In April of 2018 the Sun (which is a really skanky tabloid, to be honest)) published an article calling Johnny Depp a “wife-beater”.
Depp then sued the Sun for libel, and after a long trial wherein he accused his ex-wife, Amber Heard, of shitting the bed and abusing him, he lost big time. In a nutshell, the court found that 12 out of the 14 instances of spousal abuse that Amber Heard claimed were proven to be true, and thus the Sun hadn’t been fibbing when they called Depp a wife-beater. You can read the full court ruling here: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Judgment-FINAL.pdf
I’ll give you a quick sum up if you don’t want to read the whole thing.
The court saw conclusive evidence that Depp had assaulted his then-wife Amber Heard 1) for mocking his tattoos and 2) for having a painting from an ex. He repeatedly assaulted Heard on multiple occasions, including 3) in a trailer, 4) on a plane, 5) in the Bahamas, 6) while they were in Tokyo, 7) while they were in Australia (where he inflicted his infamous finger wound on himself), 8) on the stairs of their home (whereupon Heard hit him in self-defense), 9) on a train in Asia, 10) just before an appearance on the Late Late Show, 11) on Heard’s birthday, and 12) at least one other time in Los Angeles back in 2016.
The court also called out Depp for his jealous rages, anger issues, and his problems with drink and drugs.
Think that Depp must have been hard done by? Well, remember, in the UK the “burden of proof was on the Sun to demonstrate that the story was substantially accurate on the balance of probabilities.” That means that the judge found that the Sun had brought forth enough hard and substantial evidence to prove justify calling Depp a wife-beater. Testimony from Depp’s friends claiming that he was really a super nice dude didn’t outweigh things like police reports.
Of course, Depp’s lawyers are still insisting that the judge simply ignored “the mountain of counter-evidence from police officers, medical practitioners, her own former assistant, other unchallenged witnesses and an array of documentary evidence which completely undermined the allegations, point by point.” However, it seems to me that if there were really such strong counter-evidence, rather than hearsay by Depp’s friends and employees, the judge would have found in Depp’s favor … especially since the UK’s libel laws are NOTORIOUSLY favorable for the plaintiff in libel cases.
“English defamation law puts the burden of proving the truth of allegedly defamatory statements on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood, and for that reason, has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sued in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright.”
In sum, if you can’t win a libel case in the UK, you basically can’t win a libel case anywhere and you are probably guilty as sin.