Amber Heard’s sister “begged” the actress not to continue her wedding to Johnny Depp, she heard a UK court on Thursday, when the younger sister revealed that she witnessed him being hit “really hard” during a heated discussion.
Whitney Henríquez, 31, said she “felt sick” when Heard called her to tell her she was engaged in September 2013, according to written testimony presented at Depp’s defamation trial in the High Court in London.
He said his 34-year-old sister’s relationship with Depp, 57, was “tumultuous from the start” and had noticed “early” signs of physical abuse, such as bruises, cuts and burns on the actress.
“I told him it was a bad idea, I begged him not to do it and I said I should finish it because it was not going to get better,” said Henríquez.
“I asked him, ‘Why do you put up with this?’ and told her that putting a ring on her finger was not going to prevent him from hitting her. “
Henríquez said he had confronted his sister on other occasions about the alleged abuse, but the actress “always had an excuse.”
She directly asked the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star for the first time in 2014, saying, “Why did your king have to hit her?”
“Sometimes he denied it or played it down saying ‘No, I just pushed her, I didn’t hit her,'” Henríquez said, adding other times that he would try to “justify it.”
Henríquez, who appeared in court on Thursday, described a fight at the couple’s home in Los Angeles in March 2015.
The younger sister, who lived rent-free in one of Depp’s top floors in the same building, said the couple who were fighting woke her up and went to her apartment.
She said she saw the actor throw a can of Red Bull at his nurse niece, after which he tried to chase her and her sister upstairs, according to the Evening Standard.
“When he got to the top of the stairs, he was pulling me back so I could get to Amber,” he said. “I remember being scared because I was worried that I would fall backwards and fall down the stairs.”
She said the “Edward Scissorhands” actor reached out to shove her out of the way to lash out at his then-wife.
“Amber suddenly stumbled forward and hit him and said ‘Don’t hit my sister,'” he said.
“Somehow they pulled me out of the way, so I wasn’t between them, but I was standing right next to them when Johnny grabbed her by the hair with one hand and I saw him hit her very hard on the head with the other hand.” hand several times. “
Heard admitted to hitting Depp during the match, saying it was “in defense of my sister.”
The “Aquaman” actress, who concluded her testimony on Thursday, has claimed that Depp was violent with her on more than a dozen occasions during the course of their relationship, which ended in divorce in 2017.
She told the court that Depp threatened to cut her face the same night he cut off her fingertip during a series of alleged assaults in Australia in 2015.
“He raised a bottle against my face, he said he would cut my face,” he told the court.
She said she was somehow able to escape him, leading him to become “so angry he hit a wall.”
She claimed that she then grabbed a phone, which “repeatedly” slammed into the wall and “broke into pieces.”
Heard said he believes a plastic piece of the phone cut his finger, while Depp claimed the actress dropped a bottle of vodka, which broke and injured her finger.
Depp has denied being violent towards the actress, claiming that she was abusive in the relationship.
He is suing British tabloid The Sun over a 2018 story that called him a “handcuff puncher.”
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