Amber Heard has agreed to a legal settlement with her ex-husband and fellow actor Johnny Depp, who sued her for defamation after she suggested he abused her in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed.
Heard, 36, was previously ordered to pay more than $10 million in damages to Depp, 56. Meanwhile, Depp was ordered to pay Heard $2 million after she filed a counterclaim accusing him of defamation after his lawyer, Adam Waldman, called it abuse. claims a “hoax”.
Heard initially appealed the ruling ordering her to pay, but has since abandoned that effort. The terms of the settlement she announced Monday end any further litigation between Heard and Depp over their claims against each other for now, but terms of the settlement were not immediately made public.
In an Instagram post she shared Monday morning, Heard wrote that accepting the deal was “a very difficult decision.”
“It’s important for me to say that I never chose this,” the post read. “I stood up for my truth, and in doing so, my life as I knew it was destroyed. The defamation I’ve faced on social media is an amplified version of the ways women are revictimized when they present
“Now I finally have a chance to emancipate myself from something I tried to leave over six years ago and on terms I can accept. I have made no admissions. This is not an act of concession. There is no there are no restrictions or gags in terms of my voice moving forward.”
News of the settlement comes after a months-long public legal battle that saw Heard and Depp fight for support in the court of public opinion and litigate their difference in an actual courtroom in Fairfax County, Virginia. On social media, support for Depp was overwhelming, as evidenced by the widespread sharing of videos and posts aimed at disputing, if not outright discrediting, Heard’s accounts of domestic violence at the hands of Depp.
Separately, in the UK, Depp lost a defamation case in 2020 against The Sun after he sued the newspaper for publishing an article calling him a “woman beater”.
The judge in that case found the article to be “substantially true,” and some observers thought Heard’s initial victory could continue in the case she and Depp took against each other in the United States. But the split decision that followed the trial of the case in Virginia was substantially more financially burdensome for Heard.
Depp and Heard were married for two years from 2015 to 2017.