Johnny Depp Will Have His Day in Court. Again. - Vanity Fair
All is not settled in the land of Johnny Depp, despite his British travels, a reported $62,000 celebratory dinner, and winning a defamation lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard. The actor has to contend with yet another trial, this time brought against him, wherein a crew member on the set of one of his movies is accusing him of assault. Camille Vasquez and Benjamin Chew, the lawyers that became somewhat household names for Depp supporters blanketing social media during the last trial, will reportedly again defend him in an on-set assault lawsuit. (Chew had worked for Depp during previous lawsuits—it’s been a busy six years for the actor—but Vasquez, recently made partner at their firm, is a fairly new addition to the team.)
Gregg “Rocky” Brooks was a location manager on City of Lies, a crime-thriller about LAPD’s investigation into unsolved murder of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Depp plays a retired detective and Forest Whitaker plays the journalist he teams up with to get to the bottom of the murders. The film was slated for release in September 2018, but according to Deadline at the time, its distributor pulled it after the suit was filed, which Brooks had filed about a month before. The trailer had already been released on Biggie’s birthday—May 21—that year, and can still be found online:
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In the original 2018 filing, which also names director Brad Furman as a defendant, Brooks claimed that when he told Depp that they could only film one more exterior shot of the night due to permit requirements, the actor became angry. The location manager alleged Depp then followed him, yelled, “Who the fuck are you? You have no right to tell me what to do,” and punched him twice in the ribs.
After Brooks didn’t react, Depp allegedly said he’d give him “$100,000 to punch me in the face right now.” Depp’s own bodyguards escorted him from the scene.
Brooks, who is also suing Depp’s production company for wrongful termination, said that he was fired after refusing to sign an agreement not to sue the production, and subsequently, according to Brooks’s lawyer Pat Harris, found it difficult to get work. In 2019, when the trial was originally scheduled to begin before delays, Harris told Variety, “We obviously recognize that in the hierarchy of Hollywood, Johnny Depp is on top and the location managers are somewhere mid-level or toward the bottom. In any confrontation between the two of them, no matter who started it, no matter who’s responsible, Johnny Depp is going to come out on top and our guy is going to come out damaged.”
According to Variety at the time, Depp was expected to testify that he did not hit Brooks, and that he confronted him verbally after he saw Brooks acting “belligerently toward a woman on set.”
Depp’s lawyer at the time, Adam Waldman, told the outlet that they planned to bring a malicious prosecution claim against Brooks’s lawyers. “After all the evidence from multiple sworn eyewitness testimony and dozens of contemporaneous photographs taken by the script supervisor, Mr. Brooks has finally found a single witness to support his absurd, delusional claim—his own lawyer,” Waldman said. “As soon as the evidence defeats Mr. Brooks in trial we will immediately launch malicious prosecution claims against his attorneys. What Mr. Brooks lawyer terms ‘scorched earth’ is actually known as ‘Justice.’”
Waldman also told TheWrap in 2018 that Depp “never touched the person suing him, as over a dozen witnesses present will attest. In a court filing we have generally denied all claims and we will fight these latest sham allegations.”
In filings responding to Brooks’s lawsuit obtained by TheWrap, the allegation is that Brooks “provoked” Depp, who “[feared] for his safety”:
“The acts complained of by Plaintiff were provoked by Plaintiff’s unlawful and wrongful conduct in that Plaintiff willfully and maliciously acted out and conducted his activities in such a manner as to cause, Defendant Depp to fear for his safety, and according to Defendant Depp’s observations, Defendant Brad Furman [the director] for his safety.”
In a 2018 story about the decision to scuttle the film, the Daily Beast spoke with four sources who say they witnessed an altercation but not blows between the men. To which Brooks’s lawyer Arbella Azizian told the Daily Beast, “[M]y client was punched. He was punched twice in the rib cage and this was witnessed... I suggest you use a different source to get a more accurate assessment of what happened on set.”
There is still more than a month until the trial; it’s scheduled to begin July 25 in Los Angeles County Superior Court. And it will not be televised.
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