Johnny Depp’s private doctor spoke about treating the actor’s wound after his finger was sliced in Australia in March 2015.
Dr David Kipper said during a pre-recorded deposition played in court on Monday that he cleaned Mr Depp’s wound following an incident in which the actor claimed that his ex-wife Amber Heard threw a vodka bottle at him.
The physician said he found Mr Depp bleeding heavily. He treated the wound but said he wasn’t sure how Mr Depp had been injured. The testimony was part of Mr Depp’s defamation case against his ex-wife Ms Heard, in Virginia court.
A lawyer for Ms Heard said that Mr Depp told emergency room staff that he had cut himself with a knife.
Dr Kipper said he spoke to Ms Heard on that same day, but didn’t see any injuries to her. She had said that Mr Depp threw her into a table tennis table and pushed her into a fridge.
Mr Depp has rejected those claims, previously saying of the episode that “after the incident where Ms Heard threw the vodka bottle, the second vodka bottle at me, which severed the top of my finger and crushed the bones, that’s when I began what I feel was probably some species of a breakdown, a nervous breakdown or something”.
Over the course of the six years he treated Mr Depp and Ms Heard, Dr Kipper said he never saw any signs of abuse between them and that neither of them ever reported any abuse to him. Mr Depp’s legal team are trying to establish the argument that if the actor abused his now ex-wife, Dr Kipper would have known about it.
The doctor, who still serves as Mr Depp’s physician, said that while he cleaned Mr Depp’s wound, he didn’t accompany him to the hospital. He told others to look for the fingertip and that a chef found it in the kitchen.
Dr Kipper said Ms Heard was upset but that she didn’t seek medical attention from him or private nurse Debbie Lloyd.
He added that he would have documented any injuries to Ms Heard if he had noticed any after Mr Depp reported his finger injury.
Dr Kipper noted that he saw broken glass in the kitchen but didn’t see any blood on the glass.
On 8 August 2016, almost three months after Ms Heard filed for divorce, she emailed Dr Kipper asking for medical records for December 2015.
The defamation trial between Mr Depp and Ms Heard began on Monday 11 April in Fairfax, Virginia following Mr Depp’s lawsuit against his ex-wife in March 2019, arguing that she defamed him in a December 2018 op-ed published in The Washington Post.
The title of the op-ed is “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change”.
Ms Heard partly wrote that “like many women, I had been harassed and sexually assaulted by the time I was of college age. But I kept quiet — I did not expect filing complaints to bring justice. And I didn’t see myself as a victim”.
“Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out,” she added at the time.
While Mr Depp isn’t named in the piece, his legal team argues that it contains a “clear implication that Mr Depp is a domestic abuser”, which they say is “categorically and demonstrably false”. Mr Depp is seeking damages of “not less than $50m”.
