Photo: Jim Watson / POOL / AFP / Getty Images
For: Showbiz Updated 20 Apr 2022, 10: 08 am EDT
Johnny Depp spoke of his troubled childhood while testifying in his libel trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard. The actor of 58 years old confessed that his late mother, Betty Sue Palmer, was “violent” and “cruel” with him when he was little.
“The verbal abuse, the psychological abuse, was almost worse than the beatings. The blows produced only physical pain, which you learn to deal with. You learn to accept it. You learn to deal with it,” she said. Some of the acts of violence Palmer inflicted, according to the actor, included throwing an “ashtray,” “a high-heeled shoe” or “a phone” at him. He claimed that Palmer hit him and his brothers on the head and that “he had the ability to be very cruel.”
The artist said that his father, John Depp Sr., “is a very kind man”, “quiet” and “shy” and “is not a conflictive person in any way”: “When Betty Sue, my mother, went off on tangents with my father, he was surprisingly tight-lipped. As she yelled horrible things at him, he stood there and just watched her while she hit him. He swallowed the pain”, he said.
Depp assured that there was never a time when his father lost control and attack his mother, hit her or say something bad to her. “Of the things that I witnessed, there were a couple of times the ones where she crossed the line, the ones where I could see her eyes watering as she stared at her, saying nothing. The most he did was punch the wall. Once I saw him punch a wall and he smashed her hand because it wasn’t cardboard, it was concrete, but even so, he never touched her, never argued with her. He was still a gentleman.” The actor assured that when he was five years old he constantly wondered why his father did not end the relationship with his mother: “But he did not. He was able to remain calm and composed. He was able to maintain the relationship with his children. He is a good man.”
Depp’s comments come a week after his sister Christi Dembrowski will testify in court that Palmer abused him growing up. While on the stand on April 12, Dembrowski said that she and Depp “ran and hid” when they saw their mother being abusive towards their father, who, according to her, did not react.
“He hit us. He would throw things at us.” When asked if Depp ever hit back at her mom when her mom was abusive, Dembrowski said she didn’t, “She never did. Really, when I was a little girl, nothing that happened in our house seemed right to me. And so, as I got older, Both Johnny and I decided that once we left, once we had our own home, we weren’t going to repeat never, in any way, anything like our childhood. We were going to do it differently”. Palmer “softened up” as she got older. He died at the age of 81 in May of 2016, a few days before Heard, of 35 years, filed for divorce from Depp.
The famous actor sued Heard for defamation for an opinion piece by 2018 who wrote for The Washington Post about surviving domestic violence, though he never mentioned Depp by name in the article. He originally filed the $50 million dollar lawsuit in March 2019 and argued that being branded as an abuser has tarnished his career in Hollywood. The former couple has appeared in person at the hearings since last week, listening to the proceedings from both sides of the room.
During the statements opening ceremony, Heard’s attorney, Ben Rottenborn, said that evidence will show that she suffered domestic abuse from Depp that “took many forms,” including physical, emotional, verbal, and psychological, as well as sexual violence.
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