Amber Heard and Johnny Depp are back in court, another installment in the heated legal volley that began in 2016. This time around, the catalyzing issue is an op-ed Heard wrote for the Washington Post in 2018 identifying herself as a survivor of sexual violence whose career suffered when she named a powerful man in Hollywood as her abuser. Heard did not mention Depp directly, but given how publicly the actors’ divorce played out and how central Heard’s allegations of domestic violence were to the proceedings, most readers would have filled in the blank. Depp then sued Heard for defamation, and she sued back, and now their trial is under way in Virginia’s Fairfax County Circuit Court. Below, a timeline of the current case and how they got here.
Heard and Depp met on the set of The Rum Diary and began dating by 2012, after he separated from his partner of 14 years, Vanessa Paradis, and she broke up with her partner, Tasya van Ree. The actors married in early 2015, and despite many assurances from unnamed tabloid sources that everything was “great” and “they are great together,” Heard filed for divorce 15 months later. Depp greeted this news with a terse public statement: “Given the brevity of this marriage and the most recent and tragic loss of his mother, Johnny will not respond to any of the salacious false stories, gossip, misinformation and lies about his personal life. Hopefully the dissolution of this short marriage will...
A popular social media conspiracy theory about a recent cluster of hantavirus cases claims that the word “hanta” means “scam,” “fraud,” or “nonsense” in “Hebrew slang.” That’s more or less where t...