Johnny Depp told a court of the moment his marriage to actress Amber Heard fell apart – because he took his own boots off when he got home.
Amber, he said, had a routine that she would get him a glass of wine and remove his footwear as soon as he got home.
But one day she was on the phone, so he took his own boots off rather than wait.
‘I worked quite a lot and when I came home from work I’d come in the house and she’d sit me down and give me a glass of wine and take my boots off and set them to the side,’ he told the court in Fairfax, Virginia.
‘I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life. I never experienced that and it became a regular thing, kind of routine.
Depp got emotional as he talked about how good his relationship with Amber Heard was at the beginning but how it fell apart after he took his own boots off
‘No, no, no that’s my job. You don’t do that, I do that,’ Amber allegedly told Johnny after he had removed his own footwear
Depp said under oath that his wife ‘became another person, almost’ within 18 months of the boots incident
‘One night I came home and she was on the phone, I took my boots off, suddenly Miss Heard approached with this look on her face, she just said what did you just do? What did you do?’
He asked her what she meant and she replied: ‘You took your boots off.’
‘Yes I did, he said he told her. You were busy.’
But Amber told him: ‘No, no, no that’s my job. You don’t do that, I do that.
‘Then she said “Let me get you a glass of wine.” I did take pause of course, the fact she was visibly shaken or upset that I had broken her rules of routine.
‘Once you notice something like that you start to notice other tidbits that come out.
‘Then within a year a year and a half she had become another person, almost.’
Depp, 58, was testifying in the trial in which he is suing Heard for libel over a 2018 op-ed that she wrote for the Washington Post in which she wrote about her alleged domestic abuse.
Heard, 35, is countersuing for $100 million, claiming that he smeared her when he accused her of lying.
He said in the beginning his relationship with Heard, who he met on the set of the 2011 movie The Rum Diary, was ‘too good to be true’.
‘She was attentive, she was loving, she was smart, she was funny, she was understanding. We had many things in common, certainly blues music, literature.
‘For that year, or year and a half it was amazing.’
‘From the beginning of our relationship for a good year and a half she was wonderful and then things just started to change or things started to reveal themselves is a better way to put it.’
He said he called her Slim and she called him Steve after the Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart characters in the movie To Have and Have Not.
He explained that he was the craggy Bogart and she was ‘this beautiful creature, this stunning creature,’ the much-younger Bacall.
He said it was during a kissing scene in The Rum Diary that he realized he had feelings for Heard, saying he ‘felt something he shouldn’t be feeling.’
She later went to his trailer and they kissed again.
Judge Penney Azcarate who is presiding over the sensational trial in Fairfax, Virginia
The Pirates of the Caribbean actor told the court Tuesday that he started popping pills when he was just 11 and by the time he was 15 he had ‘done all the drugs that I am aware of,’ Tuesday.
He started on tablets his mother took for her nerves and progressed from there, he told the court.
‘I’d bring my mum her nerve pill, I’d take one myself to escape caring so much, feeling so much – to escape the chaotic nature of what we were living through.
‘Can’t say I’m proud of admitting that’.
He said after taking his mother’s pills he moved on to marijuana and other drugs.
He said: ‘I’ve never taken any substance for a party. I’ve taken these substances on and off to numb myself of the ghosts, the wraiths that were still with me from my youth.
‘Essentially self medication, one of those get-me-out-of-here moments. You want to escape from your own brain, your own head’.
Depp said that by 15 he had ‘done all the drugs I was aware of’ but he didn’t continue at such a rate.
He said there were ‘many years’ he didn’t even have a drink’ and that he ‘wasn’t dropping acid every five minutes’.
And he said that his ex-wife’s claims about his drug abuse were exaggerated.
He said: ‘The characterization of my ‘substance abuse’ that’s been delivered by Miss Heard is grossly embellished and I’m sorry to say but a lot of it is just plainly false
‘It was an easy target for her to hit because once you’ve trusted somebody for a certain amount of years and you’ve told them all the secrets of your life that information can be used against you, especially if it’s taken to a point that’s teetering on impossible, teetered over impossible at times.
Depp and Heard called each other Steve and Slim after the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall characters in the movie To Have and Have Not
Johnny Depp said ex-wfe Amber Heard always insisted she take his boots off and pour him a glass of wine when he got home
Heard and Depp in the movie The Rum Diary where they met. Johnny said he ‘felt something he should not have felt’ during a kissing scene in the movie
‘I am not some maniac who needs to be high or loaded all the time.
‘In fact before Australia I’d been off of alcohol for about 18 months,’ he added referring to the time when he lost part of a finger, when, he claimed, Heard threw a bottle at him.
But he admitted that he got hooked on the painkiller Roxycontin – which he called Roxies – after getting sciatica from throwing a chair through a window in Pirates of the Caribbean 4.
‘It’s not like you take those pills to get high, you’re taking those pills to get well or better because if you’re without the pill your body will start to go into withdrawal,’ he said.
Depp shook his head and smiled when asked if he had done opiates since detoxing, telling the jury: ‘No I can’t.
‘Once you’ve been bit you’ll be bit again.’
Depp apologized for sending his best friend vile texts about Heard saying he wanted to see her ‘rotting corpse decomposing in the f***ing trunk of a Honda Civic’.
‘I’m ashamed of some of the references made. I’m embarrassed that at the time the heat of the moment, the heat of the pain that I was feeling went to dark places.
He said: ‘Sometimes pain has to be dealt with with humor and sometimes dark, very dark humor.
‘I grew up watching Monty Python so it can tend to get into dark humor. It can tend to get into…words are used for emphasis and words are used to express what you’re feeling at the time. It’s just like growing up, you learn from those mistakes, you learn from those things and you move forward’.
Earlier, Depp had talked about his upbringing, saying he had been regularly abused by his mother Betty Sue Palmer, who died in 2016.
But he said he learned a lot from his parents, especially about bringing up children.
‘I knew exactly how to raise children when my girl Vanessa (Paradis) got pregnant I knew exactly how to raise children which was to do the opposite of what they did.
Depp said he learned how to bring up children from his mother Betty Sue Palmer. ‘Justdo the opposite of what she would do’
Depp and Heard met on the set of the 2011 movie The Rum Diary, turning up on the red carpet together for its London premiere
Depp with parents Betty Sue Palmer and John Christopher Depp and then-girlfriend Vanessa Paradis when he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1999
Never raise your voice in front of the children, never. Screaming out the word no to them. I never wanted to tell my kids no.
‘I wanted to show them there are options – you don’t have to stick the coat hanger in the electrical socket.
‘Talk to them, if you understand the repercussions of something you won’t go there…give this some thought. That could kill you so I’d ease them away from things of that nature with more of a conversation as opposed to a flat out don’t you ever do that again, and threats.
‘I did not raise my children that way.’
He told of ‘verbal abuse, name calling and bullying’ by his mother, who he described as ‘very unpredictable.’.
She took any ‘opportunity to be as cruel as anyone could be,’ he said.
Depp laughed nervously as he recalled an ashtray being flung at him that hit him in the head, being beaten with high heel shoes, telephones, ‘whatever’s handy.’
‘In our house we were never exposed to any type of safety or security, the only thing to do was stay out of the line of fire,’ he said, adding, ‘When she was going to get riled up and somebody was going to get it and generally it was me.’
‘Physical violence, physical abuse. That was a constant. We were all somewhat shell-shocked. She’d walked past, you’d shield yourself because you didn’t know what would happen,’ Depp said.
He talked about how his mother gave him and his two siblings cruel names.
Johnny Depp gestures while giving testimony during the trial. He said he started popping his mother’s nerve pills when he was 11 and by the time he was 15 had tried every drug he knows of
Amber Heard and her attorney Elaine Bredehoft during the trial on Tuesday. Heard is countersuing Depp for $100 million claiming he libeled her when he said she lied in a Washington Post op-ed
‘My brother wore glasses so he was Four Eyes. His teeth were messed up in the front so he was Buck Tooth.’
He said his mother called his sister Violet although her real name is Christie.
‘My mother despised my father’s parents. Grandmother’s name was Violet.
‘So my mother said, come here Violet, get in here Violet. Christie, my sister, knew very well that was a deep cut psychologically, emotionally, but you had to take it.
‘You just had to take the pain.’
He said he had a lazy eye, and at one stage had to wear a patch over his good eye to try to strengthen the other.
”She would call me Cock eye or One Eye, anything she could get to demean, humiliate.
‘The psychological abuse was almost worse than the beatings,’ Depp added. ‘They were just physical pain, and the physical pain, you learned to deal with it, accept it.
‘But the psychological and emotional abuse that’s what kind of tore us up.’
He said his father, John Christopher Depp was a kind stoic man who never lost his temper or attacked Betty Sue, until one day when Johnny was 15 he walked out and didn’t return.
Attorneys for Heard have argued she told the truth and that her opinion was protected as free speech under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment
Depp arrives at the courthouse in Fairfax, Virginia, to give evidence in the trial
‘When my father left I didn’t realize,’ Depp said. ‘He left for work one morning, was packing his car and he left.
‘Hours later my mom came home from work, about 3.30 in the afternoon. She walked in the door and stopped and walked around, she felt something. She said your daddy’s gone. He’s gone, he’s gone.
‘She ran into their bedroom and into their closet, she opened the door and there was his rack of clothing and all his belongings were gone. She was quite upset. I took her car and drove to my father’s work and sat down in front of him at 15.
I’d bring my mum her nerve pill, I’d take one myself to escape caring so much, feeling so much – to escape the chaotic nature of what we were living through
‘I said, Listen, seems somebody stole all of your clothes and he said yeah, I’m done. I can’t do it any more. I can’t live it any more. You’re the man now..
‘Those words didn’t quite sit well with me. I didn’t feel I was ready to hear those words.’
Depp said his mother ‘went into a very deep, dark depression,’ after his father John walked out.
‘One afternoon I had fallen asleep and woke up and walked into the living room and saw my mother very feebly, almost a slow motion, crawl.’
‘I knew something was dreadfully wrong. There was drool coming out of her mouth.’
‘Front door busted open, my uncle and two paramedics came in and threw her on the gurney and whisked her out the house to get her out the hospital to pump her stomach.
‘She’d swallowed a multitude of pills to try to commit suicide,’ he said.
‘She was a firecracker of a woman but when she got out of hospital the depression was so deep she lived on the couch and weighed about 70 pounds and all that imagery spun into my head. I thought that was a cowardly way for my father to have left.
‘I was deeply upset by that.’
