On Wednesday, another last-minute witness was called to testify in the Johnny Depp defamation trial, saying she saw Amber Heard fight with another woman.
The actress, 36, is battling Depp, 58, in a Virginia court after he sued her for $50 million for a 2018 op-ed she penned for The Washington Post in which she alleged that she had been a victim of domestic abuse. While Heard did not specifically mention Depp in the piece, his lawyers have maintained that it was clear that she was alluding to the actor. During the trial, both defendants rejected the claims of domestic abuse leveled against them.
Beverly Leonard, testifying as a witness for Mr Depp in his multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against Ms Heard in Fairfax County, Virginia on Wednesday, said she met the Aquaman actor while working at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington state.
While at the airport’s baggage claim area, Leonard reported she saw Amber Heard with a traveling partner (Van Ree).
“They got into an altercation where Ms. Heard was…had grabbed her traveling companion and pulled something from her neck. At that point, I got up and went over to try to break up what appeared to be a fight.”
“And I summoned a colleague to help me. And I stepped in between them and separated them, stopping any further injuries or escalation.”
When Leonard was asked to describe the encounter, he said Heard was “aggressive towards her traveling companion.”
“She had reached up and grabbed her arm and pulled a necklace off of her, and I observed her having it in her hand,” she recalled. “She seemed to be not very steady on her feet, her eyes were blurry and watery, and I could smell alcohol.”
Leonard said of Van Ree: “She raised her hands in what appeared to be a defensive manner. But other than that, she was pretty stoic and didn’t really respond much. Her stature was two or three inches taller than Ms. Heard, so she didn’t really need to have to defend herself.”
She further said that when she interfered to inquire if “they were okay” and “what’s going on,” Ms Heard dismissed her.
“She just said, ‘We’re just having an argument,'” Ms Leonard said, adding that Ms Heard’s travel companion had an “abrasion on the side of her neck where the necklace was, like a rope burn from the chain as it was removed.”
Finally, Depp’s lawyer, Camille Vasquez, inquired about how Leonard came to be involved in the case.
“I became aware of this situation, specifically this trial, because I was sent an email anonymously,” she explained. “I don’t even know who it came from.”
In 2009, Amber Heard was arrested at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for allegedly assaulting Tasya van Ree, a woman she was seeing at the time. The charges were eventually dropped, and van Ree said in 2016 that Heard had been “wrongfully charged.”
Last week, Heard accused Depp’s team of fabricating evidence in the media that she was physically hostile to Van Ree, a photographer and artist who had been in a five-year relationship with the Aquaman star.
“You committed domestic violence against Miss Van Ree during your relationship, didn’t you?” Vasquez questioned, which Heard denied while on the stand.
“You assaulted her at a Seattle airport in 2009, didn’t you?” Vasquez continued. “And people saw that.”
