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American actor Johnny Depp's lawyer, Ben Chew, stated that the claims made by Amber Heard's attorney, Elaine Bredehoft, about the high-profile defamation case's publicity influencing the verdict were "baseless."
Elaine Bredehoft's comments on the jury's integrity, according to Ben Chew, who represented Depp, were "really disappointing" to hear. In a recent interview with the Law&Crime Network on June 8, he said:
“I was really disappointed to hear that because she’s a very good lawyer, very experienced. It seemed to cast aspersions on the jurors’ integrity because, as you know, they took an oath not to watch social media and there’s no reason to believe that they did. So to hear such a baseless claim was disappointing.”
During her interview, Elaine Bredehoft also mentioned that there were a lot of evidential concerns, which Ben Chew called "absurd."
“There are rules of evidence and both sides had evidence that were excluded for proper evidentiary reasons.”
Ben Chew's remarks come after Elaine Bredehoft made some comments post trial
While speaking to NBC News a day after Johnny Depp won the defamation case against Amber Heard, Elaine Bredehoft stated that she felt the jury could hardly avoid the strong and "lopsided" social media frenzy surrounding the trial.
“How can you not? They went home every night. They have families. The families are on social media. We had a 10-day break in the middle because of the judicial conference. There's no way they couldn't have been influenced by it.”
When asked if her client could afford to pay the court-ordered $10 million in compensatory damages, Bredehoft said,
“Oh no, absolutely not.”
In another interview with the outlet TODAY, Bredehoft said that she believes that Johnny Depp's legal team sought to "demonize" Heard and was able to withhold an "enormous" quantity of evidence in Depp's defamation trial, which he won on June 1.
While talking to Savannah Guthrie about the verdict, Bredehoft said:
“That's because she was demonized here. A number of things were allowed in this court that should not have been allowed, and it caused the jury to be confused.”
The Pirates of the Caribbean actor sued Heard for $50 million in connection with an op-ed she penned for The Washington Post in 2018, in which she labeled herself a "public figure representing domestic abuse."
Although Depp was not identified in the piece, his attorneys claimed that there was an "implication" that he was an abuser. He has dismissed all abuse charges.
The jury awarded Depp $10 million in compensation damages for lost jobs and professional possibilities, as well as $5 million in punitive damages, after finding "clear and convincing evidence" that Heard defamed him in the op-ed. A Fairfax County circuit court limited the punitive penalties to $350,000 since that is Virginia's legal maximum.
