JAN MOIR: Johnny Depp was like a cowboy in Dead End Gulch for a showdown with the law

48

View
comments

Day 4 of the Johnny Depp libel trial and matters turned once more to the difficult issue that has dominated this torrid case so far.

Barristers on £300 an hour struggled to solve the central conundrum of which tootsie did the whoopsie on the bed in the couple’s Los Angeles penthouse.

Can anyone name the nincompoop who pooped on the 500 Thread Count Sheets? It was like a game of celebrity Cluedo, but with a distressingly feculent whiff. 

Johnny was convinced that the deed was done by Amber in the master suite with the dodgy piping — because she was furious that he had ruined her birthday party by turning up late. 

And if not his ex-wife, then the 57-year-old actor aired his belief that it was her friend iO Tillett Wright who was born a woman but does not recognise gender (and who, utterly remarkably in the circumstances, is not an anagram).

Sasha Wass QC — acting for News Group Newspapers whom Depp is suing after The Sun described him as a ‘wife beater’ — started referring to the matter as ‘The Defecation Incident’ as if it were right up there with the Boxer Rebellion and the Moon Landings in terms of international importance.

Speaking with a no-nonsense Mary Poppins authority, Wass suggested that the culprit might have been Boo, one of the couple’s two Yorkshire terriers, who apparently ‘had problems with her toilet habits’.

Well, we all know what that means, little Boo hoo! Mr Depp countered that the dogs ‘were very well trained’ although ‘Boo was not as trained as Pistol’ which made me suspect that Pistol might well be that smartest member of this blighted little household.

In the overspill court, where socially distanced journalists were corralled watching the court feed on a monitor, we learned that Depp was convinced that whoever was responsible, it was not a ‘three or four-pound dog’.

Do you know, I went right off my morning pain au chocolat after that.

During another long day on the witness stand, Johnny issued rebuttal followed by denial as the accusations came thick and fast.

It was exhausting testimony, but there were sparky moments. Miss Wass tried to make something of the fact that Johnny ordered magnums of wine at a party, not bottles.

‘If there is a group of 12 or more, magnums just make more sense,’ he patiently explained.

There was a flash of arrogance when asked if a Hollywood agent was trying to court his favour. ‘Courting my favour? An agent in Hollywood? Sure, yes,’ he said, almost with a snort.

Depp had arrived in Court 13 before 10am, smartly dressed in a brown suit with a shirt and dark tie. A white handkerchief was folded into his breast pocket. He took the stand, poured a glass of water and drummed his tattooed fingers on the desk.

With his clipped moustache and collar-length hair, he looked like a cowboy summoned to Dead End Gulch for one last showdown with the sheriff. It was notable that he was scrupulously polite at all times. ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he would reply to Miss Wass. ‘No, Sir,’ he would tell his own lawyer, David Sherborne.

It was impossible to see Amber’s expression, or if she even glanced in her former husband’s direction, or if those glances were filled with regret or antipathy or something else.

Everything about this case is astonishing. It has laid bare a restless world of the beautiful and the damned.

Sherborne, sporting a lockdown tan the colour of baked clay, began his questioning of his client before lunch yesterday, quickly establishing that Depp was a good guy who would help little old ladies across the road, ate all his greens and couldn’t help it if women such as actress Ellen Barkin, supermodel Kate Moss and French chanteuse Vanessa Paradis fell in love with him.

Gosh Sherborne talks a lot — a terracotta warrior of chat — and when Depp could get a word in edgeways, he sounded more fluent and confident than the sometimes stumbling man who’d read out his own oath-strewn texts earlier in the day.

Later, I wandered over to Court 13 in time to see Depp exit the first-floor courtroom, pop on his sunglasses and make his way down the corridor.

His waiting bodyguard swiftly folded in behind him, like a bald, muscular duckling. Johnny was wearing divine aftershave, was taller than expected and looked preoccupied.

Next week it is his ex-wife’s turn to tell her story, to lay out her own summer picnic of dread, distress and bruises that ripen like strawberries.

Whatever happens next in the Amber & Johnny Show, I suspect she will want to put The Defecation Incident behind her.

Like for ever.