Johnny Depp lost his libel action against the publisher of The Sun at London's High Court in November 2020, after Mr Justice Nicol ruled that the newspaper had shown its description of the actor as a wife beater was substantially true.

Depp had sued News Group Newspapers and executive editor Dan Wootton over a 2018 article that questioned his casting in the Fantastic Beasts films in light of allegations by his former wife, Amber Heard. Under English libel law, the burden fell on the newspaper to prove the truth of what it had published, to the civil standard.

The three-week trial in July 2020 was a spectacle unlike any in recent legal memory. Depp and Heard both gave evidence over days, and the court heard detailed, often grim accounts of their marriage: drink and drug use, furious arguments, alleged affairs, and injuries each said the other had inflicted. Depp maintained he was never violent towards Heard and characterised her claims as a hoax; Heard detailed 14 alleged incidents of violence.

The judge examined each incident in a judgment running to more than 120 pages. He found that the great majority of the alleged assaults had been proved to the civil standard — 12 of the 14 incidents — and rejected the portrayal of Heard as a gold-digger. He concluded that Depp had not succeeded in his action, and the claim was dismissed. Depp's lawyers called the ruling perverse and bewildering and sought to appeal, without success.

The consequences were immediate. Depp was asked to leave the Fantastic Beasts franchise, and his standing in Hollywood, already damaged, collapsed further in the short term. The Sun thanked Heard for her courage in giving evidence and said domestic abuse victims must never be silenced.

The story took a famous turn two years later, when Depp won a separate defamation case against Heard in Virginia over an opinion article she had written — a verdict reached by a jury under different law, on different evidence rules, which produced the paradox of two courts and two opposite public narratives.

For British media law, the London case remains the landmark: a Hollywood star who chose the claimant-friendly courts of England to clear his name, and left with a judicial finding far more damaging than the headline he had sued over.

The London proceedings also exposed the machinery of celebrity reputation to an uncomfortable light. Weeks of evidence about text messages, medical records, recordings and the testimony of staff, friends and former partners turned a libel claim about a single headline into a forensic examination of a marriage. Legal commentators noted that this was precisely the risk Depp's advisers took in suing in London: English law gave the newspaper the chance to prove its case in open court, with disclosure obligations that dragged years of private material into the public record, whatever the verdict had been.