Johnny Depp trial live: Jury picked as Amber Heard and actor face off in $50m

Here’s the statement issued by Amber Heard on Saturday on her Twitter and Instagram accounts, in which she tells fans she will be “offline for the next few weeks”.

She also thanked her fans for their support, and said “in these coming weeks I will be leaning on it more than ever”.

Heard also addressed Depp’s claim that she had defamed him in an article in 2018 in The Washington Post, and said she continued “to pay the price” for speaking out on the issue of domestic violence.

Depp denies any wrongdoing.

Heard will be able to argue during the trial that she is immune from liability because her Washington Post article in 2018 about domestic violence was an important issue in the public interest.

Lawyers for Depp had argued for the court to refuse to allow Heard to use the law, known as an anti-Slapp (strategic lawsuit against public participation) provision, because it was a civil case.

Both will testify during the trial, which will see the Fairfax County district court assess Heard’s counter defamation claim against Depp.

Appearing as a witness during Depp’s trial against British newspaper The Sun in 2020, Heard said she wanted to be “left alone” and wanted her former husband to end lawsuits over domestic abuse claims to “save him the embarrassment.”

“I didn’t want to do this, I did not want to expose this totality of what really happened to me,” Heard told London’s Royal Courts of Justice. “I didn’t want to talk about everything that happened in our marriage and happened in our relationship.”

While Depp denies the claims, Heard told the court of 14 allegations of “violence” by Depp between 2013 and 2016, in locations such as a rented house in Australia, his private island in the Bahamas and a private jet, as The Associated Press reported two years ago.

The judge ruled against Depp, who accused the publisher of The Sun of defaming him with a headline including the words “wife beater”. His lawyers afterwards called the judge’s decision “perverse”.

Ahead of the trial due to begin today in Virginia, Depp and Heard have each published a list of witnesses their teams may wish to call upon, writes The Independent’s Clémence Michallon.

They have each filed lists of objections to some of the other side’s witnesses, so the final pool of witnesses will become clearer and may evolve as the proceedings go on.

Some of the people named as potential witnesses so far include Tesla-founder Elon Musk and actor James Franco…

A jury of eleven people, including four alternates, has been selected to hear Johnny Depp’s defamation case against his ex-wife Amber HEard.

This is not the first time Depp and Heard have appeared in court after he failed to sue the publishers of The Sun newspaper for defamation in 2020.

A judge ruled that the headline of an article written by The Sun’s executive editor Dan Wootton in 2018 was “substantially true”. It described the actor as a “wife beater”, which he denies.

Depp, whose lawyers called the judge’s ruling “perverse”, was not allowed to appeal the decision either.

He also denied the claims made in the article and by Heard, who spoke in court as a witness during the case in London’s Royal Courts of Justice.

While Depp says he was forced to stand down from his role in the…