Three years after their explosive defamation trial, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard live radically different lives. Depp signed a $20 million deal with Dior, moved to an 850-acre estate in England, and landed a new Hollywood film. Heard, by contrast, rents an apartment in Madrid under a pseudonym, raises three children under five almost entirely on her own, and has an estimated net worth of around $500,000. After a major television interview following the verdict, Heard sold her California home for just over $1 million and left the United States.
She moved first to the island of Mallorca, then to Madrid. Within about 18 months, she learned to speak fluent Spanish, with locals saying she even picked up a Madrid accent. She rents her apartment under the name Martha Jane Canary, the real name of the historical figure known as Calamity Jane. The choice of alias appears deliberate.
Calamity Jane was known as a strong, independent woman who did not care what others thought of her, and the name says much about how Heard now sees herself. Neighbors say she walks her daughter to school each morning in a cap and sunglasses. Most people around her no longer recognize who she really is. The contrast began immediately after the June 2022 verdict.
In a major NBC interview, Heard looked into the camera and said she would stand by every word of her testimony until the day she died. She said she had not wanted to be in court and that reliving the details of her split was deeply painful, especially having her motives and truth questioned. By September 2024, footage showed her walking silently through a street in Madrid, cap pulled low. She said she no longer wanted to think or talk about her past because she was happy and content with her life.
Then in January 2026, she appeared in a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival titled “Silenced. ” This time she said something very different: she no longer wants to use her voice. The shift from “I’ll stand by every word until I die” to “I don’t want to use my voice anymore” does not look like someone who simply recovered and moved on. It looks closer to someone who learned the hard way that every time she speaks, things get worse for her.
The financial picture is stark. Before her legal troubles, Heard’s net worth was estimated at around $11 million. Today, most reports put it at roughly $500,000, though some estimates go as high as $3 million when counting Instagram sponsorship income. She had publicly stated she would donate $3.
5 million from her $7 million divorce settlement to the ACLU. Court records show only $1. 3 million actually reached them. Of that total, just $350,000 came directly from Heard herself.
Elon Musk contributed $500,000, and $100,000 came from Depp himself, the man she was suing, who ended up covering part of her charitable pledge. Years of legal fees in two countries, totaling around $6 million, plus the loss of most of her U. S. work, turned an actress who once earned $3 million a year into someone earning roughly what a mid-level office worker makes.
Her acting career also suffered. After the verdict, brands dropped her almost overnight. Her L’Oréal deal disappeared. Magazine covers stopped.
Studios simply stopped calling. In “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” her screen time was reduced to about 20 minutes. Reports say co-star Jason Momoa pushed to have her removed entirely and allegedly blocked her on Instagram during filming. A planned third Aquaman installment, which could have earned her $3 to $4 million, was canceled.
She produced her own comeback film, “In the Fire,” hoping to prove she still had something to offer. It scored only 21 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, skipped theaters entirely, and went straight to streaming. Between 2022 and 2026, she gave only one English-language interview to the press. It happened in Sicily, where reporters noted she was under heavy guard from her team and completely walled off from the public.
According to Variety, in the Sundance documentary she says: “This isn’t about me. I have lost my ability to speak. I’m not here to tell my story. I don’t want to tell my story.
In fact, I don’t want to use my voice anymore. That’s the problem. ” She adds that seeing other women fight the imbalance of power gives her strength, and that looking at her daughter growing up, she believes things can get better. E!
News contacted Depp’s representative for comment. Part of the story that almost no one discusses is her children. In 2021, before the trial even began, Heard welcomed a daughter via surrogate. She never revealed the father’s identity, and has not done so to this day.
Then in May 2025, she announced twins, a girl and a boy, also born via surrogate. Again, no father was mentioned anywhere. Heard is now a single mother of three children under five, raising them almost alone in a foreign country. But it is not a complete collapse.
A quiet comeback is also underway. In 2025, she made her first professional stage appearance, not in Hollywood, but at a small regional theater festival in Massachusetts. Vanity Fair reviewed her performance and described it as eloquent and beautiful. Depp’s net worth is now estimated at around $150 million, compared to Heard’s roughly $500,000, a gap of nearly 300 to 1 between two people who sat across from each other in the same courtroom just three years ago.
Depp has new film deals in development, a lifetime achievement award, and a major magazine interview. Heard has none of that now. Her name attached to any project is still treated as a risk inside Hollywood even in 2026, while others from the same era are being welcomed back to major studios.
The real question is whether there is any genuine path back for Amber Heard from here, or whether this is simply what her life now looks like, possibly forever.
