Johnny Depp during the defamation trial said his relationship with Heard began to deteriorate shortly after their 2015 marriage.
“I was suddenly just wrong about everything,” Depp told the jury hearing the case in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia.
He denied ever striking Heard and said she was the abusive one.
She would “verbally decimate me” with a “rapid fire, endless parade of insults,” he said.
The thrice Oscar-nominated actor, who was married to the Texas-born Heard from 2015 to 2017, said he would often retreat to another room to escape her rage.
“I would just go and lock myself in the bathroom,” he said.
“If I stayed to argue, eventually I was sure that it was going to escalate into violence,” he said. “In her rage and her anger, she would strikeout.
“She would begin with a slap. It could begin with a shove,” he said. “It could begin, you know, with throwing a TV remote at my head. It could be throwing a glass of wine in my face.”
Depp recounted one incident for the jury in detail which took place while he was in Australia filming the fifth instalment of “Pirates.”
Heard was angry because one of his attorneys had discussed a possible post-nuptial agreement with her, he said.
“It escalated and escalated and turned into madness, chaos and violence,” he said.
Depp said he had been sober for “many months” but after arguing with Heard he had “two or three stiff shots” of vodka.
Heard was upset to see him drinking again, he said, and threw a vodka bottle at him, which shattered and severed the tip of the middle finger on his right hand.
“I was looking directly at my bones sticking out,” Depp said, displaying the crooked digit for the jury.
Depp said he was in “shock” and “started to write in my own blood on the walls” — “lies that she told me” and “little reminders of my past.”
Heard listened attentively, taking occasional notes on a yellow legal pad as Depp testified in a slow and measured voice.
Depp filed the defamation complaint in the United States after losing a separate libel case in London in November 2020 that he brought against the tabloid The Sun for calling him a “wife-beater.”
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