Amber Heard gave testimony to the British High Court on Monday that she was afraid her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, was going to kill her. “Some incidents were so severe that I was afraid he was going to kill me, either intentionally or just by losing control and going too far. He explicitly threatened to kill me many times, especially later in our relationship,†she said, according to Deadline. Heard recounted an incident in a Tokyo hotel in 2015 “that resulted in Johnny kneeling on my back and hitting me on the back of the head,†she told the court.
Heard’s testimony was part of Depp’s libel trial against the British tabloid The Sun, its publisher, News Group Newspapers, and the paper’s executive editor, Dan Wootton, over an April 2018 article that called him a “wife beater.†Heard was giving evidence on 14 allegations of domestic violence that The Sun is using in its defense. As part of her testimony, Heard denied being a drug user and denied that she was abusive herself. She described Depp as having an intense split personality that subjected her to abuse: “When Johnny puts his attention on you, with all his intensity and darkness, it is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. When I say he was dark, he had a violent and dark way of speaking: the way he talked about our relationship being ‘dead or alive’ and telling me that death was the only way out of the relationship.â€
Depp has denied all allegations of abuse and gave his own testimony over five days. Heard’s testimony is expected to last three days.