Johnny Depp’s defamation court case against Amber Heard just hit another snafu after briefly being held up due to global events, only recently getting the greenlight to go to trial. The new bump in the road is because Amber Heard’s legal team, headed up by Roberta Kaplan but also including John Quinn, Julie Fink, Davida Brook, have quit.
Roberta Kaplan is a well-known lawyer. She’s associated with the Times Up movement in Los Angeles and co-founded that movement’s legal defense fund. However, the defamation case against Amber Heard isn’t happening in Los Angeles. It’s happening in Virginia and Amber Heard will retain Virginia lawyers for the rest of the duration of the case.
Per documents, Amber Heard signed off on and is fine with the change. Instead of being represented by Kaplan Hecker and Fink LL she will switch to local counsel. The organization cited “travel and logistics” becoming “more costly in light of the pandemic” as the reasons for bowing out.
Given airfare and hotel costs are seemingly at lows right now, that’s an interesting comment from the firm, although we have no record of what Heard’s finances are like or what the court case is costing both parties. In addition, given different states have different laws, it’s not super unusual for people involved in a case to seek a counsel who is familiar with the penal code in a particular state.
Still, Johnny Depp’s attorney has thrown some shade on the matter, with Adam Waldman telling The Blast:
Ms. Heard’s lawyers, one of whom co-founded the #TimesUp Legal Defense Fund, have now apparently unhitched from Ms Heard’s long-disproven frauds. We intend to discover why.
The last thing we learned about the defamation case between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was that Depp’s team was seeking to determine whether Amber Heard had actually allotted to donate all the money to charity from the proceeds of her divorce from Johnny Depp, as she previously said she did. It was reported prior that Heard had donated between $1 and $5 million to the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles in 2017 along with several other charities as part of a personal vow to donate her $7 million divorce settlement.
This court case is separate from the one Johnny Depp filed against U.K. news outlet The Sun’s parent company, which came about after an article from the well-known tabloid referred to the actor as a “wife-beater.” Both court cases are still ongoing and some famous names have gotten embroiled in the story, including Winona Ryder, who has defended Depp. Meanwhile, all of this is coming after the couple divorced in 2017 after a tumultuous marriage that had only lasted a couple of years and involved accusations from both sides.
