ABC/Randy Holmes(LONDON) — Johnny Depp was handed another legal setback in a U.K. courtroom Thursday morning.

According to The Guardian, a judge denied the actor’s appeal of a ruling against him in his libel case against the tabloid The Sun, which portrayed Depp as a “wife beater” during his rocky marriage to Justice League actress Amber Heard.

After a high-profile case last July, in which Heard and Depp leveled abuse accusations against each other, a judge dismissed Depp’s libel claim, ruling the Sun‘s accusations in an April 2018 story were “substantially true.”

Depp’s appeal centered on the fact that Heard hadn’t donated to charity the $7 million she was granted in a divorce settlement, as she promised to do at the time, and so that “calculated and manipulative lie,” as his attorneys called it, “tipped the scales against Mr. Depp from the very beginning.”

However, The Guardian reports the judge on Thursday dismissed those claims, ruling “We do not accept that there is any ground for believing that the [previous] judge may have been influenced” by claims of the donation to rule in Heard’s favor.

By Stephen Iervolino
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