A jury has decided in favor of actor Johnny Depp in a defamation suit against his ex-spouse, actor Amber Heard, awarding him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Depp will receive $10.35 million since Virginia caps punitive damages at $350,000. The jury also found in favor of Heard in a countersuit she had filed against Depp saying that his legal team falsely accused her of fabricating claims, awarding her $2 million. A major component of the case was an op-ed that Heard wrote about her experience with intimate partner violence, published in The Washington Post in 2018 at the height of the #MeToo movement. Activist Tarana Burke’s “MeToo” Movement organization has issued a statement acknowledging the “mockery of assault, shame and blame” over the weeks of the trial, calling it a “toxic catastrophe and one of the biggest defamations of the movement.”
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