The saga between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard is still ongoing at this point, as court cases are moving forward and back and forth sniping between both legal teams continues. Recently, we learned Johnny Depp was hoping to postpone his Virginia court case against Amber Heard due to the studio also scheduling him to film Fantastic Beasts 3 in that same time window. However, Amber Heard’s legal team now says the request was not made in good faith.
Per a new report Amber Heard’s legal team is arguing that Johnny Depp should have made the effort to shift his filming commitments and not the court’s commitments. The official written request states the actor has made “no effort whatsoever” with this lawsuit, which is supposed to commence in January:
Although Mr Depp had been contacted in late June or July with the proposed filming dates, he did not alert them to the trial dates. Mr. Depp decided that, rather than speak with his employer to work his film commitments around his trial, he asks this court to subserviently reschedule around his employment and the entire film schedule and production.
Depp is due to go back and apparently film Fantastic Beasts 3 during the court case window in January in Virginia, which is currently on the schedule to happen between January 11 and January 28, 2021. A report over at The Daily Mail alleges that Amber Heard reportedly has her own filming commitment with Aquaman 2 in February of next year, which is why her lawyers filed a motion to not allow the dates to change.
Regardless, when Johnny Depp’s legal team filed the motion to delay the case, Depp had asked the court to delay the hearing on the defamation case to between March and June of 2021. A March court date could seemingly interfere with Aquaman 2, but Depp’s motion basically said anytime during that time window would work. We’ll have to wait and see if the legal team or the presiding judge are able to work out a solution that won’t end up affecting either massive film production. It's also worth noting this lawsuit was originally scheduled for February of 2020, but both the defamation case and the libel lawsuit had to shuffle around dates during this fiscal year given global circumstances.
Meanwhile, the world is still waiting on pins and needles as Johnny Depp’s U.K. libel case awaits a verdict. Initially it seemed as if the results might come down the pipeline at the beginning of the month, but we are a few days into September now and the case against The Sun still does not have a verdict.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s legal teams are both prepping for the case in The States. While Amber Heard testified as part of the libel case, the defamation case was actually filed against the actress in the U.S. after she penned an Op Ed in the Washington Post talking about an abusive partner. Depp’s legal team is alleging that in it Heard makes it pretty clear she’s smearing Depp, though he isn’t specifically named in the feature.
Later as part of the libel case, Amber Heard did detail some of the abuses she says she encountered with Johnny Depp, telling the court that he got violent during an incident in which he severed his finger and also held her “hostage” when she visited while he was filming one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Oppositely, Depp has said he severed his finger when Heard threw a bottle of vodka at him and that Amber Heard was the person who got violent, particularly when she found out about the actor’s notable financial problems.
Most recently, Amber Heard has also countersued Johnny Depp, asking for $100 million in damages after saying her former husband had embarked on a “smear campaign.” She also alleges Depp hired trolls to push a narrative online.
