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Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp testified on Wednesday that his ex-wife Amber Heard would regularly “verbally decimate” him and once threw a vodka bottle at him, severing the tip of one of his fingers.

Depp, taking the witness stand for a second day of testimony in his blockbuster defamation case against Heard, said their relationship began to deteriorate about a year after their 2015 marriage.

“I was suddenly just wrong about everything,” the 58-year-old Hollywood star told the jury hearing the case in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia.

Heard, an actress who had a starring role in the movie Aquaman, would “verbally decimate me” with a “sort of rapid fire, endless parade of insults,” Depp said. “It seemed like pure hatred for me.”

The thrice Oscar-nominated actor, who was married to the Texas-born Heard from 2015 to 2017, said he would frequently retreat to another room to escape her rage. “I would just go and lock myself in the bathroom,” he said.

“If I stayed to argue, eventually I was sure that it was going to escalate into violence and oftentimes it did,” he said. “In her rage and her anger she would strike out.

“She would begin with a slap. It could begin with a shove,” he said. “It could begin, you know, with throwing a TV remote at my head. It could be throwing a glass of wine in my face.” Depp filed the suit after Heard, who turns 36 on Friday, wrote a column for The Washington Post in December 2018 in which she described herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”

The actress never named Depp, whom she met in 2009 on the set of the film The Rum Diary, but he sued her for implying he was a domestic abuser and is seeking $50 million in damages.

Originally published in Dawn, April 21st, 2022