Amber Heard Legal Team Requests Johnny Deep Trial Verdict Be Overturned Over Alleged Imposter Juror, Lack of Evidence

Amber Heard's legal team has filed new documents asking the judge in her defamation case with ex-husband Johnny Depp to set aside the verdict in the case on the grounds that the verdict was unsupported by the evidence. Additionally, the filing claims that one of the juror's in the case may have been an imposter and suggests that Juror 15 was significantly younger than their listed age.

According to the filing (via The Guardian), the 43-page filing says that the jury verdict, which found Heard liable on three claims of defamation and awarded Depp more than $10 million, was unsupported by evidence presented. Specifically, the filing claims Depp's claims that he lost his role in Pirates of the Caribbean because of Heard's Washington Post op-ed were false and "proceeded solely on a defamation by implication theory, abandoning any claims that Ms. Heard's statements were actually false." The filing also claims that the monetary award against Heard is excessive considering the split verdict that both Heard, and Depp had defamed each other.

As for the claim regarding the juror, the filing claims that the juror in question was not properly vetted by the court. The juror has a listed birth year of 1945 but per the filing, "was clearly born later than 1945. Publicly available information demonstrates that he appears to have been born in 1970."

"This discrepancy raises the question whether Juror 15 actually received a summons for jury duty and was properly vetted by the court to serve on the jury," the motion reads.

Last month, a court in Virginia awarded Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and an additional $5 million in punitive damages — the latter of which was later reduced to $350,000 due to the state's statutory cap on punitive damages — after finding that Heard defamed Depp in her 2018 op-ed. However, the court also found that Depp had defamed Heard and awarded her $2 million in compensatory damages. Heard has indicated that she will appeal the verdict and it is important to note that this latest filing is not Heard's appeal.

Heard and Depp have been locked in legal battles since their divorce in 2016. In 2020, Depp lost a libel suit against British tabloid The Sun with the English court deciding at that time that the claims made by the paper were "substantially true".