By Ashley Young-
Amber Heard has been accused of telling a “calculated and manipulative lie” when she claimed she donated her $7m (£5.5m) divorce settlement to charity, Johnny Depp’s lawyers have told the Court of Appeal.
Depp, 57, is attempting to overturn a damning High Court libel case ruling that he assaulted his ex-wife and put her in fear for her life, made last year following a high-profile trial.
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He is also asking the Court of Appeal to order a retrial of his libel claim against The Sun, which in April 2018 published a column calling Mr Depp a “wife beater”.
Mr Justice Nicol had ruled in July last year that Mr Depp, 57, assaulted his ex-wife on a dozen occasions and put her in “fear for her life” three times.
The judge also concluded that The Sun column was “substantially true”.
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But Mr Depp claims he “did not receive a fair trial” and is applying for permission to appeal against the ruling at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Thursday.
During a hearing on Thursday, Depp’s lawyers asked for permission to appeal the judgment, which found in favour of The Sun that an April 2018 column in the newspaper calling the actor a “wife beater” was “substantially true”.
However, Adam Wolanski QC, representing the Sun’s publisher News Group Newspapers (NGN), asked the court to reject the appeal, claiming he has brought the application to “promote his position” in the US where he faces a separate libel battle.
The Hollywood star claims he “did not receive a fair trial” adding that there are details of “fresh evidence” that Heard did not donate her divorce settlement to charity.
Charity Donation
After the couple’s split in 2016, the 34-year-old actress – who was a witness for The Sun’s publishers NGN Newspapers during the trial – said she would split the $7m between the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Mr Caldecott said the hospital wrote to Depp’s business adviser in 2019 to say Heard had not made “any payments”.
In his ruling in November, Mr Justice Nicol said of Heard: “Her donation of the $7m to charity is hardly the act one would expect of a gold-digger.”
Mr Caldecott said that if “the truth” about the charity claim had been known during the trial, it would have affected the judge’s consideration of the actress’s evidence.
Adam Wolanski, representing NGN, said in written submissions that Depp’s “fresh evidence” was said to support “a theory that Ms Heard was a ‘gold-digger'”.
However, he argued that “the evidence is not ‘fresh’ at all, since it could have been obtained with reasonable diligence for (the) trial”.
Depp’s legal team claims the judge “failed to examine the competing accounts of each incident, or to explain whether he found them proved and, if so, on what basis”.
At the conclusion of Thursday’s hearing, Lord Justice Underhill – sitting with Lord Justice Dingemans – said the court would give its ruling at a later date.
He said: “We are not going to reach an immediate decision today. We will make it very shortly.”
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