Depp v Heard: the unreal story extract chapters 1-2

PREFACE
Talking and writing about what may or may not have happened between
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard across the course of their
four-and-a-half year relationship is fraught with difficulties. Multiple,
competing, intertwining narratives offered up by interested and disinterested
parties point to contradictory conclusions. Hard evidence is
thin on the ground.
I have spent hundreds of hours reviewing sworn testimony and
statements, reading court transcripts, watching videos, listening to
recordings and scrolling through endless tweets, texts and emails. At
the conclusion of one multimillion pound trial in 2020, the allegation
Johnny Depp was a wife-beater was ruled ‘substantially true’. At the
conclusion of another, held in 2022, a jury found Amber Heard had lied
about her allegations of abuse.
In this book I have tried to build a picture of who Johnny Depp and
Amber Heard are, why they matter and how their relationship became
so toxic. I’ve worked through the details of each alleged incident of violence
to see whose story stands up, and I’ve picked out some of the
key moments in both trials, either because they inform a wider truth, or
because they felt significant at the time. I’ve also attempted to give you
a flavour of what it was like reporting everything first hand, trying to
make sense of the overwhelming volumes of information flooding out
of each trial and the raging passions of the online armies who invested
so much of themselves in the proceedings and the outcome.
My basic working methods involved examining primary and secondary
source documents and assessing their credibility before inserting
them into the narrative. Credibility is a subjective measure, and
weighing the credibility of a source can be complex. Contemporaneous
documentary evidence is the best, though it needs context. Court transcripts
are an undisputed and accurate record of the recollections of
primary witnesses. Unfortunately those recollections could be cloudy,
mistaken or deliberately misleading.
I have tried to include as much as I think you need to know about
the story without being overwhelmed by pointless detail. I have also
tried to do this dispassionately, without being dull. This book distils
the several million words which have been written and spoken about
this case into a few hundred pages. Not everything is going to make
the cut.
Unless an event is generally agreed to have happened in a manner
which is largely unchallenged, I flag it as alleged, reported, apparent