Johnny Depp’s drug abuse and wife-beating a pulp novel we shouldn’t have to read

There comes a point after the screaming and the smashing and the hitting and the howling when you simply need the firm, cool breeze of sanity.

Actor Johnny Depp. Picture: Getty Images

There comes a point after the screaming and the smashing and the hitting and the howling when you simply need the firm, cool breeze of sanity. Reading the jaw-dropping 585-paragraph ruling issued last week on the libel claim brought by Johnny Depp against the British newspaper The Sun – in which the judge agreed the actor was a “wife-beater” – felt like a long drink of fresh water. You just thought: why did this take so long? Why didn’t anyone say the truth earlier? Why did it take a vast court case, a stream of ratty sub-Kate Moss outfits and 70,000 damning words – basically a novel – to expose Depp as the snivelling abuser and cry-bully he is?

We learnt he took so many drugs he could barely enter a room without throwing bottles or smashing mirrors or setting paintings on fire or stubbing cigarettes out on his own cheeks. On a trip to Australia, Depp – now sacked from his role in the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts – casually trashed an entire house, severing the top of his finger. There was an accidental recording of his security team going through the destruction, describing how they’d sand the floors, clean the curtains, repair plasterwork, remove spilt paint, broken glass and smashed china. It sounded disgusting – Depp likes to leave “messages”: he “urinated all over the house in an attempt to write messages”, the court heard, and scrawled graffiti with blood from the finger. You read the details and thought: this isn’t human, it’s animal.

But it was the tone of behaviour of the people around him that was most unsettling. The security team jadedly swept into the houses as if this kind of meltdown was normal, as if every star left houses covered in sick and wrote vile and abusive messages on the walls. It took a judge in a legal case to point out that a “jokey” exchange with his ex-wife Vanessa Paradis about an unspecified “f … ing ugly fat whore” and “sloppy slut” wasn’t that “funny”, either. “Mr Depp did agree that the views he was expressing were not those of the Southern Gentleman he aspired to be,” it said, witheringly. You know your star has fallen when a legal ruling is taking the piss out of you.

What is it about society that permits the behaviour of these titanically self-absorbed, destructive, spoilt, angry rich men? In the coming weeks we’ll be thinking about how we let “characters” like Depp and, indeed, Donald Trump get away with this sort of appalling abuse. Fans will argue that both are entertaining – and, yeah, I suppose you do laugh at the tampon applicator Depp used to take his cocaine and the moment he claimed Heard or a friend had left faeces in their bed as “a prank”. An entire section was devoted to analysing the “defecation incident” – whether it was Amber or Depp’s Yorkshire terrier who’d left the mess.

Johnny Depp pictured with Amber Heard in 2011. Picture: AP

Imagine being one of Britain’s top legal minds and finding yourself weighing up the legal impact of an escaped celebrity terrier turd. “Boo had an incomplete mastery of her bowels after she had accidentally consumed marijuana,” the ruling deadpanned, so it was “unlikely” that Heard or her friend, a trans artist, did it.

On and on the document trolled, with its cast of make-up artists and sobriety nurses, and penthouses used just for clothes. There was the comic mystery of Depp going to his private island in the Bahamas to wean himself off painkillers, where he was “sedated” because of the “physical pain” of withdrawal. But sedated with what? Painkillers?

His greatest fear seemed to be that Heard was principally a lesbian who “never f … ing loved me” and just wanted his money – during an argument about a pre-nup on a private plane Depp tried to “storm the cockpit”. What’s remarkable is how much the judge believed Heard and how little he believed Depp. Time and again he found in her favour, even on tiny matters, adding there was no evidence she was similarly violent or a “gold-digger”.

This wasn’t a narrow victory; it was a landslide, making the campaign to discredit her all the more unpleasant. The ruling is filled with details of how she was punched, slapped, pushed, grabbed, kicked, dragged by the hair – and how scores of witnesses, including Depp’s security, his managers, his drivers and assistants, closed ranks (the judge described them endlessly as “loyal to Depp”). Even the police called to the scene of their final punch-up were too lazy to take notes, getting the timings of the incident wrong and failing to observe basic details. I’d like to say this felt like a victory for victims of domestic violence, but it didn’t feel as though anyone won.

The Sunday Times