Claims that Johnny Depp was violent towards ex-wife Amber Heard are “complete lies”, his lawyers have told the High Court.
The actor is suing the publisher of The Sun – News Group Newspapers (NGN) – and executive editor Dan Wootton, over an April 2018 article that referred to him as a “wife beater”.
Mr Depp has strenuously denied that he was violent towards Ms Heard.
But NGN lawyers said the “wife beater” description was “entirely accurate”.
Both Mr Depp and Ms Heard were in court in London on Tuesday morning.
In a written outline of the Hollywood star’s case, his barrister, David Sherborne, said the article made “defamatory allegations of the utmost seriousness” against Mr Depp, accusing him of committing serious assaults on Ms Heard and “inflicting such serious injuries that she feared for her life”.
Mr Sherborne said: “The articles amount to a full-scale attack on the claimant as a ‘wife beater’, guilty of the most horrendous physical abuse.”
He added: “The claimant’s position is clear – Ms Heard’s allegations are complete lies.
“The claimant was not violent towards Ms Heard, it was she who was violent to him.”
Mr Sherborne also asked Mr Depp – called as the first witness in the case – about a recording of a conversation between the actor and Ms Heard on September 26 2015.
Mr Depp explained that both he and Ms Heard recorded conversations during their relationship.
In her witness statement, Ms Heard had said that she recorded their conversations “to remind Johnny of what he would do when using drugs and alcohol because he wouldn’t remember, or deny what he had said”.
But Mr Depp said that was not correct, telling the court that Ms Heard’s later recollection of their conversations would sometimes be “radically different”.
Source:Â bbc.com