A juror in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation case is speaking out.
A juror in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation case is speaking out, and explaining how the jury came to ultimately side with Depp.
The six-week trial began a little over three years after Depp filed his $50 million defamation lawsuit against Heard in March 2019 following the Washington Post op-ed she wrote which detailed how she was the victim of domestic violence. While Depp's name was not mentioned in the article, the piece came out as their contentious 2016 divorce continued to make headlines. Depp ultimately won the case when the jury unanimously decided that he was defamed by Heard and that she "acted with actual malice," and awarded him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Heard, for her part, was awarded $2 million by the jury in compensatory damages for her counterclaim but nothing in punitive damages. The jury found Depp liable after his attorney referred to Heard's claims as a "hoax."
Speaking with ABC News, a juror from the trial said that a lot of Heard's story "didn't add up" to him. ABC News did not reveal the name of the juror who spoke out, but instead identified him as "one of five men on the jury," while the other two of the seven jurors were women.
"The crying, the facial expressions that she had, the staring at the jury -- all of us were very uncomfortable…," said the juror in a segment that aired Thursday on Good Morning America. "She would answer one question and she would be crying and then two seconds later she would turn ice cold… Some of us used the expression 'crocodile tears.'"
The juror shared that several of those on the jury saw Heard as the aggressor, not Depp. "A lot of the jury felt what he was saying, at the end of the day, was more believable," noted the juror. "He just seemed a little more real in terms of how he was responding to questions. His emotional state was very stable throughout."
As for how they came to their verdict, the juror said they "followed the evidence."
"Ultimately what I think it truthful was that they were both abusive to each other," the juror added. "I don't think that makes either of them right or wrong. But to rise to the level of what she was claiming, there wasn't enough or any evidence that really supported what she was saying."
Another reason for their verdict was that Heard had not donated the $7 million divorce settlement to charity as she had promised.
"She goes on a talk show in the U.K. The video shows her sitting there telling the host that she gave all that money away, and the terms she used in that video clip were, 'I gave it away,' 'I donated it,' 'It's gone,' but the fact is she didn't give much of it away at all," said the juror, calling the situation a "fiasco."
Just this week, Heard said in an interview with NBC News' Savannah Guthrie that she still plans to honor her pledge. "I made a pledge, and that pledge is made over time by its nature," the 36-year-old actress said.
She also told Guthrie that she doesn't blame the jury for their verdict.
“I don't blame them. I actually understand," Heard told Guthrie. "He's a beloved character and people feel they know him. He's a fantastic actor.”
The Aquaman star also opened up about how she doesn't believe there was a fair representation of her on social media throughout the six-week trial.
“I don't care what one thinks about me or what judgments you want to make about what happened in the privacy of my own home, in my marriage, behind closed doors," Heard said. "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."
She reiterated, "You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair."
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