Amber Heard says she still loves Johnny Depp – “Absolutely,” as she put it emphatically – but still fears future “silencing” as long as she continues to speak out.
Heard sat down with Savannah Guthrie for an interview on “Today” that NBC has been rolling out in bits and pieces this week. In earlier teases, she said she doesn’t blame the jury, stands by every word of her testimony and still insists social media poisoned the panel that ruled against her.
But NBC News perhaps saved the biggest shocker for promo No. 3, with Heard saying she still loves the “Pirates” actor, even after all she’s been through – including losing a whopping civil defamation case that dragged every ugly detail of their volcanic relationship out into public.
Guthrie asked whether Depp had fulfilled the prophecy he sent her in a text message – that she would suffer “total global humiliation.”
“I know he promised it – I testified to this,” she said. “I’m not a good victim, I get it. I’m not a likable victim. I’m not a perfect victim. But when I testified I asked the jury to just see me as human and hear his own words, which is a promise to do this. It feels as though he has.”
Yet Heard insisted she still has “no bad feelings or ill will” toward the “Pirates” actor.
“I love him. I loved him with all my heart. I tried my best to make a deeply broken relationship work. And I couldn’t. I have no bad feelings or will will towards him at all. I know that might be hard to understand or it might be really easy to understand. If you’ve ever loved anyone, it should be easy.”
Guthrie also asked Heard whether it was a mistake to write the op-ed at the center of the case after the relationship had ended and “life had seemingly moved on.”
“The op-ed wasn’t about my relationship with Johnny,” Heard said. “It was about me lending my voice to a bigger cultural conversation we were having at the time.” She added that teams of lawyers had reviewed the piece before it published and deemed it safe from defamation claims.
The six-week trial ended in a $10.4 million jury prize for Depp, and an offsetting $2 million judgment for Heard, who says she now feels like she must be very careful about choosing her words.
“I’m scared that no matter what I do, no matter what I say or how I say it, every step that I take will present another opportunity for this sort of silencing,” she said.