Johnny Depp Avoiding First Amendment Core Of $50M Trial Against Amber Heard Could Prove Key To Victory (Analysis)

deadline.com:

On the eve of the jury’s first full day of deliberations, Johnny Depp’s $50 million defamation trial against Amber Heard has become a morass of misdirection and repugnance.After six weeks, the plaintiff and defense both rested their cases Friday, and a seven-person jury finally went behind closed doors to decide on the courtroom drama.With both a sunglasses-wearing Depp and Heard sitting in the Fairfax County Courthouse courtroom, their respective lawyers offered up pugilistic closing arguments last week seemingly designed to cast the other side in the most toxic light possible.

Bizarrely, the defense waited until the final hours to frame the matter around the First Amendment – a choice that may have been lost in the celebrity deluge since the trial started April 11.

Unsurprisingly, with Depp and Heard both taking the stand twice, the livestreamed case has riveted a large chunk of the country and beyond for its sensationalistic and lurid soap opera nature, and captivated commentators with its potential social implications.Seemingly lost however in much of the explicit descriptions of drug addiction, private islands, gold-digging, sexual assaults, private jets and severed fingers is just what the case really is about.

Throughout the trial and claims by Heard of physical, psychological, verbal and sexual abuse at the hands of the fired Fantastic Beasts actor, it was almost an afterthought at points that it was Depp who sued his ex-wife in March 2019 over a late 2018 Washington Post op-ed the actress wrote about becoming “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”Though the ACLU-crafted article in the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper never mentioned Depp by name, he claimed it “devastated” his already waning career.