Judge Grants Johnny Depp Permission To View Amber Heard’s Donation Records

Complicating to the messy lawsuits surround the divorce of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, a New York judge has granted Depp’s team the ability to view Heard’s donation records.

During the two’s divorce settlement, the Aquaman actress had pledged to donate her $7 million settlement to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, a move which Depp’s lawyers claimed: “tipped the scales against [him] from the very beginning.”

The Pirates of the Caribbean star and his team are hoping to overturn a previous libel ruling which said that the British tabloid, The Sun, had sufficient evidence to call him a “wife-beater.” The Sun called the actor such in a headline. During that case, he had previously claimed that Heard had not donated the sum she had promised.

Depp is seeking the documents in the course of his $50 million defamation case against Heard, who wrote a 2018 op-ed for The Washington Post detailing her story of surviving domestic abuse. A Virginia court has already ruled that the piece was written about the Fantastic Beasts actor even though she did not refer to him by name.

His team hopes that, with the help of possible evidence that Heard did not donate her settlement earnings to the ACLU, the U.S. defamation case will have a different outcome than the U.K. one.

Court documents showed Heard’s attorney’s response to the accusations. Elaine Bredehoft said that her client had promised to pay the ACLU within a period of ten years and that the organization understood that. She added, “We produced the documents from the ACLU on how much she has. She has always said she fully intends to continue to give the full $7 million, but she can’t do it yet. She will do it when she can. But she has given a significant amount to both.”