A court has given Johnny Depp access to his ex-wife Amber Heard’s phone — which he hopes will prove she faked injuries he allegedly gave her.
Ms. Heard’s counsel has repeatedly used these phony photographs at deposition,” Depp’s lawyer Benjamin Chew alleged to the Circuit Court of Fairfax County, Va., in a court filing.
Chew, however, claims that when the LAPD responded to the alleged beating, “they found no injury upon Ms. Heard and no disruption to the penthouses.
“Ms. Heard and her friends then fabricated photos that she used to obtain an ex parte TRO [temporary restraining order] and a $7 million divorce settlement which Ms. Heard falsely testified in London she gave to the ACLU and, more scandalously, to the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles; sick children with cancer,” Chew alleged in his filing.
He added that the LAPD “disavowed the photographs” and “said they did not depict what they saw.”
The Virginia court ruled Wednesday that Depp’s team can have an expert look at the phone and see if they can find evidence of any photo tampering.
Chew had argued that earlier images given to Depp’s legal team came without any metadata, so their expert, Brian Neumeister, could not verify the details.
"Mr. Neumeister’s preliminary investigation shows that a number of the photographs have been run through a photo — a photo editing application called Photo 3 that can easily manipulate images such as showing bruises where none actually existed,” said Chew.
However, in his new Virginia court filing, Chew argued that the Sun’s own expert concluded that Heard’s photographs that showed injuries to her face from December 2015 “were manipulated three years later.”
He said the expert found that photos from an iPad Pro 10.5 were created on or after October 6, 2018, adding: “As such, any editing of the trial bundle versions would have been on or after Oct. 6 2018.
“So Ms. Heard or someone on her behalf doctored those photographs three years later. When that came up in her testimony in London, Ms. Heard falsely denied it. In short, Your Honor, without forensic imaging Mr. Neumeister cannot properly assess or verify Ms. Heard’s data,” he claimed.
The judge Wednesday also denied that Depp should have to hand over his phone and laptop, saying Heard’s attorneys had asked for “too broad” a search.