Amber Heard says she has made the “difficult” decision to agree to a settlement with her ex-husband Johnny Depp, and that she has lost faith in the American legal system during the defamation case.
Heard will pay US$1 million to Depp, with the payment expected to come from her insurance carrier.
Both sides had filed appeals of the jury’s verdicts in the high-profile defamation trial that took place earlier this year. In that trial, Heard was ordered to pay $10 million in damages to Depp who sued her for defamation, while Depp was ordered to pay $2 million to Heard in a countersuit.
In her Instagram post, Heard said the decision to settle was a “very difficult” one, and it was not an act of concession.
“It’s important for me to say that I never chose this,” her post reads.
“I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed. The vilification I have faced on social media is an amplified version of the ways in which women are re-victimized when they come forward.
“Now I finally have an opportunity to emancipate myself from something I attempted to leave over six years ago and on terms I can agree to. I have made no admission. This is not an act of concession. There are no restrictions or gags with respect to my voice moving forward.”
Heard said she had lost faith in the American legal system and could not afford to risk an “impossible bill – one that is not just financial, but also psychological, physical and emotional”.
The settlement marks the end of a long-running, highly public saga that has surrounded Heard and Depp since she wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2018 describing herself as a survivor of domestic abuse. Depp’s lawyers said he was defamed by the article (even though his name was not mentioned) because it clearly referenced abuse allegations Heard had made against Depp during their divorce.
The trial that took place in a Virginia Court this year was televised, with millions of Americans tuning in and reacting on social media.
That came after a separate trial in the UK in 2020, where Depp lost a libel case against a tabloid, the Sun. The judge in that case concluded that Heard’s claims of abuse by Depp were “substantially true” and ruled in favour of the Sun.
In her statement announcing the settlement, Heard compared her experiences of the legal system in the US and the UK.
She said in the US, her “unprotected testimony served as entertainment and social media fodder”, while in the UK she said the system was “robust, impartial and fair”.
Depp has not released a statement on the settlement, but his lawyers said the $1 million payment will be donated to charity.