During the trial, Amber Heard informs the jurors of death threats.

Testimony ended Thursday within the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation case with Heard telling jurors that she suffers minute-by-minute harassment, including death threats, and daily trauma requiring special “rules” in her life to stop anxiety attacks.

“My friends need to live with a set of unspoken rules about how they can touch me,” the 36-year-old Aquaman actor told the court in what amounted to the ultimate reel of the hearing in the long-running case.

Heard said she just wants “Johnny to go away me alone”.

In Heard’s last appearance within the witness box, she was asked what it had been like for her during the trial and having to face accusations by Depp’s publicity man that her claim of abuse by the actor was a “hoax”.

“I am harassed, threatened, humiliated … every single day,” Heard said. “People want to kill me and that they tell me so. Every day. People want to place my baby in the microwave. They tell me that. Johnny threatened – promised me – that if I ever left him, I’d make him consider him every single day that I lived.”

In tense cross-examination from Depp’s attorney Camille Vasquez, Heard was questioned about an alleged tip-off to the showbiz gossip site TMZ before she appeared during a Los Angeles court to file a restraining order and a video she took of Depp slamming kitchen cabinets and pouring a “mega pint” of wine.

In both instances, Heard testified, she didn’t know who had sent the information. On Wednesday, a former TMZ reporter, Morgan Tremaine, testified the location had been tipped off and had been been “trying to capture Amber leaving the courthouse and an alleged bruise on the right side of her face”.

In another exchange, Vasquez challenged Heard about a clear lack of bruises on her face in several photographs taken soon after an alleged incident in which Heard described Depp beating her.

Heard testified that she was wearing makeup, firing back: “If [the photo] was taken as you represented, then obviously there’s a bruise on my face. It’s covered by makeup, as per usual.”

Heard’s attorneys asked her if she’d ever faked bruises and or altered photos documenting abuse allegedly inflicted by Depp during their relationship.

“Absolutely not,” Heard said.

Asked about her reaction to the claim that she’d perpetrated a “hoax”, she said Depp “promised me he would ruin me. He’d ruin my career and take my life from me. Death was the sole way out – and if I got out, this is often what he’d do to me. He promised me global humiliation,” she said.

“The harassment and therefore the humiliation, the campaign against me that’s echoed every single day on social media, and now ahead of cameras in the showroom – every single day I have to relive the trauma,” Heard said, fighting back tears. “Perhaps it’s easy to forget I’m a person’s being.”

Heard, who has been booed by spectators on the road as she enters and leaves the courthouse, said she hopes the lawsuit will allow her to regain her “voice”, and said she had the “right as an American” to publish the 2018 Washington Post article during which she described herself as a survivor of domestic abuse.

“Johnny has taken enough of my voice,” she said. “I have the proper to tell my story.”

Heard has witnessed more than a dozen incidents of physical abuse she claims she suffered at Depp‘s hands. Depp claims she was the abuser within the relationship and has denied ever striking her.

Lawyers for each side will deliver their closing arguments on Friday and jurors will be given deliberating instructions by Judge Azcarate.

maria

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