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Can Amber Heard speak about Johnny Depp and what happened during the trial without landing herself in another defamation lawsuit? Some lawyers think it's risky.
The actress has given her first post-trial interview to Today's Savannah Guthrie, with it set to air in full as a primetime special on NBC this Friday.
The highly anticipated interview will see Heard discuss her ex-husband and the media circus surrounding the trial.
Heard and Depp were embroiled in a weeks-long blockbuster trial after the actor sued his ex-wife for $50 million, accusing her of defaming him by writing an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2018 in which she said that she had been the victim of domestic violence. Though Depp was never named in the piece, his lawyers argued that it was clear who she was referencing.
Millions of people all over the world tuned in to the trial from Fairfax, Virginia, as the proceedings were televised daily, prompting hundreds of viral moments and unprecedented scrutiny.
The trial ended with a jury finding that Heard had defamed Depp with actual malice. She was ordered to pay him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. The punitive damages were reduced to $350,000, due to a Virginia law that caps them at that amount.
In preview clips of the interview, Heard said that she doesn't blame the jury for ruling in favor of Depp and called him a "fantastic actor."
She also told Savannah Guthrie of Depp in the preview: "I loved him with all my heart. And I tried the best I could to make a deeply broken relationship work. And I couldn't."
But how much of a risk is Heard taking by talking about a trial that she already lost?
"As a legal matter she does not run a higher risk of being sued for slander or libel because she lost her case," attorney Ambrosio E. Rodriguez told Newsweek.
Rodriguez, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, former prosecutor, and founder of The Rodriguez Law Group, highlighted that by doing this highly publicized NBC interview, Heard is "obviously not taking her loss quietly."
He added that even so, "she is still free to speak her mind, but she, like all of us, isn't free to make false accusations."
Similarly, attorney Brett Turnbull of Turnbull Holcomb & Lemoine said anyone who makes false statements about another individual runs the risk of a defamation suit.
"As far as defaming Depp, we are not allowed to make intentionally false statements publicly to harm another person or business's reputation," Turnbull told Newsweek. "That is always defamation."
He also said that Heard's interview could possibly affect any potential future trials.
"Amber Heard is allowed to say anything that she wants in her interview without an impact on appeal. But, if she does get a new trial post-appeal she continues to potentially damage her odds of success in a later trial by admitting certain things or making certain comments in the public domain," Turnbull said.
In a preview for the NBC interview, Heard discusses the social media frenzy surrounding the trial and how she believes it was not fair.
"But even somebody who is sure I'm deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I'm lying, you still couldn't look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there's been a fair representation. You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair," she said.
Tessa McKeown, an expert on reputation and privacy and civil litigation at the leading law firm Vardags, agrees that the "social media coverage of this trial took on a life of its own in a way we have never seen before."
"Heard affirmed in her NBC interview her concerns that 'the vast majority of this trial was played out on social media,' forming a spectacle to which 'even the most well-intentioned juror' would fail to be immune," McKeown tells Newsweek.
"Indeed, the social media coverage of this trial took on a life of its own in a way we have never seen before, with 2.5 billion views on TikTok and live viewership of the trial surpassing over 3 million at its peak. Perhaps even more unusual was the inescapable volume of isolated snippets of information, allegedly fake accounts, and the allegations that significant amounts of money were spent to promote content regarding the trial—a lot of which has been criticized as being lopsided."
McKeown added that the trial itself and Heard's comments speak to the "inherent unpredictability of litigation, which is only compounded in a case involving a jury trial, and where that jury was not sequestered."
She added: "It is almost impossible to know whether the jury's decision was influenced by external factors, and if so, to what extent."
"The trial and the social media frenzy surrounding it has led to a lot of commentary regarding the role of the media in the courtroom. The trial raises important questions about how to balance the principle of open justice and the right to a fair trial in the 21st century and in the age of the TikTok generation. It remains to be seen what will follow, not just for Heard and Depp, but also for trials of this type both in the U.S. and the U.K."
Heard's interview with Guthrie is scheduled to air this Friday on NBC at 8 p.m. ET.
