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A Virginia judge has denied a motion by Amber Heard to dismiss Johnny Depp’s libel lawsuit against Heard because Depp lost a similar suit in England.
A Virginia judge has ruled against Amber Heard in the attempt by the Aquaman star to have the lawsuit filed by her ex-husband, the former Fantastic Beasts star, Johnny Depp, thrown out of court because the Pirates of the Caribbean actor had previously lost a similar lawsuit in the United Kingdom.
Depp is suing Heard over a a December 2018 piece that Heard wrote in the Washington Post that alleged that Depp was physically abusive of Heard during the couple’s brief, tumultuous marriage. Depp recently lost a similar defamation lawsuit in England against the newspaper, The Sun, for referring to him as a “wife-beater” based on Heard’s claims. A British judge agreed with Heard’s characterizations of their altercations and agreed that “wife-beater” was a “substantially true” description of Depp. Heard, then, feels that Depp’s loss in England should prevent him from continuing his lawsuit in the United States. After all, if a British court has ruled that it was fair for a newspaper to call Depp a “wife-beater,” how could it be libel for Heard to say the same?
Fairfax County Chief Judge Penney Azcarate (the case is being tried in Virginia due to the location of the Washington Post, where Heard’s comments were published) denied Heard’s motions due to a lack of privity. Privity, in legal terms, means a contractual connection between two people. In this context, the British lawsuit was between Depp and The Sun, while this lawsuit is between Depp and Heard, and therefore the success of The Sun in its lawsuit has no bearing on Heard, even if that case involved the same basic fact patterns of Depp’s case against Heard.
As Azcarate noted, “The Sun‘s interests were based on whether the statements the newspaper published were false. [Heard’s] interests relate to whether the statements she published were false.”
In addition, since Heard was not technically the defendant in the first trial, she was not open to discovery like she is now, so Depp has a chance to find information that was not available to him in the original trial. Already, he has recently been pushing to discover whether Heard actually donated her divorce settlement to charity like she had previously claimed.
Depp’s lawyers note that one of the reasons that the British judge gave for believing Heard’s version of events over Depp’s was that one of Depp’s biggest claims was that Heard only married him for his money and the judge noted that Heard claimed that she donated all of the $7 million that she received from Depp in the divorce settlement to charity, half to the ACLU and half to the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and that “Her donation of the $7 million to charity is hardly the act one would expect of a gold-digger.'” Depp could not gain discovery as to the true disposition of the settlement money in England, but he likely will in this American trial.
That is one of the other reasons why the judge denied Heard’s motion and allowed the trial to move forward.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
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