Amber Heard claims a bogus juror was involved in her high-stakes defamation case with Johnny Depp as she urges the judge to declare a mistrial.
The Aquaman actor’s legal team filed new court documents in Fairfax County District Court in Virginia on Friday, claiming that Juror Number 15 was not the person called for the panel.
Juror 15 lives at the same address and shares the same last name as the person summoned to serve on the jury, the documents state.
However, the two are said to have been born 25 years apart.
Ms. Heard, who was ordered to pay her ex-husband $8.35 million in the defamation case, is calling for a mistrial and a new trial.
The documents say the person on the jury list sent to the two legal teams before the trial began was born in 1945 and is 77 years old.
Juror 15, who took part in the nearly two-month trial, was born in 1970 and is 52 years old, Ms Heard’s lawyers said.
Although the two are said to have the same last name, it is not clear if they also share the same first name.
“Juror #15 was not the person summoned to the jury on April 11, 2022 and therefore was not part of the jury and could not properly serve on the jury of this trial,” the documents state.
“As the Court no doubt agrees, it is deeply troubling for a person who is not called to serve on a jury to nevertheless appear on a jury and serve as a juror, particularly in a case such as this.”
The latest saga threatens to throw the high-profile case into turmoil, coming a week after Ms Heard’s team first raised concerns about the juror’s age.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard pictured in court in their defamation case
(AP)
“The Code of Virginia does not provide for jurors from anyone not on the venire for good cause. . . . In any case, but especially in a high-profile case such as this, it is critical to ensure that no person who does not is in the venire, is unable to serve on a jury, whether inadvertently or intentionally,” documents filed July 1 read.
“Here, the facts show that Juror 15 was decades younger than the person on the juror list, which raises questions about whether they are the same or different people.”
New documents filed Friday further support that claim and raise concerns about the juror’s true identity.
Mr. Depp is suing his ex-wife for defamation over a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she described herself as a victim of domestic violence and said she felt “the full force of our culture’s anger at women who speak out “.
After the dramatic televised trial, a seven-person jury decided in June that Ms Heard had defamed him on all three counts.
Jurors awarded Mr. Depp $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages, before Fairfax County Judge Penny Azcarate reduced the latter to the legal limit of $350,000.
Ms Heard won one of her three counterclaims against her ex-husband, with a jury finding that Mr Depp – through his lawyer Adam Waldman – defamed her by calling her claims about a 2016 incident an “ambush , fraud’.
She was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages but $0 in punitive damages, leaving the Aquaman actor $8.35 million out of pocket.
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