GoFundMe has shut down a fake Amber Heard fundraiser with a $1 million goal that claimed it was raising money to pay Johnny Depp after the actress lost a high-publicized defamation trial against her ex-husband last week.
Shortly after a 7-person jury in Virginia reached a verdict on June 1, someone named Kimberly Moore created a fundraiser claiming to support Heard with the millions of dollars in defamation damages she owes Depp, entertainment tabloid TMZ reported, sharing a screenshot of the phony page.
“I believe Amber, and social media protected the abuser,” the fundraiser’s description read. “The judgment exceeds her net worth. It’s so sad that he was able to get away with the abuse. The judgment furthers that abuse. If you can please help her.”
Moore claimed to have been in contact with Heard’s legal team and pledged that the “Aquaman” actress would have direct access to the money raised.
A GoFundMe spokesperson told TMZ that they were quickly able to flag the profile as phony before a substantial amount of money was raised. The crowdfunding platform added it will continue to look for fake pages.
“Our top priority is to keep our community safe and protect the generosity of our donors,” a spokesperson for the platform told The Daily Mail. “GoFundMe will remove any fundraisers unless there’s a direct connection and the fundraiser has been authorized by the recipient of the funds.”
This past week, a jury reached a verdict in relation to Depp’s lawsuit against ex-wife Heard. Jurors concluded that the 36-year-old actress defamed her ex-husband when she wrote a 2018 opinion article for the Washington Post.
In favor of Depp, the jury awarded compensatory damages of $10 million and punitive damages of $5 million—which was reduced by Judge Penney Azcarate to Virginia’s $350,000 statutory cap. They also ruled that Depp has to pay $2 million to Heard in favor of a counterclaim Heard had filed after Depp’s lawyer called her abuse allegations a hoax.
Meanwhile, Heard’s lawyer revealed last week that her client can’t afford to pay the millions of dollars in damages after she lost the defamation case against her ex-husband, saying she will “absolutely” appeal the case.
During an interview on NBC’s daily live broadcast, “The Today Show,” Heard’s lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, said her client is “absolutely not” able to pay the $8.36 million in damages the jury awarded the 58-year-old “Pirates of the Caribbean” star.
Bredehoft also said that Heard wants to appeal the case, saying her client “has some excellent grounds for it.”
The lawyer insisted that Heard was “demonized” by Depp’s team during the case, claiming “an enormous amount of evidence” that was used in her UK case “was suppressed” in the Virginia trial.
“A number of things were allowed in this court that should not have been allowed, and it caused the jury to be confused,” Bredehoft said. “We weren’t allowed to tell them about the UK judgment, so the damages is completely skewed. There are no damages, it stopped on Nov. 2, 2020, which is when the verdict came down in the UK.”
The 6-week-long trial, which drew numerous international headlines, included lurid details of the celebrities’ short and volatile marriage. Heard testified that Depp physically or sexually assaulted her more than a dozen times. Depp said that he never struck Heard, that she concocted the abuse allegations, and that she was the one who physically attacked him, multiple times.
