Why did Amber Heard get 2 million? Compensatory win against Johnny Depp explained

American actress Amber Heard lost the multi-million defamation case filed by her estranged husband Johnny Depp on June 1.

While Depp sued Heard for $50 million, the jury ruled in favor of Depp and awarded him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Amber Heard was also awarded $2 million in compensatory damages.

The verdict came after the jury deliberated for 12 hours and 45 minutes before agreeing on the conclusion, read in the Fairfax, Virginia court.

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The jury announced that both Amber Heard and Johnny Depp were defamed

The jury of seven had to decide whether or not several statements made by Heard and Depp's ex-lawyer were defamatory. Depp's legal claims arose from Heard's op-ed article, which she wrote in the Washington Post in 2018.

The jurors were asked if the op-ed piece headlined, "I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change," was defamatory.

Aside from this, they also had to weigh in on whether a statement made in the article was defamatory or not. The line read:

“Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out."

The third statement which they considered was:

“I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.”

The jury deliberated on each of these statements separately. They could have decided that one or more of these statements were defamatory or that they were all defamatory for Johnny Depp to win his claim. In the end, all three of them were found to be defamatory by the jury.

In her counterclaim, Amber Heard asserted that Depp's former lawyer, Adam Waldman, made defamatory statements about her in several articles published in UK's Daily Mail.

In an article published on April 8, 2020, Waldman said:

“Amber Heard and her friends in the media use fake sexual-violence allegations as both a sword and shield depending on their needs. They have selected some of her sexual-violence hoax ‘facts’ as the sword, inflicting them on the public and Mr. Depp.”

The second statement in Heard's counterclaim was made by Waldman on April 27, 2020, when he told the Daily Mail:

“Quite simply this was an ambush, a hoax. They set Mr. Depp up by calling the cops, but the first attempt didn’t do the trick. The officers came to the penthouses, thoroughly searched and interviewed, and left after seeing no damage to face or property. So Amber and her friends spilled a little wine and roughed the place up, got their stories straight under the direction of a lawyer and publicist, and then placed a second call to 911.”

This statement alluded to an alleged altercation between Depp and Heard in May 2016.

Lastly, Amber Heard claimed that Waldman's statement on April 27, 2020, "We have reached the beginning of the end of Ms. Heard's abuse hoax against Johnny Depp," was defamatory.

The above-stated statements were analyzed individually, and eventually, it was decided that the second statement, which Waldman made in April 27, 2020, was found to be defamatory in Amber Heard's case, which led Heard to be awarded $2 million in compensatory damages.

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The high-profile trial began on April 11, with several witnesses testifying in the presence of Judge Penney Azcarate. For almost six weeks, the court heard statements from the actors where they both accused each other of domestic violence, which ultimately ended their marriage in 2017.