The couple were in Australia while Depp was filming the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film. Heard claims that he chopped off his fingertip with a knife during the argument, and her team has called it a 'three day hostage situation' where Depp was repeatedly violent.
Depp took the stand Wednesday and told the court that Heard was angry at him after she met with his lawyers to discuss a post nuptial agreement.
Depp said: 'All I could do was try to calm her down and say I was not out to screw her over or put her in a position that was uncomfortable. It did not work, it escalated and turned into madness, chaos, violence.'
'She was irate, she was possessed. When I tried to remove myself as I normally would, as she's hammering me with brutal words. Pardon my language but I remember that it wasn't nice.. Sort of being called an a** kisser to lawyers or a pu**y that didn't fight for her or stand up for her. I tried to remove myself from the situation but to no avail.
The house they'd rented for me in Australia was quite a large place. I think I ended up locking myself in at least nine bedrooms, bathrooms that day as she was banging on the doors and streaming obscenities and wanting to have a physical altercation.
Depp described how Heard walked away after he locked himself in one room and then he walked downstairs to the rec room where there was a pool table and a bar.
He said: 'I went behind the bar, I grabbed a bottle of vodka, and a shot glass and sat at the bar and I poured myself two or three stiff shots of vodka, first taste of alcohol in a long time.
'When she came down to the bar and found me there started screaming you're drinking again, the monster and all that.'
'She walked up to me and reached and grabbed the bottle of vodka and stood back and hurled it at me', Depp said 'It just went right past my head and smashed behind me.
'I stood up and walked behind the bar and there was a larger bottle of vodka, the kind with the handle. I grabbed that and sat in my seat, opened the bottle and poured myself a shot and drank it.
Miss Heard was flinging insults left right and center. She grabbed that bottle and threw that at me.' Depp said he used the bench in front of him to show the jury where the bar was situated and leaned back in his chair.
I was leaning like this in the chair. First bottle went, got the other bottle, shot. Takes second bottle. I'm in this position again. My hand is on the edge of the bar like that, leaning over.
'She threw the large bottle and it made contact and shattered everywhere and I honestly didn't feel the pain at first at all, I felt no pain.
What I felt was heat and I felt as if something were dripping down my hand and then I looked down and realized that the tip of my finger had been severed. I was looking directly at my bone sticking out.
The meaty portion of the inside of your finger. Blood was just pouring out and at that point I think I went into some sort of, I don't know what a nervous breakdown feels like but that's probably the closest I've been. Nothing made sense. I knew in my mind and in my heart this is not life. This is not life. No one should have to go through this.
'This feeling of being in the middle of some sort of nervous breakdown I started to write with my own blood on the walls, little reminders from our past that essentially represented lies she had told me, lies I had caught her in.'
Looking at a picture of himself on a stretcher, Depp said, 'That’s me in the emergency room. I see a detail I’d forgotten.
'Miss Heard had taken my cigarette from the ashtray and stubbed it out on my face.'
Depp was taken to the emergency room where he lied to the doctors and said he smashed the finger in some accordion doors because he 'didn't want to get Miss Heard in trouble'
He stayed with Heard despite the alleged abuse because he feared she would attempt suicide like his mother did when his father left her.
'Miss Heard had spoken of suicide on a couple of occasions so that also becomes a factor. That's also something that always lives in the back of your brain and you fear.'
'Many times when I'd try to leave she would stop me at the elevator with the security guards crying, screaming, ''I can't live without you, I'm going to die.''
'The Amber Heard I knew for the first year and a half was not this opponent, it wasn't my girl. She had become my opponent and everything I did just didn't fit her, she didn't accept it.'
Miss Heard in her frustration and her rage and her anger, she would strike out. It could begin with a slap, a shove, throwing a TV remote at my head, throwing a glass of wine in my face but all in all it was just a constant.
There were several occasions where Miss Heard would tell me what a bad father I was and that I had no idea how to parent.
I was not prepared to take, I would not hear the words you're a terrible father, you're an awful father. One can only take so much of that before bits of your brain, bits of your heart, the valve gets shut off because you can't hear it any more and you know it's not true and you know it's to slice you up, to bring you down, to bring you into a place where you start to believe there's something wrong with you.'
'There's plenty wrong with me…but in all of these situations my main goal was to retreat because most important is pick your battles. If there's a battle to be fought it's grave and important that must be dealt with but small insults and kind of teenage high school tactics, this bullying if you will, it was becoming too much too take.'
Amber, he said, had a routine that she would get him a glass of wine and remove his footwear as soon as he got home.
'One night I came home and she was on the phone, I took my boots off, suddenly Miss Heard approached with this look on her face, she just said: What did you just do? What did you do?'
He asked her what she meant and she replied: 'You took your boots off.'
'Yes I did, he said he told her. You were busy.'
But Amber told him: 'No, no, no that's my job. You don't do that, I do that.
'Then she said 'Let me get you a glass of wine.' I did take pause of course, the fact she was visibly shaken or upset that I had broken her rules of routine.
'Once you notice something like that you start to notice other tidbits that come out.
'Then within a year a year and a half she had become another person, almost.
He said in the beginning his relationship with Heard, was 'too good to be true'. We had many things in common, certainly blues music, literature.
'She was attentive, she was loving, she was smart, she was funny, she was understanding'.
'Pirates of the Caribbean actor told the court Tuesday that he started popping pills when he was just 11 and by the time he was 15 he had 'done all the drugs that I am aware of'.
'I'd bring my mom her nerve pill, I'd take one myself to escape caring so much, feeling so much – to escape the chaotic nature of what we were living through. '
'Can't say I'm proud of admitting that'.
'I've never taken any substance for a party. I've taken these substances on and off to numb myself of the ghosts, the wraiths that were still with me from my youth.'
'The characterization of my 'substance abuse' that's been delivered by Miss Heard is grossly embellished and I'm sorry to say but a lot of it is just plainly false.'
'It was an easy target for her to hit because once you've trusted somebody for a certain amount of years and you've told them all the secrets of your life that information can be used against you, especially if it's taken to a point that's teetering on impossible, teetered over impossible at times.'
'In fact before Australia I'd been off of alcohol for about 18 months,' he added referring to the time when he lost part of a finger, when, he claimed, Heard threw a bottle at him.
But he admitted that he got hooked on the painkiller Roxycontin after getting sciatica.
Depp apologized for sending his best friend vile texts about Heard saying he wanted to see her 'rotting corpse decomposing in the f***ing trunk of a Honda Civic'.
'I'm ashamed of some of the references made. I'm embarrassed that at the time the heat of the moment, the heat of the pain that I was feeling went to dark places.'
He said: 'Sometimes pain has to be dealt with with humor and sometimes dark, very dark humor.