files an opposition; the moving side may then file a reply.
- Discovery
- The stage where each side must hand over relevant evidence to the other. It has a deadline, and missing it matters.
- Deposition
- Sworn question-and-answer, out of court, recorded by a court reporter. Lawyers for both sides attend; there is no judge.
- Subpoena
- A court order compelling someone who is not a party to hand over documents or give testimony.
- Evidentiary hearing
- A hearing where witnesses actually testify and are cross-examined, rather than lawyers simply arguing.
- Protective order
- An order limiting what either side may do with the material it receives in discovery.
- Magistrate judge
- A judge who handles pre-trial matters. On some questions they recommend, and the district judge decides.
- Paperless order
- A short ruling typed straight onto the docket. It has no document behind it, which is why some entries here do not link.
The motions that can end things
- Motion to dismiss
- Argues the case cannot proceed even if everything alleged is true — usually because the court lacks power to hear it.
- Summary judgment
- Argues the facts are not genuinely in dispute, so the judge can decide without a trial. If facts are disputed, it fails.
- Motion in limine
- Filed before trial to decide what a jury will and will not be allowed to hear.
- Spoliation
- Destroying or losing evidence you were obliged to keep. The duty starts once you know a lawsuit is coming.
- Sanctions
- A penalty for misconduct in the litigation itself. They can run from a fine to losing the case outright.
- Adverse inference
- A sanction where the jury is told it may assume the destroyed evidence would have hurt the side that destroyed it.
- Rule 11
- The rule requiring that filings have a factual basis. A Rule 11 motion says the other side asserted something it could not support.
Tests the court applies
- Jurisdiction
- Whether this court has the power to hear this case at all. A federal court needs a federal claim, which is why one date decides so much here.
- Burden
- Which side has to prove a thing. If they do not, they lose that point, even if the other side proves nothing either.
- Retroactive
- Whether a law reaches conduct from before it existed. Usually it does not, unless Congress clearly said so.
- Hearsay
- Repeating what someone said outside court to prove it was true. Generally not allowed, with many exceptions.
- Authentication
- Showing a document or screenshot is genuinely what its proponent says it is. The bar is low, but it is not nothing.
- Probative
- Actually tending to prove something. Evidence can be admissible and still carry very little weight.