Earlier in the trial, Ellen Barkin, with whom Mr. Depp was also romantically involved in the 1990s, called him a “controlling” and “jealous man,” recounting an incident in a Las Vegas in which, she said, Mr. Depp threw a wine bottle across a hotel room. She said there had been a fight going on between Mr. Depp and other people in the room, but she could not remember the cause of it.
The Virginia case was sparked by a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post, in which Ms. Heard said her career suffered after she became a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article did not mention Mr. Depp by name, but he has asserted that its allusions to their relationship “devastated” his acting career.
The seven-person jury is also considering Ms. Heard’s countersuit, which says Mr. Depp defamed her when the lawyer representing him at the time made statements to the British tabloid The Daily Mail saying that her abuse accusations were a hoax.
Ms. Heard has testified that Mr. Depp’s rages were fueled by his drug and alcohol use and triggered by his suspicions that she was having affairs, which she has repeatedly denied. Mr. Depp, she said, would punch, slap and kick her, and had torn out clumps of her hair and sexually assaulted her with a bottle.
Over four days of testimony earlier in the trial, Mr. Depp described Ms. Heard as someone with a “need for conflict” and a “need for violence.” He said she had lashed out at him physically over a number of issues, including a potential postnuptial agreement, her desire for Mr. Depp to abstain from drugs and alcohol, and his tardiness to her 30th birthday dinner.
On Wednesday, one of the texts that Mr. Depp was confronted with included his saying of Ms. Heard in 2016, “I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion, or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market.”
Mr. Depp said the text portrayed his anger at the false accusations that turned him into “scum” in the eyes of many.
