Amber Heard says Johnny Depp’s witnesses in trial were ‘paid employees’

Actor Johnny Depp won the defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard on June 1.

In her first interview since she lost the case to Johnny, Amber said that the trial wasn’t fair. She said Johnny’s witnesses were ‘randos’ and ‘paid employees’.

Amber said the “hate and vitriol” she suffered on social media during her libel trial against Johnny was not “fair,” but insisted in an interview released Monday she did not blame the jury for largely siding with her ex-husband.

After a six-week-long trial, a Virginia jury awarded Johnny more than $10 million in damages for defamation, in contrast to just $2 million for Amber who had counter-sued.

“I don’t presume the average person should know those things. And so I don’t take it personally. But even somebody who is sure I’m deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I’m lying, you still couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there’s been a fair representation,” Amber told NBC in her first major interview since the verdict.

She added, “How could they make a judgment? How could they not come to that conclusion?” Amber said. “They had sat in those seats and heard over three weeks of non-stop, relentless testimony from paid employees and towards the end of the trial, randos, as I say.”

The trial, live-streamed to millions, featured lurid and intimate details about the celebrities’ private lives, and Amber was targeted by countless social media posts and internet memes throughout.

Johnny had sued Amber for $50 million claiming she defamed him when she called herself a victim of domestic abuse in a Washington Post op-ed she wrote in 2018.

She counter-sued him for $100 million. Both the actors had alleged that the other person abused them throughout their short-lived marriage from 2015-17.

Johnny had lost a previous libel case in the UK he had filed against the tabloid The Sun, which called him a “wife-beater”. In that case, the judge had ruled there was sufficient evidence to back up the allegation.