A friend of Amber Heard has come out in defense of the actor and fights back in an essay against claims that Heard fabricated her domestic abuse allegations against her estranged husband, Johnny Depp, to squeeze money out of the star.
iO Tillett Wright, a photographer, actor and MTV host, explains in the essay, published by Refinery29, why she called 911 to report the alleged abuse that caused Heard to file for divorce from her husband of one year.
“I called 911 because she never would,” Wright wrote. “Because every time it happened, her first thought was about protecting him. Because every time it happened, the sweet, loving man we all cared for so much would come back with apologies, profuse, swearing up and down that he understood how bad what he had done was, and swearing never to do it again.”
Wright does not name names in her personal account, but her essay is unmistakably about her friends’ relationship.
According to a statement from Heard filed in support of the restraining order she successfully obtained against her husband, Heard alleges several incidents of domestic violence by Depp in the past six months. In one incident in April, on Heard’s birthday, Depp allegedly threw a magnum-sized bottle of champagne at the wall and a wine glass at her, then grabbed her by the hair and shoved her to the floor. Heard filed for divorce two days after a 21 May encounter at Depp’s downtown Los Angeles loft, during which she says Depp and threw his cellphone at her, resulting in facial bruises.
In Wright’s essay, she recalls Heard also telling her about an “all-out assault” in December. “She woke up with her pillow covered in blood,” Heard’s friend writes. “I know this because I went to their house. I saw the pillow with my own eyes. I saw the busted lip and the clumps of hair on the floor.”
Wright says she called 911 on behalf of Heard on 21 May because she knew her friend “never would” after allegedly hearing Heard scream for help while on the phone with the couple.
“I wondered like so many times before if I should break the code of silence that surrounds celebrities and invite the police into the situation, and in a split second decided that, yes, I was going to,” Wright wrote. “Because I realized that as long as I was protecting the abuser from consequences, I was enabling the abuse and I could no longer partake.”
According to the Los Angeles police department, Heard did not want to file a report following the alleged attack and the police saw no evidence of domestic violence.
In the essay, Wright describes Depp as “a brother” – and a “person I loved very much”.
“I knew him to be soft and gentle, with a temper and a dark side, but a golden heart. I didn’t want to believe it either, until I saw the wreckage.”
Wright’s essay does not directly address Doug Stanhope’s guest column in the Wrap, in which the comedian accuses Heard of “threatening to lie about [Depp] publicly in any and every possible duplicitous way if he didn’t agree to her terms” and alleges that Depp “got used, manipulated, set up and made to look like an a[ss]hole”. But it blasts media coverage that paints Heard as a gold-digger and liar.
Wright describes “every journalist, every editor, every person who puts a comment on an article pointing an uneducated finger” as “the lynch mob”.
“You are a deafening chorus,” she writes. “Your searching for an explanation for why he would have hit her sends the clear message that there CAN be a reason why someone hits their spouse.”
Heard has since filed a defamation lawsuit against Stanhope, citing that his accusations are “completely false”.
