Johnny Depp & Amber Heard Mutual Friend, Artist iO Tillet Wright, Details Alleged Abuse In Essay ‘Why I Called 911’

iO Tillet Wright, the Los Angeles-based artist who has long been friends with both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, penned an essay titled “Why I Called 911,” in which she details the alleged abuse Heard suffered at the hands of the Oscar-winning actor.

iO Tillet On Amber Heard’s Alleged Abuse

Wright is the friend of Depp and Heard who has been credited with calling 911 during the alleged May 21 incident, when Depp is said to have attacked Heard inside the married pair’s Los Angeles apartment. It was the event that apparently led to Heard filing for divorce, and which left her with the bruises that were on display as she left a Los Angeles court room after being granted a restraining order.

Since news of the divorce filing and the alleged abuse first broke, public opinion has been split between condemning Depp and accusing Heard of fabricating the abuse for the purposes of claiming as much of the Hollywood star’s money as possible. Tired of the accusations being launched at Depp, Wright went into detail about what she had witnessed as someone close to the couple in an essay for Refinery 29.

Wright began her essay, “I called 911 because she never would. Because every time it happened, her first thought was about protecting him. Because every time it happened, the sweet, loving man we all cared for so much would come back with apologies, profuse, swearing up and down that he understood how bad what he had done was, and swearing never to do it again.”

Wright acknowledges that, like many members of the public, she struggled to reconcile the “soft and gentle” Depp with the person who could be so violent towards his wife. The artist points to the alleged incident in December as a turning point. Despite long referring to Depp as “a brother” and crediting him with helping her get out of her own tough times, Wright says she had to face that what he was doing wasn’t something she could forgive.

“The reports of violence started with a kick on a private plane, then it was shoves and the occasional punch, until finally, in December, she described an all-out assault and she woke up with her pillow covered in blood,” Wright wrote. “I know this because I went to their house. I saw the pillow with my own eyes. I saw the busted lip and the clumps of hair on the floor. I got the phone call immediately after it happened, her screaming and crying, a stoic woman reduced to sobs.”

“As she, shaking and crying, described this 195-pound man throwing the full weight of his body into head-butting his 120-pound wife in the face in a fit of rage, I found that an unforgivable line in my heart had been crossed,” Wright continued. “I sat and listened, my own heart aching because I had so much care for the tender, generous man inside of all this rage, and yet…the bottom, unequivocal line is, nothing she ever could have said or done deserves what she describes as him dragging her up the stairs by the hair, punching her in the back of the head, choking her until she almost passed out, and smashing his forehead into her nose until it almost broke.”

Reading and watching the reports about Heard’s claims, Wright has found much of the coverage reprehensible, believing that it will discourage others who are suffering from abuse from coming forward.

“Right now, every battered woman in the world is watching this media circus, internalizing the message that when they come forward for help, when they break the cycle, they will be called a gold digger, a cheater, and be accused of having faked it all for attention,” she wrote.

In closing her essay, Wright turns back again to the alleged May incident. She details the moment that she decided that she could no longer cling to the idea that things would improve, ignored the implications of Depp’s celebrity and dialed 911.

“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,” Wright wrote. “Because I realized that as long as I was protecting the abuser from consequences, I was enabling the abuse and I could no longer partake.”