Amber Heard‘s $1 million payment to Johnny Depp has been routed to various charities, with TMZ reporting that the actor has given away the settlement from their defamation suit.
According to sources close to TMZ, the money — which was paid out via Heard’s insurance after Heard and Depp agreed to settle their case instead of Heard appealing the decision in 2022 — will be split into five different payments of $200,000 for various charities. The charities in question are the Make-A-Film Foundation, The Painted Turtle, Red Feather, Tetiaroa Society, and the Amazonia Fund Alliance.
The move officially closes the book of the highly covered defamation lawsuit between the formerly married couple. In a trial that ran from April-June 2022, a verdict was reached that found both Heard and Depp liable in various forms of defamation.
Both actors appealed their respective verdicts but instead settled and dropped their appeals, a decision that Heard called “a very difficult decision” that was “not an act of concession” in a December 2022 statement on Instagram.
In 2016, during the early stages of their divorce proceedings, Heard claimed that Depp had abused her physically, which would grow into two separate lawsuits. Later in 2018, following the publication of an article in the British newspaper The Sun that called Depp a “wife beater,” Depp sued News Group Newspapers Ltd for defamation in 2020, but a High Court judge ruled against Depp, claiming that Heard’s evidence of abuse was “substantially true.”
After the 2020 lawsuit, a trial in the United States took place, with Depp filing a complaint of defamation against Heard following an op-ed by Heard was published in The Washignton Post. That lawsuit ended in a verdict finding that Heard’s references to “sexual violence” and “domestic abuse” were false and led to the aforementioned settlement.