Johnny Depp’s lawyer Camille Vasquez admits her team was “running on fumes” at one point during the six-week trial as they worked around-the-clock on the defamation case.
“After court, we would go back to the hotel where we lived and was our little nest, if you will, for months,” she tells PEOPLE. “We would change. We would have food served. Then we had two war rooms where we would be until sometimes 5:00 in the morning the next day. It was very intense.”
The dedication paid off, as the jury handed down a verdict in favor of Depp, 58, finding that the actor’s ex-wife Amber Heard defamed him in her 2018 op-ed about domestic abuse. (Heard won one of her three defamation countersuit claims too, and the actress plans to appeal.)
“We worked with the most amazing group of young lawyers that are excellent and strategic and came into this case with different experiences and looked at this evidence in a really critical way,” says Vasquez, who was made partner at Brown Rudnick the week after the verdict.
Vasquez was co-lead of Depp’s legal team with attorney Benjamin Chew, and she handled the cross-examination of Heard, 36. Vasquez says collaborative efforts went into those big moments in the Fairfax, Virginia, court case.
“Before I did her cross and before I delivered the opening and closing arguments, I would go to bed around 1 or 2 in the morning. And then my team would stay up till 5, 5:30, and slide whatever it was that we were working on under my door. I would wake up to them under my door and they would sleep for an hour, an hour and a half. Then we would all go to court together. I mean, we were really running on fumes.”
She adds, “I was the one that delivered the cross-examination, but I was very clear that this wasn’t my cross examination. This was our team’s.”
The attorney says they had people of “different political backgrounds” and people who “saw the case and the evidence differently” on the legal team. Plus, “All of us believed Johnny and believed that he didn’t do this. We were looking at it from that perspective.”
How is Depp doing after the legal victory? “There is a peace now that he wears that he just didn’t have before, and I think it came even before the verdict, if I’m being 100 percent honest with you. It was just him being able to tell his story. … This was the one way he could finally tell his story and then talk about what actually happened in this relationship. I think that once he was able to do that and expose everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, he felt a sense of relief, and he deserves that.”
After the verdict, Heard said in a statement that she was “disappointed” and called it a “setback” for women. She added, “I believe Johnny’s attorneys succeeded in getting the jury to overlook the key issue of Freedom of Speech and ignore evidence that was so conclusive that we won in the U.K. I’m sad I lost this case. But I am sadder still that I seem to have lost a right I thought I had as an American — to speak freely and openly.”
Vasquez tells PEOPLE that her legal team doesn’t see the outcome as having a negative impact on the larger #MeToo movement of survivors speaking up about their stories.
“We all believe that women should, and victims — regardless of gender — should come forward and have their day in court. This case is an example of that. These people had their day in court and the jury decided unanimously that Mr. Depp was defamed. I think it doesn’t get more clear than that. Each case is different and it shouldn’t have an effect on any movement. Domestic violence doesn’t have a gender.”
She adds, “I think it takes the same amount of bravery, irrespective of gender, to come forward and expose your entire life the way that Johnny did, and to do that because he knew that it was important to get the truth out. I commend him for his bravery and his courage, just like I do any other victim of domestic abuse who comes forward and stands up and is willing to have their day in court and have everything about their life exposed just to seek justice and the truth.”
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