Amber Heard Denies Wrongdoing After Johnny Depp Trial: ‘I Made a Lot of Mistakes, but I’ve Always Told the Truth’

Amber Heard spoke out on Tuesday about how she believes the extensive social media coverage around her defamation trial resulted in an unfair, unjust result.

Heard sat down with Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “Today” show for her first interview since the trial’s verdict in favor of ex-husband Johnny Depp.

When referencing the verdict, Heard said that the process has been, “Surreal and difficult. This has been a long time coming.”

Asked by Guthrie about her words in court, Heard said, “To my dying day, I’ll stand by every word of my testimony.”

Regarding the social media circus surrounding the trial, Heard said, “I think even the most well-intentioned juror…it would have been impossible to avoid this. Every single day I passed three, four, sometimes six city blocks with people holding signs saying ‘Burn the Witch,’ ‘Death to Amber.” After three and a half weeks, I took the stand and saw a courtroom packed full of Captain Jack Sparrow fans who were vocal, energized.”

Heard also referred to the trial as, “The most humiliating and horrible thing I’ve been through. I’ve never felt more removed from my own humanity. I felt less than human.”

When referring to the U.K. trial that Depp lost, Heard said, “There was another trial that dealt with the same substantive issues and had even more evidence in. In fact, my evidence was largely left out.”

When referring to Depp’s legal team, Heard said, “His lawyer did a better job at distracting the jury from the real issues.”

When asked about people watching the trial that might thing they were both to blame, Head said, “Absolutely. I would not blame the average person for looking at this and how it’s been covered and not seeing Hollywood brats at their worst. But what people don’t understand is that it’s so much bigger than that. This is not only about our First Amendment rights to speak,” also adding about the First Amendment, “It’s a freedom to speak truth to power, and that’s allI I spoke and I spoke it to power and I paid the price.”

Ending the interview, Heard said, “I made a lot of mistakes, but I’ve always told the truth.”

Referencing the jury’s decision, Heard said, “I don’t blame them.”

“I actually understand. He’s a beloved character and people feel they know him. He’s a fantastic actor,” she said in a clip of the interview first released on Monday.

Heard called out the extensive social media frenzy that surrounded her case, calling it “unfair.” On social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, users latched on to the case and made posts ridiculing Heard’s lawyers and her own testimony. Depp, on the other hand, was seen favorably in the eyes of many social media users, with the TikTok hashtag “Justice for Johnny Depp” bringing in 20 billion views. The hashtag “Justice for Amber Heard” has received 27 million views.

“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 explained. “I don’t presume the average person should know those things. And so I don’t take it personally.”

She continued: “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. You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair.”

A Virginia jury found that Heard defamed Depp in 2018 when she wrote a Washington Post op-ed alluding to being a victim of domestic violence. The jury awarded the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages — reduced to $350,000, in accordance with the state’s statutory cap.

The jury also found that Depp defamed Heard, through his attorney, awarding Heard $2 million in compensatory damages for her counterclaim.

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