Paul Barresi says he is still haunted by the expression on Amber Heard’s face as she gave her now infamous testimony to a U.S. courtroom in 2022 claiming that her former partner Johnny Depp sexually assaulted her with a bottle of bourbon.
The jury was not convinced, returning their unanimous verdict in Depp’s favour. Barresi?
He can’t make sense of it, and God knows he has tried more than most.
The thing is, I’d seen that expression before, on my mother’s face, when my father attacked her,’ says the 75-year-old former wrestler. He rises to his feet and crosses his California kitchen.
He starts to re-enact what he saw that day in his own childhood kitchen, leaping from the fridge to the hob, sliding down to the floor as his mother did, after his father had gone for her.
He mimes pots crashing, his father lashing out, his mother cowering, terrified for her life. ‘My father had been drinking. She had poured his alcohol down the sink. I was standing at the entrance to the kitchen, frozen. The expression on my mother’s face will never leave me — and I saw it on Amber’s face that day.’
He shrugs. ‘No one believed her. And she is an actor. I’ve wondered if she witnessed something else — nothing to do with Depp — that she could call on. Still, it troubles me.’
Lest there be any doubt, he still feels the jury returned the correct verdict. ‘I found no evidence that Depp was capable of that sort of violence.’ This, in a nutshell, is why the Depp v Heard debacle continues to fascinate, even two years after that explosive trial.
Everyone has an opinion. A docu-series about the trial is trending on social media and is currently top of the Netflix charts. Armchair detectives are still pulling the evidence to pieces. The whole world still seems to be gripped, and to be taking sides.
But who is Paul Barresi and why should his take on it matter? Well, he has been right up to his neck in the evidence, he claims. A pile of it sits on the table in front of him.
‘I spoke to hundreds of people, everything’s here,’ he says, tapping it. ‘Every taped conversation, email conversation. I spent three months on it, left no stone unturned.’
Barresi is the California-based private investigator who, in 2019, was hired by Amber Heard’s legal team to find the dirt on Depp. Or as Barresi himself puts it, ‘I was hired to find evidence to support the idea that Johnny was a mean-spirited, irascible human being with a proclivity for violence.’
He set about establishing exactly that — perhaps, he admits now, thinking, even subconsciously that in being able to ‘help’ Amber Heard, supposed victim of male oppression, he was remembering his own mother and what she suffered.
‘I really wanted to find that,’ he says, of his brief, which was to provide the ammunition that would destroy Johnny Depp. Barresi — a colourful and controversial character — describes himself as a Hollywood fixer. Certainly his previous client list reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood. He has worked for or on behalf of Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Eddie Murphy and Gerard Butler.
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