The legal team for Johnny Depp had a move to dismiss denied by Virginia judge Penny Azcarate on Tuesday, May 24. The actor’s lawyers asked a judge to throw out Amber Heard’s $100 million countersuit. In her counterclaim, Amber Heard claimed that Adam Waldman, Johnny Depp’s ex-lawyer, injured her career by defamatory statements about her and her associates. In 2020, Waldman accused Heard of an “abuse hoax” in his allegations to the Daily Mail. Waldman has a history of making contentious remarks to the media, most recently in 2019 when he accused Heard of lying about her injuries to get a restraining order against Depp in The Blast. Sometime later, he used the word “ambush” to describe Heard’s accusations.
Waldman’s accusations against Amber Heard in Johnny Depp countersuit
In 2016, Johnny Depp went through the divorce process with his ex-wife Amber Heard, and his old attorney, Adam Waldman, defended him throughout those procedures. For his claims against Heard, he was eventually removed from the case. In an April-June 2020 statement to the Daily Mail, Waldman alleged that Amber Heard and her media allies utilised false charges of sexual assault as both a sword and a shield. They have chosen some ‘facts’ from her sexual violence fake and are using them to wield against both the general public and Mr. Depp. He then told the magazine, “Very simply this was an ambush, a fraud,” in another article.
When their first effort to frame Mr. Depp with a 911 call failed, they tried again. Officers visited the penthouses, conducted extensive searches and interviews, and departed when they discovered no signs of forced entry or damage to persons or property. For example, Waldman claims that Heard and her companion “roughed the house up, got their tales straight under the instruction of a lawyer and publicist” before calling 911 again. In July 2019, the solicitor also gave The Blast his controversial views. There was a time when he said that Heard “went to court with painted-on ‘bruises’ to seek a temporary restraining order.” Around this time, he publicly claimed that the Aquaman star’s “battered face” was a “hoax.”
How does Amber Heard’s $100 million countersuit use Waldman’s statements?
The legal team representing Heard referred to many articles published by a limited number of publications that mentioned Adam Waldman. The actress claims that Johnny Depp and Waldman were behind a “smear campaign” to damage her professional standing. However, Johnny Depp’s legal team has denied the allegations against him. In addition to that, Heard commented on one of Waldman’s tweets about her from the previous year. Between May 21 and May 27, 2016, Waldman said that he is aware of many witnesses who have denied the existence of any facial bruises on the actress. After Johnny Depp’s legal action against The Sun in 2020 and the subsequent trial in the United Kingdom, the actor’s counsel declared that he had evidence supporting Depp’s allegations against the newspaper.
