why Amber Heard is speaking out about Blake Lively's sexual harassment complaint

A “horrifying” reminder of what she experienced in 2022. While Blake Lively announced that she was suing her playmate Justin Baldoni for sexual harassment and accused him of having led a defamation campaign against her, the he actress Amber Heard tried to defend her friend in a statement to NBC News.

An experience that brings back memories of the trial that pitted her against her ex-husband Johnny Depp. “Social media is the absolute personification of the classic saying 'A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can arrive,'” the 38-year-old actress wrote on Monday.

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“I saw it with my own eyes and up close,” she continued. “It’s as horrible as it is destructive.” One of Justin Baldoni's publicists, Melissa Nathan, also represented Johnny Depp during his defamation trial with Amber Heard in 2022. She was then found guilty of defamation against Johnny Depp, who was awarded 15 million dollars in damages.

“Publicly humiliated”

Like Blake Lively, Amber Heard had accused her former companion of sexual assault. In return, the actor Pirates of the Caribbean had sued Amber Heard over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post about experiencing domestic violence. A lawsuit that the actress lost. “This verdict turns the clock back to a time when a woman who spoke out could be publicly humiliated,” she wrote at the time.

Hot on the heels of Blake Lively's lawsuit, Justin Baldoni's lawyer denied the allegations, saying the actress' suit was aimed at “fixing her negative reputation,” while accusing her of causing problems on the film set. The actor, for his part, described the actress' complaint as “shameful” and “categorically false”, before being definitively dismissed by his artistic agency.