Amber Heard’s Former Personal Assistant Kate James Claims Heard Paid Her “Very Poorly” And Screamed Abuse At Her

John F. Trent |

Apr 14, 2022

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Amber Heard’s former personal assistant Kate James digital deposition from February 18, 2022 began the third day of the ongoing defamation lawsuit filed against Amber Heard by Johnny Depp.

During her testimony, James claims she was paid “very poorly” by Heard for the myriad of duties she performed for Heard.

Before revealing how much Heard paid her, James detailed a laundry list of activities she performed for the starlet, saying, “It’s everything you could possibly do to run someone’s life, okay? So it is grocery shopping. It is taking care of admin. It is running errands.”

She continued, “It is getting the car fixed. It is getting the dogs groomed. It is picking up flowers. It is dealing with decorator. It is dealing with the housekeeper. It is going on and on and on and on. And it goes on every single day.”

James went on, “Arranging travel, dealing with all of the surplus stuff around the travel, booking all the greasers, dealing with the changing of travel, okay?”

“Liaising with the people she’s working with on films, updating her calendar accordingly, liaising with the people on set every single day to update her calendar to ensure that she knows what scene she’s doing each day, what her call time is. Every day it’s something different. It’s a myriad, myriad of things that go across the board daily,” James added.

When asked if she was paid for the work she responded, “Very poorly.”

She then revealed she was specifically paid $25 an hour to start off with. James then added, “She finally agreed after screaming abuse at me that she would pay me $50,000 a year once I went to full time. And this was me working for well over 10 years as a personal assistant. So it was very insulting to me, but I did it any way because I had grandfathered in the ability to pick up my son from school and bring him to work with me at 3 o’clock.”

Later in her testimony, James also detailed another instance where Heard screamed abuse at her. After explaining why she stored a number of magazines that featured Heard in Heard’s garage, James said, “She just got very angry at me one day because I hadn’t quite made it downstairs to put them in the garage when she came home. And she went absolutely ballistic over that.”

She then detailed what she meant by absolutely ballistic, “Screaming. Yelling. Abuse.” She would further describe it as “blind rage.”

Still later during her testimony, James detailed how Heard was verbally abusive to her saying, “Screaming. Screaming over the phone. She screamed at me once in person. Multiple times screaming at me over the phone.

“Barrages of abusive text messages, day and night. A lot of them in the middle of the night. I think between 2 and 4 a.m. the barrage would start that I’d wake up to. All incoherent not really making sense just basically someone to lash out at, you know? No apparent reason to it,” she added.

She also claimed that Heard was verbally abusive to her sister,” It was ongoing, kick the door type of relationship with her sister so it’s really hard to pinpoint any specifics, but her poor sister was treated like the dog that you kick basically.”

She also detailed what she observed regarding Heard being abusive to her mother, “Well, there is a video that’s online where you can see her being abusive first and foremost so it’s not even based on what I’m telling you. It’s what I’ve seen the interactions between the two of them when her mother was still alive and the fact that her mother was terrified of her.”

James added that Heard’s mother personally told her that she was terrified of her. She went to testify that she did witnessed Heard tongue-lash her mother saying, “Here and there, yes. Especially when it was a build up to a stressful event or something like that, yeah.”

James would also testify that she did not witness any violence between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

She also claimed that she does not believe that Depp ever mistreated Heard. She explained, “Never any evidence of it at all. I was there almost daily, both her place and then eventually his place at West Hollywood and then ultimately at the Lofts downtown. It was a daily basis experience, morning, noon, night and all days of the week. I never once saw evidence of anything.”

James also said that Heard had never informed her that Johnny Depp had ever hit her, puller her hair, or pushed her.

She also made it abundantly clear that she never believed Amber Heard’s claims that Johnny Depp had mistreated her. She said, “No. Never. And there was never any damage to the apartment that I witnessed. There was never any aftermath of anything ever. That I ever saw.”

James was also asked, “You, of course, have no personal knowledge one way or the other whether Johnny was abusive to her, correct?” She answered, “Well, I don’t know if that is necessarily true because if it was true I would have seen the damage even if I wasn’t physically present in the moment of these alleged arguments.”

In answer to a follow-up question she explained, “Well, if someone’s being beaten there’s generally physical evidence.”

James previously provided a witness statement in Depp’s libel suit against The Sun claiming that Heard abused alcohol claiming, “During my time working for her, Amber would drink vast quantities of red wine each night. Meanwhile, she would ask me to buy Johnny non-alcoholic beer, as that’s all that she would allow him to drink.”

Smith also claimed that Heard perjured herself in an Australian court regarding a number of dogs being smuggled into Australia.

She stated, “I broke down in tears at the thought that she blatantly lied in court in my home town and blamed me. Obviously I knew that was a complete lie and yet she had no problem in apparently perjuring herself in order to avoid responsibility.”

In a second witness statement, James accused Heard of stealing her own horrific personal experience of surviving a rape in Brazil.

In the statement James stated, “When I was 26 years old and traveling in Brazil, I was violently raped by an unknown male at Machete point, having been woken by the perpetrator whilst sleeping alone in my dwelling. This ordeal went on for 5-6 hours and I narrowly escaped with my life.”

“This torturous experience of such extreme sexual violence has haunted me ever since and permanently changed the trajectory of my life to this day,” she stated.

James went on to reveal that while perusing documents for Depp’s libel case she “discovered that Ms. Heard had in fact stolen my sexual violence conversation with her and twisted it into her own story to benefit herself. This of course cause me extreme distress and outrage that she would dare to attempt to use the most harrowing experience of my life as her own narrative.”