Back in 2016, Amber Heard shocked the world with accusations of domestic abuse against Johnny Depp. However, the more evidence to come out the less clear it has seemed what really happened.
Now, after nearly four years, an anonymous 911 call reporting the alleged assault, in which the Pirates of the Caribbean star is said to have hurled a phone at Amber, bruising her face, has finally been made public.
But whose case does it help?
Video: Watch Amber Respond To Audio In Which She Admits To Hitting Johnny
Oddly, both parties’ legal teams claim it bolsters their own arguments. How?? To understand that you have to hear the call and/or read the highlights.
The recording, obtained by DailyMail.com, is timestamped 8:27 p.m. PST on Saturday May 21, 2016, begins with a woman’s voice saying:
“Hi, I need to report an assault right now happening at 849 Broadway at the Eastern building, it’s penthouse three.”
The operator asks the caller if she’s there, to which she explains she’s not in the penthouse apartment but downstairs. The operator then asks for more details, such as who is being assaulted? “A woman.” Who is doing it? “A man.” Is it her boyfriend or…? The caller says simply:
“A man. That’s all I know.”
The operator, clearly confused about the vagueness of the call, asks the caller if she witnessed the assault, to which she answers:
“No, I happen to know that it’s happening and I just need to remain anonymous.”
Once the operator explains the police need to know how the caller knows there has been an assault, the woman finally says:
“She told me.”
The operator then continues to try to get information, and it’s like pulling teeth for some reason, as you can read (below):
Operator: So this is a friend of yours?
Caller: Yes.
Operator: OK, so what did she say, that this guy assaulted her? Hit her?
Caller: Physically assaulting her, yes.
Operator: OK. But this isn’t a boyfriend or anything like that?
Caller: Yes? It… it could be, yes.
Operator: Is it her boyfriend, yes or no?
Caller: Yes.
The operator gets some more details about the location and then asks for the name of the victim, to which the caller responds:
“Her name? Amber. That’s all I can tell you, I have to go.”
Seemingly flustered, the operator says if that’s all the information they have there’s not much they can do, to which the caller asks:
“Send somebody up please?”
The operator says they will, but if she denies it there’s nothing they can do based on this minimal information.
So how does this help anyone? Johnny’s legal team points to the events following the call.
First off, who made the call? Trans activist iO Tillet Wright has said he called 911, writing an op-ed about it on Refinery29 just weeks later in June 2016, saying he had witnessed Johnny’s abuse before:
“That’s why, when it happened again, when I was on the phone with both of them and heard it drop, heard him say, ‘What if I pulled your hair back?’ and her scream for my help, I wondered like so many times before if I should break the code of silence that surrounds celebrities and invite the police into the situation, and in a split second decided that, yes, I was going to.”
Mystery solved, right? However, iO’s call is on the log at 10:09 p.m. So he called “to save Amber’s life” an hour and a half later?
Also, the voice on the phone doesn’t match. You can hear this interview with iO for comparison:
Depp’s lawyers believe the 8:27 call was made by another friend of Amber’s, a yoga instructor named Raquel Pennington whom Johnny was letting live rent-free in a neighboring apartment he owned.
Johnny can be seen leaving the apartment on security cam footage at 8:29, around the time the 911 call was ending. So he was long gone by the time the police arrived. The two officers who did come by the apartment reported they met with Amber but could find no evidence a crime had been committed. Officer Melissa Saenz further reported another patrol showed up later in the evening (after the second call maybe?) and said in her deposition:
“Their findings were the same as ours.”
Hence no arrest at the time. So what does it all mean?
Depp’s attorney, Adam Waldman, points to the inconsistencies as evidence of a hoax perpetrated by Amber, saying:
“Quite simply this was an ambush, a hoax. They set Mr Depp up by calling the cops but the first attempt didn’t do the trick. The officers came to the penthouses, thoroughly searched and interviewed, and left after seeing no damage to face or property. So Amber and her friends spilled a little wine and roughed the place up, got their stories straight under the direction of a lawyer and publicist, and then placed a second call to 911. But even this didn’t have the desired effect because two domestic abuse-trained LAPD police would later provide a pair of sworn depositions saying they saw no evidence of a crime. These lies about who made the calls and when are just the tip of the iceberg as the evidence will show in court.”
Amber’s legal team says the opposite.
Attorney Roberta Kaplan responds:
“Mr Depp’s representations about the 911 calls on the night of May 21, 2016 are false, and Mr Depp and his lawyers should know better. All of the evidence — including sworn testimony from multiple witnesses, phone records, and police department logs — are consistent with the truthful account given by Mr Tillet Wright. Despite Mr Depp’s efforts to misrepresent the facts and to harass and intimidate Ms Heard and various witnesses, we still live in a world where certain things are truth and others are false. Here, there are the true facts of what happened and then there are Mr Depp’s self-serving fantasies.”
Eesh, what a mess.
What do YOU make of these opposite interpretations of the exact same call??
[Image via WENN.]
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