Johnny Depp has described in graphic detail the infamous incident in which he claimed Amber Heard smashed a vodka bottle over his hand, severing part of his finger.
The alleged incident happened at their Australian home in 2015; Depp told the defamation trial on Wednesday that he had been hiding in a locked bathroom during one of Heard’s alleged violent rants, when the banging on the door finally ceased, and he thought it safe to come out.
He made his way downstairs to the bar area, and poured himself two or three stiff shots of vodka — his first taste of alcohol after several months of sobriety.
“I was a mess, I was a wreck, I was shaking… I just didn’t understand why, why all this was happening,” he said, having taken Heard’s alleged insults to heart.
He said he was alone at the bar — until she came down and found him there, and started screaming “Oh you’re drinking again, ‘the monster’.”
“She walked up to me, she reached and grabbed the bottle of vodka… and then just kind of stood back and hurled it at me,” he claimed, re-enacting the movement.
“And it just went right past my head and smashed behind me. So I stood up and walked behind the bar, and there was a larger bottle of vodka, the kind with the handle, you know?”
He said he silently grabbed this bottle, and poured himself another shot, while Heard “flung insults left right and center.”
“And she then grabbed that bottle, and threw that at me.”
He demonstrated to the court how, as he sat back watching her alleged outburst, his hand was on the edge of the bar with his fingers draped slightly over the edge.
“And it made contact and shattered everywhere,” he said, tapping his hand.
“I honestly didn’t feel the pain at first, at all. I felt no pain whatsoever,” he recalled. “What I felt was heat… I felt heat, and as if something were dripping down my hand.”
“And then I looked down and realized that the tip of my finger had been severed. I was looking directly at my bones sticking out. And the…” — he said, struggling to find the correct description — “meaty portion of the inside of your finger.”
“Blood was just pouring out. And at that point I think that I went into some sort of… I don’t know what a nervous breakdown feels like, but that’s probably the closest I’ve ever been.”
“Nothing made sense. And I knew in my mind and in my heart… this is not life. This is not life. No one should have to go through this.”
He said his reaction was to use his bloodied half finger to write on the walls “little reminders from our past, that essentially represented lies that she had told me, and lies that I had caught her in.”
He said he then hid in the bathroom again and texted his doctor “you might want to come over, I cut my finger off here.”
He described how all the bones in his finger were crushed from the impact. “It looked like Vesuvius,” he recalled.
Having not had use of the mangled tip, he said arthritis had set in.
Asked what Heard had said after seeing the injury, he said he could not recall exactly, just “white noise… yelling, just a high-pitched, constant attack of insults. Just jumbled words to me in a very high frequency… I was in shock.”
Depp admitted lying to doctors about what happened, telling them he had caught it in accordion doors.
“I lied because I didn’t want to disclose that it was… what it was,” he said. “I didn’t want to get her in trouble. I tried to just keep things as copacetic and easy as possible for everyone. I did not want to put her name in that mix.”
After leaving the ER after the bottle incident, he said he slept on a friend’s couch, and asked his team to arrange a flight for Heard from Australia back to LA.
“I didn’t want to see her. I didn’t want to have any more arguments,” he replied when asked why. “For all intents and purposes, I was just… done.”
Depp was then shown pictures of himself taken in the emergency room, where with a slight smile, he recognized a detail he’d “forgotten” in his testimony: the burn mark on his cheek where he alleged Heard had stubbed out his lit cigarette — right after his finger “went away.”
Describing the aftercare for his finger injury, he said he had to see a surgeon every couple of days to ensure it didn’t get infected.
He said he had to get a skin graft from the side of his palm to fix the top of the finger, while he also had to get a metal pin to replace the bones, as the finger had been “hollowed out”.
Depp also told the court he was filming one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films at the time, and the digital effects team had to use CGI techniques to hide the bandage for the remainder of the shoot.
Depp is suing his ex-wife for defamation over an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she claimed she was a victim of domestic violence. Depp was not named in the piece, but his lawyers argue it is strongly insinuated, and that his career suffered as a result. She has countersued Depp for $100 million.
Depp has already lost an earlier lawsuit he took in the UK over the same article that appeared in The Sun.
The trial is expected to last six weeks. See more coverage of the ongoing trial here.
, Entertainment,International, ,