Amber Heard says she still loves Johnny Depp despite ‘total global humiliation’
Amber Heard admitted that she “absolutely” still loves her ex-husband Johnny Depp — despite accusing the actor of shocking abuse and acknowledging he brought her “total global humiliation.”
“Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I love him,” Heard, 36, told NBC News in her first interview after being ordered to pay her Hollywood superstar ex $10.4 million for defamation.
“I loved him and all my heart. And I tried the best I could to make a deeply broken relationship work,” she said of their “ugly” and “very toxic” marriage.
“And I couldn’t,” she told Savannah Guthrie in a clip that aired Wednesday on the “Today” show.
“I have no bad feelings or ill will towards him at all,” she insisted of Depp.
“I know that might be hard to understand, or it might be really easy to understand — if you’ve ever loved anyone, it should be easy.”
Still, she admitted that the trial fulfilled Depp’s promise in a text message that she would see “total global humiliation” if she pressed ahead with her accusations.
“I know he promised it … it feels as though he has,” she said after a long pause, admitting she was “not a likable victim” on the stand.
“Of course, I took for granted what I assume was my right to speak,” she said of her op-ed about being a survivor of domestic violence.
She insisted that the Washington Post “op-ed wasn’t about my relationship with Johnny.”
“What the op-ed was about was me loaning my voice to a bigger cultural conversation that we were having at the time,” she said of the wave of #MeToo accusations.
“It was important for me not to make it about him, or to do anything like defame him,” she insisted of the piece that led to her downfall.
“I had lawyers, teams of lawyers, review all the drafts of this,” she said of the 2018 article that jurors unanimously ruled had defamed Depp.
Asked if she wanted Depp to be one of the “legions of powerful men being canceled,” she insisted, “Of course not. Of course not. It wasn’t about him.
But now she is “scared” that he could come after her again, she admitted.
“I’m scared that no matter what I do, no matter what I say or how I say it, every step that I take will present another opportunity for the sort of silencing,” she said.
“Which is what I guess a defamation lawsuit is meant to do. It’s meant to take your voice,” she said.
She said she now plans on focusing on being “a mom full time, where I’m not having to juggle calls with lawyers.”
Asked what she would tell her daughter about her high-profile loss, she said, “I think no matter what, it will mean something.
“I did the right thing. I did everything I could to stand up for myself and the truth.”
Her comments came on the third day of footage from a “wide-ranging sitdown” that will air in full in an hour-long “Dateline” special Friday night at 8 p.m. ET.
In it, Heard, 36, again called Depp a liar for denying her long-held accusations of domestic abuse — saying that she “will stand by every word in my testimony” until her “dying day.”
In Wednesday’s clip, Heard again defended her decision not to immediately report her then-husband to the police, insisting her failure to do so was not proof of a hoax.
“As I have testified before and I will stand by until my dying day, I didn’t want to cooperate with them. I didn’t want this to be out. I didn’t want this to be known,” she told Guthrie.
“I didn’t want to cooperate with them because I didn’t want this to be … I don’t want to get him in trouble.
“If it was a hoax I could have done that,” she stressed.
But “five days later I made the decision to stand up for myself and protect myself,” she said.
She insisted to Guthrie that the tip that paparazzi for TMZ received to photograph her with bruises on her face “had nothing to do with me.”
“He certainly didn’t get tipped off by me or anyone in my” circle, she said.
She also defended her decision to imply in court that she had donated her $7 million divorce settlement to charity, as promised, after Guthrie questioned whether jurors saw the move as her “getting caught in a lie.”
“I made a pledge. And that pledge is made over time by its nature,” she again said of her suggestion that it amounted to a paid-out donation.
“I feel like so much of the trial was meant to cast aspersions on who I am as a human, my credibility, to call me a liar, and in every way you can,”
I shouldn’t have had to earmark the entirety of that …” she said.
In earlier aired clips, Heard denied ever starting the violence in her “ugly” and “very toxic” marriage to Depp, she did admit “regret” for having “behaved in horrible … ways.”
“We were awful to each other. I made a lot of mistakes — a lot of mistakes.
“But I’ve always told the truth,” she insisted.
“I spoke [the truth] to power — and I paid the price,” she said.
