“I loved [Johnny Depp] with all my heart, and I tried the best I could to make a deeply broken relationship work and I couldn’t,” said Amber Heard
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Amber Heard is moving forward with positivity.
In the latest segment of her exclusive conversation with Savannah Guthrie for NBC News — in the wake of the verdict from her defamation trial with Johnny Depp — Heard, 36, said she harbors “no ill will” toward her ex-husband “at all.”
“I love him,” said the actress in part two of her interview with Guthrie, which aired on Today Wednesday. “I loved him with all my heart, and I tried the best I could to make a deeply broken relationship work and I couldn’t.”
After the recent six-week trial in Fairfax County, Virginia, a seven-person jury reached a verdict on June 1, deciding that Depp, 59, proved the Aquaman actress defamed him in a 2018 op-ed. (Depp has maintained that he never assaulted Heard, and claimed she physically harmed him.)
The jury awarded Depp $15 million in damages but Heard will only have to pay $10.35 million due to a Virginia law limiting punitive damages (the judge reduced the amount). In her countersuit, Heard won one of the three defamation counts, and was awarded $2 million in damages.
Johnny Depp; Amber Heard
| CREDIT: KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY ; RON SACHS/CONSOLIDATED NEWS PICTURES/GETTY
“I have no bad feelings or ill will to him at all,” said Heard, who met Depp on the set of their 2011 film The Rum Diary and was married to him from 2015 to 2017.
She added, “I know that might be hard to understand or that might be easy to understand if you’ve ever loved someone. It should be easy.”
Heard also touched on the op-ed — which she wrote for The Washington Post, and did not mention Depp by name — after Guthrie, 50, brought it up.
“The op-ed wasn’t about my relationship with Johnny,” she said. “What the op-ed was about was me loaning my voice to a bigger cultural conversation that we were having at the time.”
CREDIT: TODAY/NBC
The Stand star went on to say she “obviously knew” that “it was important for me not to make it about him or to do anything like defame him. I had teams of lawyers review all the drafts of this.”
After Guthrie asked about whether she wanted Depp to be “canceled” during the “height of #MeToo,” Heard replied, “Of course not. It wasn’t about him.”
Heard also said in the interview segment that aired Tuesday that she has “so much regret” for what transpired during her past relationship with the Pirates of the Caribbean actor.
Johnny Depp’s Former Agent Says Studios Became Reluctant to Hire Him Due to Unprofessional Behavior
“I did do and say horrible, regrettable things throughout my relationship. I behaved in horrible, almost unrecognizable to myself ways,” she said. “I freely and openly and voluntarily talked about what I did. I talked about the horrible language. I talked about being pushed to the extent where I didn’t even know the difference between right and wrong.”
“I will always continue to feel like I was a part of this, like I was the other half of this relationship because I was. And it was ugly, and could be very beautiful. It was very, very toxic,” Heard continued. “We were awful to each other.”
And while the actress admitted she “made a lot of mistakes,” she insisted in her conversation with Guthrie, “To my dying day, I will stand by every word of my testimony.”
For more from Heard’s interview with Guthrie, viewers can stream part of the special edition of Dateline Thursday on Peacock, ahead of it airing Friday at 8 p.m. ET on NBC. The interview will then be available on Today‘s website, and the full Dateline episode will be shared on Peacock.
