One of the central points of contention in the trial was the question of what caused Johnny Depp to lose his lucrative film career.
Mr. Depp’s lawyers contended in the defamation case that Ms. Heard’s op-ed, in which she called herself a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” had damaged his reputation and his career. Ms. Heard’s lawyer’s argued that Mr. Depp’s pattern of bad behavior and publicity had already damaged his career before the op-ed.
Both sides presented witnesses during the trial to try to bolster their claims.
Mr. Depp’s talent manager, Jack Whigham, testified that his client had lost a $22.5 million deal to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a sixth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie after the op-ed was published. The agreement was verbal, not formally written out into a contract, Mr. Whigham testified, but in early 2019, it became clear to him that Disney would be “going in a different direction.”
“After the op-ed, it was impossible to get him a studio film,” Mr. Whigham said.
Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, a lawyer for Ms. Heard, pointed to a previous deposition by Mr. Whigham in which he had said that it had been the fall of 2018 — before the op-ed was published — when he came to understand that it was becoming unlikely that Mr. Depp would appear in the next “Pirates” movie.
Mr. Whigham testified at the trial that around that time, Disney had not yet made a decision about whether Mr. Depp would appear in the movie and it was “trending badly,” but said that he and the producer Jerry Bruckheimer were still seeking to convince the company to keep Mr. Depp in the franchise. “We had hope,” Mr. Whigham said, “and it became clear to me in early 2019 that it was over.”
Ms. Heard’s lawyers called as a witness an agent who said she had represented Mr. Depp for about 30 years, Tracey Jacobs, who testified that Mr. Depp’s career troubles started long before 2018, when the op-ed was published in The Washington Post. In the final 10 years that she worked with him, before Mr. Depp fired her in 2016, Ms. Jacobs said, Mr. Depp had exhibited a pattern of “unprofessional behavior,” including showing up late to movie sets.
“I was very honest with him and said, ‘You’ve got to stop doing this. This is hurting you,’” Ms. Jacobs testified. “And it did.”
The behavior Ms. Jacobs cited included increasing drug and alcohol use. At a certain point in his career, she testified, he regularly wore an earpiece on set so that his lines could be fed to him.
And a Disney production executive, Tina Newman, testified that she was unaware of any decisions about Mr. Depp’s potential role in a sixth “Pirates” movie that were connected directly to Ms. Heard’s op-ed. She testified that there was evidence, however, that Disney executives corresponded about a 2018 Rolling Stone article that cited Mr. Depp’s “multimillion-dollar lawsuits, a haze of booze and hash, a marriage gone very wrong,” and that one executive had responded by saying, “sad.”
