"She-who-must-not-be-silenced" 's (last?) attempt to dismiss:
A Virginia judge on Friday refused to dismiss Johnny Depp’s lawsuit against Amber Heard, allowing him to proceed with a claim that she defamed him in a Washington Post opinion piece.
Judge Bruce D. White ruled on Friday that Depp can proceed under the theory that Heard’s statements clearly implied that Depp had assaulted her.
“Plaintiff has pleaded circumstances that would reasonably cause three of the four statements at issue to convey the alleged defamatory meaning that Mr. Depp abused Ms. Heard, and this alleged meaning is in fact defamatory,” White wrote.
Heard’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, urged the court last fall to throw out the suit, arguing that the column was fundamentally not about Heard’s allegations against Depp.
“It was about her and what happened to her after she came forward,” Kaplan argued.
White rejected that argument, finding that the column “relied on the factual underpinning that Ms. Heard was abused by Mr. Depp.”
White did throw out Depp’s defamation claim with regard to a fourth statement in the piece. In that statement, she wrote about receiving death threats, and being followed by paparazzi on the rare occasions when she left her home.
White held that the statement carried no defamatory implication against Depp. White also rejected Heard’s attorneys’ claim that the suit was barred by the one-year statute of limitations, because Heard was merely alluding to statements that had first been made in 2016.
Adam Waldman, one of Depp’s attorneys, responded that the ruling speaks for itself.
“Roberta Kaplan’s suggestion that losing their own motion to dismiss was what they had planned all along also speaks for itself,” he said. “As for Amber Heard’s mythical ‘evidence’ that Ms. Kaplan confidently cites, we and reality both look forward to seeing it.”