Johnny Depp: Amber Heard Had a 'Need for Conflict'

Johnny Depp returned to the stand in his defamation lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard on Wednesday, and gave his version of numerous ugly incidents in their troubled marriage. Depp, who denied ever hitting Heard in testimony Tuesday, said Heard had "a need for conflict" and "a need for violence," Rolling Stone reports. "It could begin with a slap. It could begin with a shove. It could begin with, you know, throwing a TV remote at my head" or a glass of wine in his face, Depp said. "But all in all, it was just constant." More:

• Severed fingertip. In what the Guardian says "might be termed as a climax in movie terms," jurors saw a photo of Depp's partially severed finger. He said the fingertip was severed when Heard threw a vodka bottle at him during an argument in Australia, but he told doctors at a hospital that it had been caught in a door. "I didn't want to get her in trouble," he said.

• Assault on Heard "never happened." Depp, addressing Heard's accusations of domestic violence in detail, said a 2013 incident in which he allegedly slapped Heard for making fun of his "Winona Forever" tattoo— which was changed to "Wino Forever" after he broke up with actress Winona Ryder—"never happened," the AP reports. "Why would I take such great offense to someone making fun of a tattoo on my body? That allegation never made any sense to me," Depp said.
• He "wanted to make marriage work." Asked why he had stayed in the marriage if Heard was being abusive, Depp said he wanted to make it work because his father had stayed in his own abusive marriage, People reports. "I thought maybe I could bring her around," he said. "Because the Amber Heard that I knew for the first year, year and a half was not this, suddenly this opponent. It wasn't my girl, she had become my opponent." He said his way of dealing with Heard's "eruptions" of aggression was to "retreat."

• "I lost." Depp said his career was destroyed when Heard made allegations of domestic abuse and he was dropped from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. When the allegations "were circling the globe, telling people I was a drunken, cocaine-fueled menace who beat women, suddenly in my 50s, it’s over," he said, per the Guardian. "You’re done. No matter the outcome of this trial, the second those accusations were made against me, and they metastasized as fodder for the media, I lost."
• The infamous poop incident. Depp said that after a fight in 2016, "human fecal matter" was found in the bed he shared with Heard, the New York Post reports. He said that he went to his penthouse to collect belongings, but a member of his security told him it "wasn't a good time" and showed him a photo of the waste on his side of the bed. Asked if it could have come from the couple's teacup Yorkies, as Heard allegedly claimed, Depp said the dogs "weigh about four pounds each. That did not come from a dog."

Depp was briefly cross-examined after his testimony Wednesday, and cross-examination will resume Thursday. Heard will give her side of the story later in the trial. (More Johnny Depp stories.)