Earlier this year, Johnny Depp asserted that his ex-wife, Amber Heard, did not follow through on her promise to donate her $7 million divorce settlement to charity. In a statement to Deadline, Heard’s lawyers admitted that the full extent of her donations had been “delayed” because of Depp’s lawsuit against her. TMZ now reports that Depp has filed a lawsuit against the ACLU, one of the charities Heard promised to donate to, in an attempt to see if she donated or not.
The move is the latest from Depp’s legal team in a string of attempts to prove that Heard lied in court when she said she had made $7 million in donations to the ACLU and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The latest lawsuit comes after Depp and his attorneys attempted to get his libel case in the UK against News Group Newspapers, the publisher of tabloid the Sun, back to trial after his appeal request was denied.
Back in 2016, Heard announced her plans to donate the settlement money to charity, which Depp said he would honor. The same year, the ACLU released a statement thanking Heard for the donation. Months later, the ACLU said that Heard had donated $350,000 directly, but Depp’s legal team has suggested that Heard’s boyfriend at the time, Elon Musk, provided the money for that donation and any further ones made in Heard’s name. From late 2016 to sometime in 2017, Musk and Heard dated.
Depp’s team believes that the judge in his UK libel case, in which he took issue with the Sun calling him a “wife beater,” was swayed by Heard’s claims of charity following the divorce proceedings.
If she’s found to be lying about her donations, Depp thinks it could help his upcoming libel case in America. He’s said that she might have only donated $450,000 of her own money in the end, and so far the ACLU hasn’t agreed to provide documents verifying whether she did actually donate $3.5 million in total to the charity.
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