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    Lawsuit Accusing Bill Cosby of Sexual Assault Heads to Trial

    A civil suit accusing Mr. Cosby of assaulting a teenager in the 1970s, which he denies, will be the first to head to court since his criminal conviction was overturned last year.Judy Huth met Bill Cosby when she was still a teenager, she has recounted in court papers. It was the mid-1970s, and Mr. Cosby had already had his breakthrough on the TV series “I Spy” and become a movie star, but was still years away from his huge success on “The Cosby Show.” Ms. Huth and a friend spotted him on a film set in a park in San Marino, Calif., and ended up meeting him in person, according to her court filings.Days later, she asserts in the filings, she went to Mr. Cosby’s tennis club at his invitation, where he gave her and her friend alcohol before taking them to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, where she accuses him of forcing her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom. Mr. Cosby has described her account as a fabrication since the case was first filed in 2014.This week the job of deciding who is credible will fall to a jury in Los Angeles Superior Court, as the civil trial of Mr. Cosby on Ms. Huth’s accusations that he sexually assaulted her is scheduled to get underway.Ms. Huth’s recollection regarding when the encounter occurred has changed. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16, according to court papers. Since the beginning, she has said in court papers that she recalled Mr. Cosby telling her and her friend to claim they were both 19 if asked at the mansion.The change of dates has led Mr. Cosby’s team to further dispute her account. Andrew Wyatt, a spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said in a statement that Ms. Huth had “made inconsistent statements since the inception of filing this civil suit against Mr. Cosby.” Ms. Huth has said that recently released information supplied by Mr. Cosby’s team had led her to reconsider what year it occurred.Judy Huth, left, in 2015 with her attorney, Gloria Allred.Anthony McCartney/Associated PressThe civil case, one of the last unsettled lawsuits against Mr. Cosby, was largely put on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued the criminal case that resulted in his 2018 conviction on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. But the conviction was overturned, and Mr. Cosby was released from prison last year when an appellate panel found that his due process rights had been violated when prosecutors ignored an assurance from a prior district attorney that Mr. Cosby would not be prosecuted.With the criminal case overturned, the significance of Ms. Huth’s suit has risen in the minds of some of the many women who have accused Mr. Cosby of being a sexual predator.“I think that Judy’s trial may be our last stand for justice and seeing accountability come to fruition in our stand against Bill Cosby,” Victoria Valentino, who says Mr. Cosby drugged and raped her in Los Angeles in 1969, said in a text. (Mr. Cosby has denied all allegations of sexual assault, and said any encounters were consensual.) She said she plans to attend part of the trial, which, barring a last-minute settlement, is set to begin with jury selection this week and opening arguments expected June 1.Patricia Steuer, who accused Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting her in 1978 and 1980, said that she saw the Huth civil trial as a chance to get a measure of justice. “There is no other recourse at the moment,” she said. “It probably is the only avenue available.”Mr. Cosby, now 84, has already faced multiple other civil cases filed against him by women, many of whom sued him for defamation after his legal team dismissed as fictions their accusations of sexual misconduct by him. Eleven civil cases ended in settlements, with 10 of the settlements having been agreed to by Mr. Cosby’s former insurance company over his objections, according to his spokesman.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit is poised to become the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. In court papers, Ms. Huth says that in a bedroom at the Playboy Mansion, Mr. Cosby tried to put his hand down her pants and then forced her to fondle him.Ms. Huth filed her suit in December 2014, at a time when Mr. Cosby was facing allegations by many women who said he had drugged and sexually assaulted them, in incidents spanning several decades.She also reported her accusation to the police, but the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.Her lawyers argued that the period for a civil claim had not expired, however, because in California it is extended for adults who say they were victims of sexual abuse as minors but repressed the experience. The deadline to file such a suit is determined in part by when the person, as an adult, becomes aware of the severe psychological effect of the abuse, her lawyers said.In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil court.Ms. Huth’s revised timeline, which says Mr. Cosby assaulted her when she was 16 rather than 15, should not affect her ability to pursue the suit since the law views a 16-year-old as a minor, Ms. Huth’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, said.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers argued in legal papers that they felt ambushed by the sudden change in Ms. Huth’s account. They said that their research had been geared toward establishing Mr. Cosby’s and Ms. Huth’s whereabouts in 1974, and said they had prepared evidence to show that the entertainer was not at the Playboy Mansion in the period she suggested in 1974.Log books from the Playboy Mansion for 1974 do not list either Ms. Huth or her friend as having visited, according to Mr. Cosby’s lawyers.At a hearing last week, the judge asked Playboy to produce records for 1975 and agreed that Ms. Huth and the friend who accompanied her should sit for a further deposition before the trial begins.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have also questioned whether she had only remembered the alleged abuse a short time before filing the suit because, they said, she had contacted a tabloid about it 10 years earlier.Mr. Wyatt, the spokesman for Mr. Cosby, said in the statement, “We feel confident that the Playboy records along with Ms. Huth changing her timeline of events from 1974 to 1975 in the 11th hour will vindicate Mr. Cosby.”Mr. Cosby acknowledged meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion, and Ms. Huth has produced photographs of them together that she said were taken there, according to court papers. But he has denied that she was a minor when they met.“While defendant does not deny that he socialized with plaintiff at the Playboy Mansion, as he did other women and men who frequented the club,” his lawyers said in court papers, “defendant vehemently denies that plaintiff was underage.”Ms. Huth has said that she changed the timeline of her account in part because she only recently realized, as a result of documents put forward by Mr. Cosby, that the filming of the movie “Let’s Do It Again,” where she says they met, took place later than she had recalled.The trial is expected to last two weeks, and Ms. Huth, who is seeking damages from Mr. Cosby, is expected to testify, along with the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion. Mr. Cosby has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify. He will not attend the trial, Mr. Wyatt said.During pretrial hearings, Ms. Huth had asked for a bench trial, but the trial will be in front of a 12-person jury, with at least 9 of 12 votes needed for a conviction.Mr. Cosby settled a civil case Ms. Constand brought against him in 2006 for $3.4 million. The other civil cases were settled for undisclosed terms by the insurance carried on Mr. Cosby’s home policy, which provided “personal injury” coverage in a range of circumstances, including lawsuits that accused the policy holder of defamation.The other ongoing civil case against Mr. Cosby was filed last year by Lili Bernard, an actor and visual artist, who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Atlantic City in 1990, when she was 26. She was able to file the suit, which is still in its early stages, because in 2019 New Jersey overhauled its laws on the statute of limitations for sexual assault cases, extending the time limit for filing suits and creating a special two-year window allowing people to bring cases regardless of how long ago the alleged assaults might have occurred. More

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    Amber Heard Recounts Unraveling of Marriage to Johnny Depp

    The defamation trial involving the actors is entering a new stage as Ms. Heard faces aggressive cross-examination from Mr. Depp’s lawyers.Amber Heard testified on Monday in the defamation case brought by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, that she filed for divorce and for a restraining order against him in 2016 after two blowout fights that made her fear for her safety.“I knew I had to leave him,” Ms. Heard testified. “I knew I wouldn’t survive it if I didn’t.”But after detailing the collapse of their marriage for several hours, Ms. Heard faced aggressive cross-examination from a lawyer for Mr. Depp, Camille Vasquez, who sought to discredit her account that the actor had beaten her repeatedly throughout their relationship.Citing incidents during which Ms. Heard testified that she had been struck, Mr. Depp’s lawyers displayed photos taken at the time that show no apparent bruising or swelling. Ms. Heard testified that she covered the injuries with makeup so the abuse would remain hidden after many of the incidents.“You should see what it looked like underneath the makeup,” Ms. Heard said of one photo she described as being taken the night after Mr. Depp hit her so hard that she thought her nose had been broken.As the trial at Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia entered its final two weeks, Ms. Heard spent the opening hours of the day finishing her testimony before facing off with Mr. Depp’s legal team, who questioned whether her accounts of spousal abuse were accurate and whether she had actually donated the money she secured through her divorce to charity, as she had pledged.Her testimony included her account of the first time the issue of spousal abuse by Mr. Depp came into public view, in May 2016, after paparazzi photographed Ms. Heard at a California court, where she obtained a temporary restraining order against him. She had what appeared to be a bruise under one eye, and she told the court then, in a filing, that Mr. Depp had hurled a cellphone at her during an argument about a week earlier, hitting her in the face.“The violence was now normal and not the exception,” Ms. Heard told the jury on Monday.Mr. Depp, 58, sued Ms. Heard, 36, for defamation after The Washington Post published an oped by Ms. Heard in 2018 in which she called herself a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article did not mention Mr. Depp by name, but he has asserted that it clearly alluded to their relationship. The jury is also considering a countersuit filed by Ms. Heard, which accuses Mr. Depp of defaming her when his former lawyer made statements saying her accusations were a hoax.In addition to repeated physical abuse, Ms. Heard has described multiple instances of sexual assault by Mr. Depp. He has accused her of being the aggressor in the relationship and denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting her.Ms. Heard testified on Monday about one confrontation that occurred after Mr. Depp missed her birthday dinner in April 2016 because he had a business meeting. When they were alone later that night, he initiated a physical fight, she said, and shoved her, grabbed her by the hair and threw a bottle of champagne at her, missing her.Ms. Heard said she did not see her then-husband for about a month after that. But in May 2016, when Mr. Depp visited the penthouse in Los Angeles where Ms. Heard was staying, the couple ended up arguing about Mr. Depp’s accusation that she or a friend had defecated in the couple’s bed as a “prank.” Ms. Heard called the accusation a “delusion,” attributing the feces to one of the couple’s dogs.During the confrontation, Ms. Heard said, she was on the cellphone with a friend, who, overhearing the commotion and screaming, warned Ms. Heard that she wasn’t safe. That prompted Mr. Depp, she said, to grab the phone from her.“He pulls his arm back with the phone and throws it at my face,” she said. “I put my head in my hands and immediately start crying.”According to court papers, the friend on the phone called 911, but when the police arrived, Ms. Heard refused to cooperate.“I wanted to protect Johnny,” she testified on Monday. “I didn’t want him to be arrested.”But two days later, she said, she filed for divorce, and several days after that, she filed for the restraining order because she was experiencing extreme anxiety and wanted an assurance that Mr. Depp would not return to where she lived. (She agreed to drop a request for a permanent restraining order as part of their divorce agreement.)Johnny Depp, waving to observers in the gallery in the courtroom on Monday.Pool photo by Steve Helber via ReutersMr. Depp’s account of those two incidents was markedly different during his testimony earlier in the trial. He said he had an important meeting about his finances and was late for Ms. Heard’s birthday party, prompting her to lash out at him later that night. He testified that she punched him in the face twice before he left the building and stayed elsewhere. His mother died while the couple was separated, and when he called Ms. Heard to tell her the news, he also told her he planned to file for divorce, Mr. Depp testified.“Somebody had to call it,” he acknowledged.When he returned to the penthouse to pick up some of his belongings, Mr. Depp testified, the couple got into an argument about the feces that an employee had found in the bed the previous month. Mr. Depp said he did not throw the phone at her, but rather, he “flopped” it onto the couch. He accused Ms. Heard of faking that she had been injured during the confrontation in order to convince her friends that she was in some peril.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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    Amber Heard Accuses ‘Belligerent’ Johnny Depp of Sexual Assault

    With graphic depictions of what she described as physical attacks, she sought to counter the actor’s testimony that she had been the aggressor.Amber Heard described in graphic detail on Thursday how, she said, her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, beat and sexually assaulted her during a trip to Australia, during which she experienced the worst fear of her life.Ms. Heard, testifying in the defamation case filed against her by Mr. Depp, said the couple took the trip in 2015, shortly after they were married, because the actor was needed for the filming of the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. But, while there, Mr. Depp took MDMA, became “belligerent” and attacked her, hitting her in the face, throwing her across the room, ripping off her nightgown and grabbing her by the neck, she said.“I’m looking in his eyes and I don’t see him anymore,” Ms. Heard, who sometimes broke into sobs during her testimony, said. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”Ms. Heard described the encounter during her second day of testimony in Fairfax County Circuit Court, where she and Mr. Depp are locked in a tense legal battle over just who defamed whom. In his own testimony, Mr. Depp denied hitting Ms. Heard and denied sexually assaulting her, accusing her of being the aggressor in the relationship.The incident in Australia has emerged as a key point of contention in a trial that has focused on competing, and contradictory, accusations of spousal abuse. At some point during the confrontation Ms. Heard described, part of the middle finger on Mr. Depp’s right hand had been severed, but the couple has presented differing accounts of how it actually happened and who was to blame.Ms. Heard, 36, said Mr. Depp, 58, was angry about several issues, including his suspicion that she had been having an affair with another actor and his contention that she had been unkind to his sister. She said his attack escalated from vulgar name-calling to threats and violence. In an argument over his drinking, she said, she had thrown a liquor bottle on the ground.“That really set him off,” she said.Ms. Heard testified that during the fight, Mr. Depp threw bottles at her, missing, and that later he sexually assaulted her with a bottle. She said that, though she could not see the bottle at the time, she was later able to deduce what the object had been.According to Ms. Heard’s account, Mr. Depp severed his finger when he picked up a phone from the wall and smashed it into pieces. She said that after the attack she returned to that area of the house and found messages written on the walls and objects in the room, in blood and paint.During his testimony earlier in the trial, Mr. Depp said his finger had been severed when Ms. Heard threw a handle of vodka at him that had shattered on his hand. He said she had been upset about a meeting she had with a lawyer over a potential postnuptial agreement, and described her following him around the house, screaming obscenities and “hammering me with brutal words.” He testified that when she discovered him drinking, she hurled a bottle of vodka at him, which missed, and then another, which made contact.As his hand bled “like Vesuvius,” Mr. Depp testified, he experienced a “nervous breakdown” and used his bloody finger to write on the walls messages that “represented lies that she told me.”Mr. Depp’s lawsuit seeks $50 million in damages and cites what it describes as damage done to his reputation and career by an op-ed piece written by Ms. Heard.Pool photo by Jim Lo ScalzoDuring her first day of testimony on Wednesday, Ms. Heard testified that Mr. Depp physically abused her throughout their relationship, recalling that his anger was triggered by suspicions she was being unfaithful, which would not abate despite her repeated denials.In his testimony, Mr. Depp had denied ever hitting Ms. Heard and accused her of being the person who resorted to violence by punching him, throwing objects at him and, once, kicking a bathroom door into his head. In court papers, Ms. Heard denied hitting Mr. Depp except in self-defense or in defense of her sister.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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    Depp’s $22.5 Million ‘Pirates’ Deal Collapsed After Op-Ed, Manager Testifies

    Mr. Depp’s talent manager said the actor had been up to play Captain Jack Sparrow again until his ex-wife, Amber Heard, wrote an op-ed saying she was a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”Johnny Depp’s talent manager testified on Monday in the actor’s defamation trial that Mr. Depp lost a $22.5 million deal to star in a sixth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie after his ex-wife, Amber Heard, published an op-ed in which she called herself a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”The exact timing of when Mr. Depp was cut from the “Pirates” franchise has become a pertinent question in the trial because Mr. Depp’s lawsuit against Ms. Heard claims that her op-ed, published by The Washington Post in December 2018, “devastated” his reputation and career.Although the op-ed does not mention Mr. Depp by name, he has argued that it clearly referred to their relationship. Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp of assaulting her repeatedly during their relationship, which Mr. Depp denies.At Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia, the talent manager, Jack Whigham, testified that the actor had a verbal agreement with Disney to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a proposed sixth film, but that in early 2019, it became clear that Disney was “going in a different direction.”“After the op-ed, it was impossible to get him a studio film,” testified Mr. Whigham, who has represented Mr. Depp since 2016.Lawyers for Ms. Heard have argued that it was not the actress’s op-ed that undermined Mr. Depp’s career but rather his own actions that led to bad publicity, seeking to prove during cross-examination of Mr. Whigham that Mr. Depp had, in fact, lost the “Pirates” job before the article was published.Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, a lawyer for Ms. Heard, pointed to a previous deposition by Mr. Whigham in which he said that it had been the fall of 2018 — before the op-ed was published — when he came to understand that it was becoming unlikely that Mr. Depp would appear in the next “Pirates” movie.Mr. Whigham testified that around that time, Disney had not yet made a decision about whether Mr. Depp would appear in the movie and it was “trending badly,” but he and the film producer Jerry Bruckheimer were still seeking to convince the company to keep Mr. Depp in the franchise.“We had hope,” Mr. Whigham said, “and it became clear to me in early 2019 that it was over.”In the op-ed, Ms. Heard asserted that her own career had been affected by becoming a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” saying that she was dropped as the face of a fashion brand and a movie had recast her role.The idea for the op-ed came from the American Civil Liberties Union, and a communications department employee from the nonprofit organization drafted the article, according to earlier testimony from Terence Dougherty, general counsel for the A.C.L.U. Initially, the op-ed draft referenced Ms. Heard’s relationship with Mr. Depp directly. But those references were later edited out after back-and-forth between A.C.L.U. personnel and Ms. Heard’s lawyers about a nondisclosure agreement associated with the couple’s divorce, Mr. Dougherty testified.Aside from discussions about the op-ed on which Mr. Depp’s lawsuit is based, much of the trial has focused on diverging accounts of physical abuse in Ms. Heard and Mr. Depp’s relationship. Mr. Depp testified that he has never hit Ms. Heard and that she was the aggressor, accusing her of punching him in the face and kicking a bathroom door into his head. Ms. Heard, who has not yet testified in the trial, has said in court papers that she never hit Mr. Depp except in self-defense or in defense of her sister, and that Mr. Depp tended to perpetrate violence against her when he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol.Amber Heard has countersued Mr. Depp, asserting that his former lawyer defamed her by referring to her allegations as a hoax.Pool photo by Steve Helber/EPA, via ShutterstockOn Monday, Ms. Heard’s lawyers sought to undermine Mr. Whigham’s claim that Mr. Depp had a formal deal for the sixth “Pirates” movie at all.“Do you have any explanation for why there exists nothing — no piece of paper — nothing suggesting that Mr. Depp ever had a deal with Disney for ‘Pirates 6’?” Ms. Bredehoft asked.Mr. Whigham said it was not unusual for an actor to have a verbal agreement for a movie that is later put into writing.Ms. Bredehoft also pointed to other possible precursors to Mr. Depp’s reputational decline other than the op-ed, citing a headline from The Sun newspaper in Britain that called Mr. Depp a “wife beater.” That article was published in April 2018, she pointed out, and Mr. Depp sued the newspaper for it in June 2018 — both months before Mr. Whigham’s recollection of Disney’s declining interest in Mr. Depp for “Pirates.”(Ms. Heard’s potential witness list includes Tina Newman, a Disney executive.)Ms. Heard’s legal team has referred repeatedly to the defamation trial in Britain that arose from that lawsuit. But it appears that the team has been restricted from mentioning the outcome of the case, in which a judge in London ruled against Mr. Depp and found that there was “overwhelming evidence” that he had assaulted Ms. Heard repeatedly during their marriage. More

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    ‘Great Comet’ Producer Hasn’t Paid Royalties, Composer Says

    Dave Malloy has filed a petition seeking the help of an arbitrator in his dispute with Howard Kagan over international productions.The creator of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” says the show’s producer has refused to fully compensate him for international productions of the musical, and the artist is now going to court in an effort to force payment.Dave Malloy, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for the show, has filed a petition in New York County Supreme Court asking a judge to appoint an arbitrator to settle his dispute with the producer Howard Kagan.In the court documents, filed on April 11, Malloy says he is owed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for productions of the musical that took place in Japan in 2019 and in Korea in 2021.“The Great Comet,” adapted from a section of the classic Tolstoy novel “War and Peace,” arrived on Broadway in 2016 after a series of Off Broadway and out-of-town productions, starting at the nonprofit Ars Nova. The musical, starring Josh Groban, won strong reviews and was nominated for 12 Tony Awards, but it won just two, for scenic design and lighting, and closed at a loss in 2017.The production endured several previous public controversies. In 2016, Ars Nova asked the courts for help in a bitter dispute with Kagan over how the nonprofit was credited in the show’s Playbill. That dispute was settled, but then the next year the Broadway production imploded after a controversy over who would play the show’s lead role after Groban’s departure, and amid questions about its finances.Lawyers for Malloy and Blue Wizard Music, the publisher of “Great Comet,” declined to comment; lawyers for Kagan and his producing entity Comet Lands on Broadway did not respond to requests for comment. More

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    Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard: What We Know

    Mr. Depp has sued Ms. Heard, his ex-wife, on grounds that she defamed him in an op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post.The defamation trial in Virginia between the actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has become a fierce battleground over the truth about their relationship, with both sides accusing the other of repeated domestic abuse in what was an unquestionably tumultuous marriage.Before a seven-person jury in Fairfax County Circuit Court, lawyers have questioned witnesses about the events of what has been described as a whirlwind romance that started on a movie set and soured into a barrage of fights and physical confrontations — the details of which vary widely depending on the account.Mr. Depp, 58, sued Ms. Heard, 35, for defamation after she wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post referring to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” After more than a year of legal sparring, Ms. Heard then countersued Mr. Depp, alleging that he defamed her when his former lawyer released statements saying her allegations of abuse were a hoax.Many of the allegations being aired in the courtroom have already been heard in a British case — which Mr. Depp lost — in which the actor sued The Sun newspaper for printing a headline that called him a “wife beater.”The trial, which started with opening arguments on April 12, is expected to last about six weeks.Why is Mr. Depp suing Ms. Heard?Mr. Depp’s lawsuit, filed in 2019, revolves around the 2018 op-ed written by Ms. Heard titled, “I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.”The op-ed does not mention Mr. Depp by name, but in it, Ms. Heard wrote that two years before the article’s publication, she became a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”In 2016, Ms. Heard was granted a temporary restraining order after showing up to a California court with a bruised face, writing in an application for the order that Mr. Depp had thrown a phone at her face at close range. (The actor denies this.)In the application, Ms. Heard wrote that Mr. Depp had been verbally and physically abusive to her throughout their relationship, detailing a recent incident in which she said he grabbed her by the hair and violently shoved her to the ground. (Mr. Depp wrote in court papers that this was a lie and that she was the one who punched him in the face that night.)Mr. Depp’s lawsuit asserted that Ms. Heard’s abuse allegations were an “elaborate hoax” that cost the actor his career and reputation.“Mr. Depp brings this defamation action to clear his name,” the actor’s lawsuit said.What did Ms. Heard’s op-ed in The Washington Post say?The op-ed says that after she became a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” she started to experience a backlash to her career.“Friends and advisers told me I would never again work as an actress — that I would be blacklisted,” she wrote. “A movie I was attached to recast my role. I had just shot a two-year campaign as the face of a global fashion brand, and the company dropped me.”She wrote that she saw “in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.” Ms. Heard was identified in the op-ed as an ambassador on women’s rights for the American Civil Liberties Union, and in court papers, Ms. Heard said the A.C.L.U. suggested that she write the article and submitted it.Although the trial has become a sprawling inquiry into the couple’s marriage, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Ben Rottenborn, tried to impress upon the jury in open arguments the idea that, ultimately, the case rests on “one piece of paper” — this op-ed.Ms. Heard is countersuing, claiming Mr. Depp had conspired with a lawyer to “attempt to destroy and defame Ms. Heard in the press.”Pool photo by Jim Lo ScalzoWhy is Ms. Heard suing Mr. Depp?The jury is simultaneously considering Ms. Heard’s countersuit against Mr. Depp, which was filed in 2020.Ms. Heard’s defamation claim is against Mr. Depp, but the statements it centers on came from his former lawyer, Adam Waldman, who told the British tabloid The Daily Mail that the actress’s allegations were an “abuse hoax.”Her lawsuit claims Mr. Depp has “authorized and conspired” with Mr. Waldman, who was acting on the actor’s behalf, to “attempt to destroy and defame Ms. Heard in the press.” (Mr. Waldman was not named as a defendant.)What has Mr. Depp said in his testimony?So far, Mr. Depp has testified that he had never struck Ms. Heard, nor any other woman. Instead, he asserted that Ms. Heard was the aggressor in the relationship, engaging in angry tirades and “demeaning name-calling” that would often escalate into physical violence.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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    Johnny Depp, Accused of Spousal Abuse, Says Ex-Wife Was the Aggressor

    The actor testified in a defamation case that he filed against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, who has said he often struck her during their relationship.The actor Johnny Depp took the stand for the second day on Wednesday to describe his turbulent marriage to the actress Amber Heard, whom he has sued for defamation, accusing her of “demeaning name-calling” that often escalated into physical violence.“It could begin with a slap, it could begin with a shove, it could begin with throwing a TV remote at my head, throwing a glass of wine in my face,” Mr. Depp told a jury at Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia.Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp in court papers of repeatedly assaulting her throughout their relationship, from slapping and kicking to dragging her across the floor by her hair and grasping her throat, making her fearful that he would kill her.But over the past few years of legal wrangling in the United States and Britain, Mr. Depp has maintained that Ms. Heard was the one who was violent toward him. In testimony on Tuesday, Mr. Depp denied ever striking Ms. Heard or any woman.“She has a need for conflict, she has a need for violence,” he said of Ms. Heard. “It erupts out of nowhere.”Ms. Heard denied in court papers that she had ever struck Mr. Depp except in self-defense or in defense of her sister.Mr. Depp has sued Ms. Heard for defamation over an op-ed she wrote in 2018 in which she said she was a ​​“public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article did not mention Mr. Depp’s name, but he testified that the time-frame reference in the op-ed was clearly in reference to their marriage, which lasted less than two years.The seven-person jury will also consider Ms. Heard’s countersuit, which asserts that Mr. Depp defamed her when his former lawyer made statements saying that her allegations of domestic abuse were a hoax.During more than five hours of testimony on Wednesday, the jury heard snippets of recorded arguments between the couple. Those included audio of Mr. Depp confronting Ms. Heard about kicking a door into his head the previous night and Ms. Heard asking, “Why are you obsessing over the fact that I can’t remember it the way you remember it?”During his testimony, Mr. Depp strove to present his side of several incidents that have surfaced as their problems in their relationship became public, including the time Mr. Depp’s middle finger was severed. The injury occurred in 2015 while the couple was in Australia for the filming of the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.Mr. Depp told the jury that, at the time, Ms. Heard was angry about a meeting she had with a lawyer about a potential postnuptial agreement and threw two vodka bottles at him, one of which missed while another shattered into his hand, causing his finger to bleed “like Vesuvius.” He testified that he then experienced a “nervous breakdown” and used his bloody finger to write on the walls messages that “represented lies that she told me.”Ms. Heard, who is expected to take the stand later in the trial, has given a very different account of the incident in Australia, writing in court papers that Mr. Depp became violent with her during an argument about his drug use. She has said that at one point he grabbed her by the neck and collarbone and slammed her into a countertop, then hit her with the back of his hand and slammed a phone against a wall until it “smashed into smithereens,” injuring his finger.Upon her return to Los Angeles, Ms. Heard wrote in court papers that “I had a busted lip, a swollen nose and cuts all over my body.”Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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    Alan J. Hruska, a Founder of Soho Press, Dies at 88

    A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More