Police were called when Johnny Depp allegedly hit Amber Heard in the face with a telephone in a furous row over who had soiled his bed, a court has heard.
The 57-year-old star is accused of attacking his estranged wife, 34, at their LA penthouse after the collapse of their marriage, before smashing items with swings of a magnum bottle of wine.
Depp denies any violence, insisting Heard and her friends staged a “carefully choreographed hoax” in a bid to falsely portray him as a domestic abuser.
Heard claims she was left with a bruise on her cheek from the incident, which was still visible when she went to court to publicly accuse Depp of violence and obtain a court-ordered restraining order in May 2016.
Depp is suing News Group Newspapers at the High Court in London over a 2018 article which dubbed him a “wife beater”. He insists the claims are false.
Sasha Wass QC, representing the media group, this morning accused Depp of “spoiling for a fight” in a showdown meeting with Heard in May 2016 and starting a row over who had defecated in his bed.
She said Heard claims they called her friend, TV personality iO Tillett Wright, who Depp suspected of soiling the bed.
“You wound your arm around like someone throwing a baseball and threw the phone and it made contact with Ms Heard’s face”, said Ms Wass.
“The phone call was still live. You said you wanted to see her face where she said she had been hit.
“You asked how she would like it if you pulled her hair back. Ms Heard shouted to Mr Tillett Wright, who was still on the call, to call 911.”
Heard claims her friend Raquel ‘Rocky’ Pennington had to step in between them and was “pushed out of the way” by Depp, before Heard then collapsed on to the sofa.
“You were screaming at Ms Heard to get up, you picked up a magnum bottle of wine and started swinging it around and smashing things with the bottle", added Ms Wass.
Depp denies the allegations and claims Heard staged the incident, insisting: “Security ran in when they heard Ms Heard screaming ‘stop hitting me Johnny, stop hitting me Johnny’.
“I was 20 feet away, standing in front of the kitchen island. When she saw them, she changed it to past tense ‘you will never hit me again’.”
The court also heard how Depp sent a text to his sister, a film executive, after the breakdown of his marriage, demanding that Heard be removed from the sequel to Warner Brothers hit Aquaman.
“I want her replaced on that WB film”, he wrote.
Depp denied being behind an online petition which was signed by around 400,000 people calling for Heard to be dropped from the sequel, and told the court: “I did not orchestrate the petition.
“By saying I wanted her replaced on the Aquaman film I had been characterised globally, as The Sun put it, as a wife-beater.
“I went from, if you will pardon the expression, cinderella to quasimodo in 0.6 seconds.
“I was wanting a voice. Ms Heard made sure the news media caught it. That’s where I was in my life, a very unpleasant place to be.”
Earlier, Depp told the court Heard had “rules” for their home life, and “all hell would break loose” if he refused to comply.
He said she insisted on taking his boots off when he returned home, and got “very upset” when he once did it himself when she was busy.
“She approached me and said ‘what did you do? why did you take your boots off?’ That’s my job’.
“I said you were busy, I just took them off. That made her very upset and that became an argument.”
He continued: “Normally at home we would have dinner in front of the television, laying on the couch together. That was normal for us. That’s what we would do.
“On occasions if I - out of nowhere - my hand wasn’t holding Ms Heard’s hand or if I didn’t have my arm around her, she would reach over and grab my hand and put it on her thigh, so I was then feeding the attention that she wanted.
“She complained she needed more affection, needed more attention, I went on from there to other various things.
“It was almost as if there were rules, she had a routine, if that routine was not met to her standards then there’s going to be a problem.”
Asked what happened if he broke the rules, Depp replied: “An argument would ensue and all hell would break loose.”