Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Secrets From the Johnny Depp Trial Revealed

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey spent six weeks in Fairfax, Virginia covering the defamation trial between actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife, Amber Heard. The pair was filming a documentary and was granted unprecedented access to Johnny Depp and his legal team along with Heard’s team. But they decided to write a book, “Hollywood Vampires.” Law&Crime’s Angenette Levy talks to the authors in this episode of Crime Fix. PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:Download the FREE Upside App at https://upside.app.link/crimefix to get an extra 25 cents back for every gallon on your first tank of gas.Host:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guests:Kelly Loudenberg Makiko Wholey Producer:Jordan ChaconCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this law and crimes series ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple podcasts or Spotify. There was no truth in it. There was no truth in it whatsoever. And the fact that it was coming down on me so hard and so quickly, and how it gained momentum around the world. The DepVeHerd trial took the world by storm, and now we're getting a behind-the-scenes look at the trial with two women who were granted unprecedented access by both sides and their spilling secrets and they're here with me to talk all about it. Welcome to Crime Fix, I'm Anjana Levy. It's been a little more than three years

since the trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard became a national obsession. The case took over YouTube and social media as people tuned in each day to watch testimony about very, very serious topics that included domestic violence, verbal abuse, and sexual assault. Now, this was a defamation case. Johnny Depp sued his ex-wife, Amber Heard, over a 2018 op-ed that she wrote in the Washington Post in which she claimed that she wrote in the Washington Post, in which she claimed that she had been the victim of sexual violence. Johnny Depp said the implication from the piece was that he sexually assaulted her, and he claimed he did no such thing. Depp claimed that there was violence in the relationship, but that he was the victim,

and Amber Heard was the aggressor. The trial was kind of crazy, but it was also incredibly sad. There were recordings of arguments, Heard degrading death. It's been going on too long, Amber. And we just got to stop this. Just stop it. I don't know how to get my reputation back. We write a letter together

Is that me? saying that we're going to take this out of the public eye saying that we're going to try and work this out on our own saying that the media has created such a f**king hateful storm that it's sickening that we love each other and that we want to make sure each other is okay have we had fights in the past, have we had this or whatever

f**k it, they already know all that, f**k it, don't matter here's the deal. Oh, it matters. It makes, I have been, I have, you have no idea. Every ounce of my credibility has been taken from, I mean, and done so in a dishonest way. You know? Amber, for, the abuse, the abuse thing is, is, is, we've got to deal with that, yeah. We've got to deal with that, Andrew. I don't have any way of, my credit is my credibility, you know what I don't... Then why did you put that out there?

I did not! You forced me, your team forced me to by going on the offense. I didn't force you to... I promise! Look up the timeline to these things. Everything is... Forget it. Forget it. You don't believe what I say. You don't believe what I say. But I... I did not... I did not choose this.

You got every step of the way. It's been an offense. I did not put this anywhere. I didn't... Let me talk to the f***ing team. I did not put this anywhere. I didn't let me talk to the team I'll call the cops you told I would call the cops You told I owe to call the cops Yeah I owe to call the cops. When, when, while it was happening? Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry because the last time that it got crazy between us, I really

did think I was going to lose my life and I thought you would do it on accident. And I told you that. I said, oh my God, I thought the first time. Amber, I lost a f***ing finger, man. Come on. I had a f***ing, I had a f***king finger, man. Come on. I had a f**king, I had a f**king, a mineral, a jar of, a can of mineral spirits thrown up my nose. I, you can please tell people that it was a fair fight. Hey, I want to tell you about a free app that I've tried.

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Here's how it works. Download Upside, claim an offer, and pay as usual using a debit or credit card. Follow the steps and get paid. To find out how much you could earn, click the link in the description to download Up upside or scan that QR code on your screen and use our promo code crimefix to get an extra 25 cents back on every gallon on your first tank of gas. That's promo code crimefix for an extra 25 cents back on your first gallon of gas. And there were clips of Johnny Depp saying some

mean things to Amber Heard as well. And then there was poop gate. Yes, Johnny Depp became obsessed with the thought that Amber Heard pooped in his bed. He found poop in their bed after a big argument. She said the dogs did it. What if any issues did Boo have with bathroom problems, if you will? Objection leading and relevance? Overruled. She had eaten Johnny's weed when she was a puppy and had bowel control issues for her entire life among some other issues. You know we regularly had to take her to the vet to try to figure out, well, what was wrong with this dog?

I never met a dog that was quite like this. So she had some control issues, hence why we would... She liked to burrow in the bed. She liked to be by the foot of the bed underneath the covers. And it was customary that they slept in bed with us, but Boo, having the issues she had, we have to leave her in bed so that she wouldn't be encouraged to go to the bathroom, which would happen almost immediately once you put her down on the floor. And sometimes it happened in bed too. But yeah.

People at the trial actually dressed up like poop. No joke. A woman with alpacas showed up at the courthouse. This courthouse in Fairfax County, Virginia, became a bit of a circus each day. Johnny Depp's attorneys became celebrities. Camille Vasquez was mobbed by fans who admired her aggressive cross-examination of witnesses, including Amber Heard. Under oath, that statement wasn't true, was it, Ms. Heard?

I'm sorry, I don't follow your question. Sorry. You testified under oath, quote, the entirety of my divorce settlement was donated to charity, end quote. That statement wasn't true. It is true. I pledged the entirety to charity. The statement when you say you buy a house you don't pay for the entire house at one

time. You pay it over time. All right next question please. Thank you. That statement isn't true today as you sit here today is it? It is true I pledged the entirety. But you didn't donate it. Unfortunately... You didn't donate it. It's a yes or no. I haven't been able to obligate... I mean to fulfill those obligations. So that's a no, right, Mr. I made the pledge. I want to be very clear. I pledged the entirety.

I haven't been able to fulfill those pledges because I've been sued. You had all of the $7 million for 13 months before Mr. Depp sued you and you chose not to pay it to the charities, you pledged it to. Is that correct? I disagree with your characterization of that. Now I covered this trial gavel to gavel for you and so did Jesse Weber. We did it together. And there were also two women there shooting a documentary, Kelly Loudon Berg and Maki

Ko Woolie. I met them on the first day of the trial. And we talked almost every day, just running into each other at the courthouse, hey, how you doing, things like that. And guess what? Kelly and Makiko, they had some major access to the big players on both sides of this case.

Johnny Depp and his legal team stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in Tyson's corner, and Makiko and Kelly, they got to meet with them from time to time behind the scenes. team stayed at the Ritz-Carlton and Tyson's corner, and Makiko and Kelly, they got to meet with them from time to time behind the scenes. They had major behind the scenes access, let me tell you. But they also had access to Amber Heard and her lawyers and some of her friends.

Now more than three years after the verdict, where the jury found that Amber Heard defamed Johnny Depp and awarded him damages, they've come out with a book entitled Hollywood Vampires, Johnny Depp, Amber Heard and the Hollywood Exploitation Machine. Kelly and Makiko interviewed Johnny Depp, his lawyers, Amber Heard's lawyers, her friends, a juror from the case and many, many more people. Did you know that Johnny Depp dressed up in disguises to avoid being recognized?

You'll see that in the book and at the trial, he even had a therapist with him the entire time. And there are juicy tidbits and stories in the book told by friends of Depp's that you haven't heard until now, including his mother muttering, she doesn't love him, loud enough for everyone to hear during Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's wedding ceremony in Los Angeles. Johnny Depp, according to the book, was having second thoughts about going through with the wedding in the first place. So to talk about their brand new book, Hollywood Vampires, it's out June 17th, and it's great.

I've read much of it, if not most of it. It's Kelly Lautenberg and Makiko Holy. Ladies, thank you so much. This is like a big reunion, kind of deja vu. I wish we were all together in the same room. But we met, just so the viewers know, back in 2022. And we met at the courthouse there in Fairfax County, Virginia.

And I feel like we met up quite a bit. We'd see each other during the breaks and stuff like that. So tell me first of all, how this book started, because you didn't start with the book. You were documentarians, so let's start there. I mean, we met you, we had a camera crew, and we were filming a documentary. So you saw us there as documentarians

at the US trial in Fairfax, Virginia. And then we were in the courtroom for much of the trial. And I think Makiko and I were having conversations all along, asking ourselves, like, would this maybe work better as a book? And yeah, Makiko, I don't know if you want to add to that. Yeah, I mean, I think we were there for the full seven weeks and filming around the courthouse and everything. And then I feel like when we got home, we kind of decided like there isn't, we need the room to tell the story with nuance and rigorous reporting and depth.

Like we didn't want to tell it in a kind of like quick take away. So we thought a book was going to be the right place to really tell the story in a full way. As documentary filmmakers having to load around all this gear, we felt like being nimble and being flexible and the ability to get access to more people would be, you know, of utmost importance to this type of project. So we felt like we could do that easier in a book. Interesting, because you're not, with a book you don't necessarily need the camera.

A lot of people sometimes when you're carrying around a camera and you have a big crew with you, it's intimidating. And there's not as much of a, maybe an intimacy that you can establish with your interview subjects. So Kelly, you've probably experienced that quite a bit in your time filming documentaries. Yeah, I mean, I think Makiko and I felt really liberated with just like a pen and a pad of paper and we really, really enjoyed being able to relax and just be present with people and not worry about the technical side of things and to kind of just take it all in and really like absorb everything. And we just felt like we could use our words to communicate what we were seeing and and sort of build a story.

Mm-hmm. Makiko, one thing that really impressed me as I'm working my way through the book and I'm reading it is the fact that you guys had tremendous access, tremendous access. And it wasn't just one side. You had access to the attorneys on both sides. You had interviews with obviously Johnny Depp's team, but you also had interviews with, you know, Ben Rottenborn. You had interviews with friends of Amber Heard. You know, so you, you had all of these key players. I mean, you were in both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's home.

So talk to me if you would, first Makiko and then Kelly, about how you were able to gain such tremendous access. Because a lot of us on the ground there were like trying, chomping at the bit, trying to get some access. And it was impossible. I mean, I guess the easy answer is just, I mean, we'd been across the story for a lot of years before the US trial, actually. But really, it's just, I think Kelly and I are just really, even though our book has a lot of humor and levity to it in a way, we're

pretty serious. And I think with this topic, we were just like, if we're going to do this, we have to do it right. And so we just really pursued it relentlessly and wanted to really directly experience it and try to talk to everybody involved. So I think it was just really just chasing people after time. And it's like the same way we got access to the courtroom is like we were writing the courthouse way in advance of the trial. So I think it was just, we were just pretty dedicated to telling the story and being the people that were gonna be across it.

Yeah. I mean, I think Makiko nailed it. It's for me, you know, for us both, it's, you know, persistence, patience and trust. We knew it was a long game and we knew that, you know, persistence, patience, and trust. We knew it was a long game, and we knew that, you know, people we didn't talk to during that brief window of the trial that we would eventually,

with enough, you know, asking and, you know, enough kind of explaining what we were doing that hopefully we would be able to talk to these people and we could make a case about why they should talk to us. So I think we just like really stuck with it and it was frustrating a lot of times, but we wanted to speak to as many people as possible and we just had to go at that aggressively,

but over a long period of time to just try to get these people to talk to us. And let's talk a little bit about those conversations and those meetings. One place you guys camped out was at the Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner, and that's where Johnny Depp was staying with his legal team. And everybody knew or found out eventually that he was staying there. A lot of the fans flocked there. But this was really like the home base for Johnny Depp and the legal team.

Camille Vasquez, Ben Chu, Jessica Myers, the whole crew. There were some really interesting tidbits in this book that I was kind of shocked by a little bit, but not so much. Johnny Depp is kind of an eccentric figure. This was a heavy thing that he was going through. He contended during this case that he had been defamed by Amber Heard because of this Washington Post op-ed, of course.

He said basically it ruined his career in Hollywood. He was very bitter about that. And, you know, she was suing him, right? You know, he sued her, she sued him back. And so it's just this big mess. And he claimed he had never physically abused her despite. And you kind of point this out in your book that there were some text messages that made it sound like maybe he did. So he's holed up there with his team. He's painting on the bed spreads. I have to imagine maybe the Ritz Carlton doesn't love that, but you know, it's Johnny Depp.

He's there strumming on guitars, you know, they're hanging out in the war room. Take me inside those meetings because you guys obviously have video of this stuff, but you're then putting pen to paper to describe it in the book. So Kelly, you first. Well, some of that stuff in the war room, specifically with Johnny, like that stuff wasn't filmed. Like that was just, you know, these are just like us being observing it. Yeah, and just observing and getting to know all the

the players and you know just like I said before trying to be present and trying to take it all in. So I think yeah I mean I don't know Makiko if you can speak to that but that was like such a unique experience to be there in the midst of all the day-to-day of that grinding trial. Yeah, I mean, Makiko, were you guys in the war room and seeing Johnny Depp and all of this stuff like every day after court, or was this just on select occasions?

It wasn't every day. It was on select occasions. But of course, it's like you're walking into a Ritz-Carlton hotel room and it's just packed full of lawyers. There's files everywhere. There were files in the bathtub. You know, you see them getting their lunch. They're eating these. I don't know why I'm thinking about the sub sandwich that they were always eating, but they're eating their sandwiches, they have all the candy that fans are sending them. It's just, it's a surreal scene and it's, yeah, they were living out of the hotel like we were. So it's, it's just this kind of bizarre encampment that everybody's doing around this trial. Like that's what it felt like. It's like we go down to have dinner and there's some like trial people or people are talking about the trial. Like it was

a singular experience. You know, what was there, were there any surprises as you started covering this case? I mean, when we were all there on day one, you know, it wasn't that crowded, you know, but then things started to get a little wild a couple of weeks in, you know, the crowd started to grow as word spread that this was going on and people could attend. Were you surprised by that as the trial progressed, Kelly? I think Makiko and I were surprised that there weren't more people in the beginning. We showed up that first day and that's when we met you. And we probably even talked to you about it, how surprised we were that it was really quiet.

And you could just kind of go straight in to the courtroom, no problem, once you showed your ID. But it was, yeah, I mean, I think as the energy around it built more and more, yeah, we did feel like we were, yeah, it was kind of a bizarre thing because it was so active on the internet. It was so kind of like everybody was talking about it, but there were very few people like physically there. So it was, it was a strange feeling to be like one of the people actually there. I don't know if you felt like that, Makiko. Yeah, I mean, I think what was just surprising to see was yeah, like day one, just a little

smattering of media. And then, I mean, when Johnny testified, that was when all the crowds started coming. And when he would leave at the end of the day from the back, it started with just also like a smattering of people. But it just the whole block was was taken up by people. And I mean, I think the other thing that surprised us was there weren't that many members of media there throughout the entire thing compared to how much coverage it was getting in general. And I think that's what surprised me is like the numerous amount of takes and opinions and siding with one side or the other from legacy media journalists that weren't there and then later kind of confessed to,

I just watched the viral clips or I just watched parts of the testimony. And that just shocked me because I just was like, this is such a huge news event and it's something you really need to consume the raw record and understand and be here. So I just, I was surprised by that too, to be honest. So what do you, what do you guys want people to like really, what do you want people to take away from the book? In a lot of ways, our book is a bit of a like Faustian tale about celebrity and maybe even a cautionary tale because I think there's a tendency in say reality television or even shows like White Lotus to really romanticize this like glamorous life of being famous. And we really didn't wanna do that.

So there's some really ugly aspects to this story that we just didn't really wanna hold back from. And I just hope people kind of see that this isn't really aspirational, really. Like there's private jets, there's black cars, but there's a lot of pain and sadness also and confusion. And yeah, just it's hard to know. Like if we, I think Kelly and I probably know this story better than almost anybody, but even so it's like we'll never actually

know what happened. But we hope that we are giving people a version of the story they haven't seen yet. Yeah, and it's a there's just like this whole facade about Hollywood, you know, it looks so glitzy and glamorous, but underneath your rights kind of gross and grimy and, and look what happened to Johnny Depp. I mean, he was at the top of his game and then boom, you know, nobody wants to hire him. And then Amber Heard after this look, she hasn't been in anything. So, you know, nobody wants to hire him. And then Amber Heard after this, look, she hasn't been in anything. So, you know, Kelly, that is one of the big themes of your book that, you know, and it's aptly titled Hollywood vampires. Yes, that's Johnny Depp's band's name, but you know, the Hollywood machine will will use you up and chew you up and spit you out.

You're done when they don't need you anymore, you're gone. Yeah, I mean, just the total loss of privacy too and anonymity that you get when you're famous. I mean, it made, it's something I never would consider for myself, but it definitely repelled me from that whole, like there's nothing in me that would ever desire that. And I think people, especially with the rise of, you know, social media, like, I just feel like

if people read this and maybe think again, think that, you know, there's more to it than that. There's some griminess underneath. There's drawbacks. But it's also about social causes that Hollywood adopts and then uses these expensive PR machines to promote. expensive PR machines to promote. I think that when you mix those things together, you risk compromising the cause and in general, like, I think just like having like a real sort of authentic sort of authentic interest in a cause not filtered through like a massive publicity machine might be a good thing.

Well, it's a great book. Everybody should check it out. It's called Hollywood Vampires. Thank you so much, Kelly and Makiko. It's been great talking with you. I wish you all the best on the book. Thank you, Anjanette. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Anjanette. Thank you.

And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.