Johnny Depp Stans Rushed to Fork over Cash for Unsealed Court Docs. Did It Backfire?
As Amber Heard and Johnny Depp both prepare to appeal the verdict in their mudslinging defamation trial, a newly unsealed document dump reignited the frenzy over the highly publicized trial.
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While an initial analysis of the document dump — more than 6,600 pages — doesn’t seem to do Depp any favors, four legal experts tell Rolling Stone that what people are seeing are all the explosive allegations and potentially embarrassing claims that Depp’s lawyers successfully kept out of the trial.
“Absolutely, it was worse for Johnny,” Brett Ward, a New York family attorney, says. “Johnny Depp’s team won some key pretrial legal rulings. Overall, because he had better rulings during the pre-trial portion of the case, the stuff that he kept out hurts him more. The totality of the material now looks worse for him.”
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Each of these wins played a role in how Depp’s team was able to successfully shape the case to their benefit months before heading into the trial. “A lot of court cases generally come down to the quality of legal representation,” Ward says. “I think they both had very good reputations, but I think some pretrial releases went Johnny Depp’s way that helped him.”
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"Johnny Depp Stans Rushed to Fork over Cash for Unsealed Court Docs. Did It Backfire?" by Cheyenne Roundtree was published in Rolling Stone on August 8, 2022.