Paul Barresi says he is still haunted by the expression on Amber Heard’s face as she gave her now infamous testimony to a U.S. courtroom in 2022 claiming that her former partner Johnny Depp sexually assaulted her with a bottle of bourbon.
The jury was not convinced, returning their unanimous verdict in Depp’s favour. Barresi?
He can’t make sense of it, and God knows he has tried more than most.
‘The thing is, I’d seen that expression before, on my mother’s face, when my father attacked her,’ says the 77-year-old former wrestler. He rises to his feet and crosses his California kitchen.
He starts to re-enact what he saw that day in his own childhood kitchen, leaping from the fridge to the hob, sliding down to the floor as his mother did, after his father had gone for her.
Johnny Depp and Amber Heard have been embroiled in a bitter feud
Paul Barresi is the California-based private investigator who, in 2019, was hired by Amber Heard’s legal team to find the dirt on Johnny Depp
He mimes pots crashing, his father lashing out, his mother cowering, terrified for her life. ‘My father had been drinking. She had poured his alcohol down the sink. I was standing at the entrance to the kitchen, frozen. The expression on my mother’s face will never leave me — and I saw it on Amber’s face that day.’
He shrugs. ‘No one believed her. And she is an actor. I’ve wondered if she witnessed something else — nothing to do with Depp — that she could call on. Still, it troubles me.’
Lest there be any doubt, he still feels the jury returned the correct verdict. ‘I found no evidence that Depp was capable of that sort of violence.’ This, in a nutshell, is why the Depp v Heard debacle continues to fascinate, even two years after that explosive trial.
Everyone has an opinion. A docu-series about the trial is trending on social media and is currently top of the Netflix charts. Armchair detectives are still pulling the evidence to pieces. The whole world still seems to be gripped, and to be taking sides.
But who is Paul Barresi and why should his take on it matter? Well, he has been right up to his neck in the evidence, he claims. A pile of it sits on the table in front of him.
‘I spoke to hundreds of people, everything’s here,’ he says, tapping it. ‘Every taped conversation, email conversation. I spent three months on it, left no stone unturned.’
Barresi is the California-based private investigator who, in 2019, was hired by Amber Heard’s legal team to find the dirt on Depp. Or as Barresi himself puts it, ‘I was hired to find evidence to support the idea that Johnny was a mean-spirited, irascible human being with a proclivity for violence.’
He set about establishing exactly that — perhaps, he admits now, thinking, even subconsciously that in being able to ‘help’ Amber Heard, supposed victim of male oppression, he was remembering his own mother and what she suffered.
‘I really wanted to find that,’ he says, of his brief, which was to provide the ammunition that would destroy Johnny Depp. Barresi — a colourful and controversial character — describes himself as a Hollywood fixer. Certainly his previous client list reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood. He has worked for or on behalf of Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Eddie Murphy and Gerard Butler.
Depp testifies during a hearing in the Fairfax County courtroom in 2022 as he sued his ex-wife Amber for libel
Amber claimed that her former partner Depp sexually assaulted her with a bottle of bourbon
‘I’m the last-resort man,’ he tells me. ‘When people have exhausted all the other options, they come to me. I’ll climb every tree I have to.’
Do you have to climb many trees as a Hollywood private investigator? ‘I literally climbed one to serve papers on a particular producer that everyone thought was untouchable,’ he chuckles. ‘When I swung down, on his carport as he drove in, his son thought I was a superhero. He said, ‘That man is no friend. Don’t speak to him.’
Maybe they should make a Netflix drama about Paul Barresi, because he is as interesting as any of his clients. He’d style himself as the hero, obviously, but there are those in Hollywood who would put him firmly in the villain camp. ‘Sometimes I operate in the grey areas,’ is how he puts it.
His very entry into the Depp-Heard soap opera has just added more foam to the mix, though.
There was a twist to his assignment worthy of any Hollywood blockbuster. Try as he might, he ultimately failed to uncover any real dirt on Depp, to the point where he switched allegiances.
Barresi has now written (and self-published) a book about his experiences, which are so complimentary it could have the subtitle: Why Johnny Depp Is A Lovely Guy.
After going public about his trawl through Depp’s life, he received a thank you from Depp himself, via his lawyer, for speaking out. It was another extraordinary development in the Hollywood drama to end all dramas. Doesn’t switching sides, or at least going public about how there was very little dirt to be found, break every rule about what a private investigator does? ‘I never signed any non-disclosure agreement,’ he says.
So what did his three-month search turn up? What’s striking is how fondly he speaks of Depp, whom he has never met.
Poking around in the recesses of Depp’s life — ‘doing the research was like going down into the catacombs’ — gave him quite the insight, though.
No one is perfect, and he was a mumbling, fumbling, stumbling drunk,’ he says, starting with the worst bits. ‘He was obnoxious. He was ungentlemanly at times, but a lot of that can be attributed to the people with whom he associated. I think that they were the bane of his existence.
‘For some reason, and I still don’t understand why, he latched onto people that really were no good for him.’ Are we talking about the same Johnny Depp who once threatened to set a journalist on fire? Barresi himself verified this as true in his investigations.
‘That was a thing he said — but I do think he meant it as a sort of joke.’
Nice guy who got in with the wrong crowd, then? ‘There were people who never had a bad word to say about him, but there were also those who wouldn’t talk. So any good investigator will go back to the beginning, because that’s always where you find the truth.’
Convinced that if Depp was a misogynist it would have been apparent his whole life, Barresi banged on doors, sent emails, tracked down friends, former colleagues, old girlfriends. He says that, given the Heard legal team briefing, there would be dirt galore to find. And yet no.
Depp was described as a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ and someone who ‘doesn’t have a mean bone in his body’, despite the disturbing accusations that had been levelled against him. Friends of Depp also told Barresi that Depp had ‘respect and adoration for women’ — in contrast to Heard’s claims that he was physically and mentally abusive.
Depp ultimately lost a 2020 libel case heard at the High Court in London against a UK newspaper that had branded him a ‘wife-beater’. But in the U.S. in 2022, a second libel trial in Virginia against Heard ruled in Depp’s favour, with a jury awarding him a total of $15million (£11.5million).
Barresi can’t be sure about how much of his ‘evidence’ was used, but since very little of it was helpful to Heard’s legal team, it’s safe to assume not much. But was there a precise point at which he realised that, emotionally, he was switching sides?
‘There was a point in the investigation where, yes, I thought I had been hired on a faulty assumption, to look for evidence to prove something that wasn’t the case. But that didn’t stop me from continuing to work for Amber. I really did want to do a belt-and-braces job on it. I really wanted to find that Johnny had this in him.’
That he has called his book Johnny Depp’s Accidental Fixer is curious, given who was payrolling him.
He does seem to have come to idolise Depp. The more he dug, the more parallels he found with his own life. ‘My upbringing was quite similar to Johnny Depp’s, actually,’ he admits. ‘He had a violent father. He wanted to escape.’ He talks of being moved when he discovered Johnny’s mother had taken out a loan, which led to the seizing of the family’s possessions when they couldn’t pay. ‘They took his little TV, the thing that had provided him with an escape. That touched me.’
A documentary series about the high-profile trial between the former couple is trending on social media and is currently top of the Netflix charts
Paul Barresi was born just outside Boston, like Depp to a civil servant father with a penchant for aggression and alcohol.
Small in stature, Barresi began weightlifting to bulk up, and joined the U.S. military. He served in Vietnam before being discharged in 1971, when he became involved in the world of personal training. He worked as a bodyguard and personal trainer for movie movers-and-shakers, and through them, stars, too.
Joan Rivers was an early client. He says she squeezed his pecs and joked that he could train her, too, so he did. ‘She was a pure-hearted woman who put other people’s needs before her own.’
His introduction to Hollywood proper came by chance, when the crew of The Wild Party (1975) were filming near his gym. He lingered by the set and was spotted by the producer Ismail Merchant, of Merchant Ivory fame, who asked him if he wanted a job.
‘He said he was looking for someone local to act as a production assistant, run errands. They had me running round, getting nail polish and artichokes.’
Artichokes? ‘Yes, they were for Raquel Welch. I didn’t know who she was. I was just giving artichokes to a pretty girl in a robe.’
Barresi says there was talk of him being in an orgy scene but the producer changed his mind. ‘I would have loved to have been in an orgy scene with Raquel Welch. It would have made me a star!’
He was cast instead as a bartender, and was there when there were discussions about a scene which involved Raquel having to stand up on the bar. How would she get up there? ‘I offered to lift her but she said ‘We have choreographers for that’.
Later, she was a little more cordial.’ According to Barresi, the pair ‘had a kiss’.
His easy charm — and easy-on-the-eye looks — won him many admirers, including a producer who happened to be casting for models to pose for Playgirl magazine. ‘It was naked. I was determined to be a serious actor, but asked the wrong person for advice. I should never have done it, but that was how I got into taking my clothes off.’
From here it was a hop and a skip into the adult movie industry, which resulted in his family pretty much disowning him.
But how on earth do you get from the porn business into the private detective one? Very easily, he says.
‘You have two major industries in Hollywood. You have the movie industry, then you have the sex industry, which follows the movie industry like the moon.’
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Put simply, he was a guy who knew people — and gossip. One of his big breaks into private investigating came when an old girlfriend — who happened to be Michael Jackson’s maid — appeared on his doorstep, with her new husband. They brought troubling claims that they had witnessed Jackson sexually abuse a young man and wanted him to broker a deal with the National Enquirer, lover of sex and sleaze exposes.
‘They trusted me,’ he says. He recorded their account.
It was potentially explosive stuff, but then the couple engaged the services of a lawyer who, he says, tried to ‘write him out of the deal’. And at that point Barresi spotted an opportunity for self-advancement, and sent his recording to an established celebrity investigator working for Michael Jackson’s team, saying ‘this information would be useful for him’.
He describes himself as a fixer and had his PI license revoked for a year in 2012, but was hired by Amber Heard’s team in 2019.
Much of his celebrity work over the years can’t be reported, either because he has to stay quiet or because his claims are too toxic to print. He has been involved in very high-profile cases though, once confronting a stalker on Sharon Stone’s behalf.
During Tom Cruise’s messy divorce battle with Nicole Kidman, Tom’s legal team became aware of an individual who had claimed to have had a sexual relationship with Cruise.
‘There was nothing in it,’ Barresi says today. ‘But my brief was ‘Get this kid in. We need to interrogate him. That was the word — interrogate, not question’.’ After being interrogated, this man dropped the allegations.
He remains sympathetic — to a point — to Amber, but blames the #MeToo movement for the fact that this whole case came close to ruining her. ‘Amber was sailing high but when she lost, I think it took a little of the thunder out of the #MeToo debate.’
He’s still bothered about that look on her face, though. Which will hardly stop the speculation about this now long-running soap opera.
Read Paul Barresi’s book Johnny Depp’s Accidental Fixer here