TMZ was tipped off to Amber Heard filing a restraining order against Johnny Depp at LA court and arranged to capture the actress as she ‘stopped and turned and displayed her bruise,’ former employee testifies
Morgan Tremaine, a former field assignment manager with TMZ, said that he dispatched photographers to get pictures Amber Heard at the LA court in May 2016 after they were tipped off
He said: ‘The objective was to capture her leaving the courthouse and she was going to stop and turn to the camera and display the bruise’
Heard has testified that she was shocked to see photographers outside the court after a judge awarded her a restraining order against Depp
The court has previously heard claims that Heard’s team leaked the video of Depp smashing up his kitchen to TMZ
TMZ expected Amber Heard to ‘stop and turn and display her bruise’ when she got her restraining order against Johnny Depp, a former employee of the gossip site told the court.
Morgan Tremaine, a former field assignment manager with TMZ, said that he dispatched photographers to get pictures of the actress at the court in LA in May 2016 after they were tipped off.
He said: ‘The objective was to capture her leaving the courthouse and she was going to stop and turn to the camera and display the bruise.’
While Tremaine did not reveal the source of the tip that Heard would be there, he said that it came from a news producer meaning that it would have been verified.
Heard has testified that she was shocked to see photographers outside the court after a judge awarded her a restraining order against Depp.
The court has previously heard claims that Heard’s team leaked the video of Depp smashing up his kitchen to TMZ.
While Tremaine did not confirm this, he said that the video sent to TMZ was shorter than the one shown to the jury.
In the version TMZ received from its anonymous tip line, there was not the part where Heard was ‘sniggering at the camera’, Tremaine said.
Asked by Elaine Bredehoft, one of Heard’s lawyers, if Tremaine was only giving evidence to get his ’15 minutes of fame’, he said he stood ‘to gain nothing from this.’
He said: ‘I’m putting myself in the target of TMZ, a very litigious organization. I could say the same thing as taking Amber Heard as a client. I find that to be purely logical.’
Bredehoft looked taken aback while Depp’s legal team laughed.
Bryan Neumeister said that many of the photos showing Heard’s injuries had been through an editing program.
The metadata showed that the images were last modified by Apple editing software called Photos 1.5 or Photos 3.0, a later version of the program.
One photo showed Heard with a bruise on her arm while others showed injuries to her face.
Neumeister said: ‘This could not come out of an iPhone, it would go into a computer and be edited.
‘In a photo editing app you can do a lot of things.’
Neumeister added that the photos were not ‘anywhere near an original’.
Neumeister showed the court three versions of the arm bruise photo which were each different sizes.
He said that ‘forensically they don’t match’ and there is ‘no way to authenticate any photo’.
The images ‘had to go through some type of transformation to change sizes’, Neumeister testified.
Depp was cross examined by Heard’s lawyer Benjamin Rottenborn who asked him about his claims regarding being punched on his honeymoon.
The court was shown photos posted on social media the day before Depp and Heard got on the Orient Express in July 2015.
They showed Depp with a mark below his left eye, the same eye that he says Heard hit him on during the trip, Rottenborn said.
Rottenborn said that the dark mark was the same
Depp protested that a ‘side light’ would create such an effect.
Rottenborn pointed out the photos – showing Depp holding a baby – were not taken from the side.
Depp claims: ‘Light on the side will cause (eye) bone to appear sunken.’
Rottenborn said: ‘Whatever mark it is, sunburn, shadow, you had that same mark before you got on the train’
Depp shot back: ‘It’s pretty difficult to get a sunburn on the train.’
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