Johnny Depp finger injury doesn’t ‘line up’ with Amber Heard bottle throw claim: surgeon
Jurors were shown graphic photos of Johnny Depp’s bloody finger Monday — as an orthopedic surgeon testified the gory images don’t “line up” with the actor’s claim he was injured when Amber Heard threw a vodka bottle at him.
Dr. Richard Moore, a board-certified hand surgeon from Wilmington, North Carolina, was the first witness to take the stand at Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia, where the sensational defamation trial entered its sixth and final week.
Moore, who reviewed Depp’s medical records and testimony, said Depp’s description of his injury during a fight with Heard in March 2015 in Australia did not “line up” with the photos of his hand injury.
According to Moore, the images show that Depp’s fingernail was not injured, which would have happened had a bottle been thrown at it and struck the finger from the top as the actor was resting his hand on a countertop.
Moore also noted that no shards of glass were found embedded in Depp’s maimed finger, and no cuts were documented elsewhere on the injured digit.
He said the photographic evidence was inconsistent with a “glass explosion” caused by a bottle being lobbed at the hand, and said that in his years of practice, he has never seen injuries like those suffered by Depp being caused in this manner.
“The wound doesn’t really appear to be a sharp glass laceration,” Moore testified.
Moore said he believed it was instead a “crush injury,” though he acknowledged on cross-examination by Depp’s legal team that he could not say what exactly happened with the finger.
Several X-rays of Depp’s finger were shown to the jury, displaying crushed bones in his finger.
Heard had testified earlier in the trial that she thought Depp possibly injured himself when he smashed a wall-mounted phone into “smithereens.”
Depp’s attorney Camille Vasquez sought to undermine Moore’s testimony by arguing that the surgeon, who never treated the 58-year-old actor or examined his hand in person, was not in a position to definitively rule out that the hurled vodka bottle caused his injury.
“My testimony is that I can rule out the injury as caused by the mechanism described by Mr. Depp in his deposition,” Moore replied.
Vasquez further suggested that Moore formed his opinion about the cause of the actor’s injury without reviewing photos of the bloody scene from his Australia home.
The latest from the Johnny Depp defamation trial:
Images that were displayed in court showed the residence’s bar area littered with broken glass, with Depp’s severed fingertip resting in a tissue on a bloodstained floor.
Vasquez noted that a vodka bottle could be seen in the corner of the room.
