Schitt’s Creek alum Emily Hampshire is apologizing after she and a friend dressed as Johnny Depp and Amber Heard for Halloween.
“I want to address what is one of the most thoughtless, insensitive, and ignorant things I’ve ever done,” Hampshire, 42, wrote in a statement shared via Instagram on Wednesday, November 1. “For Halloween, I stupidly thought it would be funny to dress as Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.”
She continued: “I am deeply sorry and ashamed for putting something that awful out in the universe. Domestic abuse is never, ever funny. These are real issues with real people and I REALLY regret my actions. In the future I will do better. I’m so sorry.”
Hampshire deleted photos of herself dressed as Depp, 60, complete with drawn-on tattoos and accessories that referenced the actor’s 2022 defamation case against his ex-wife Heard, 37. Hampshire’s pal feigned tears in the snaps and donned a white top reminiscent of the one Heard wore when she cried on the stand in May 2022.
A plastic turd could be seen in Hampshire’s jacket pocket, a nod to Depp’s claim that he discovered “human fecal matter” on his bed in 2016 following a fight with Heard. The Canadian actress also posed with a bottle of wine, which some social media users interpreted as a reference to Heard’s claim that Depp sexually assaulted her with a liquor bottle in 2015.
“Wow. This is obviously in poor taste but the wine bottle prop? Gross,” one Reddit user wrote.
Others felt that the time for the controversial costume had come and gone as a jury ruled in favor of Depp in June 2022, awarding him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages.
“It really is a special kind of depraved to keep the costumes going a full year and a half later. @emilyhampshire clearly felt the need to rise to the task,” one X (formerly Twitter) user wrote.
Another person shared a similar sentiment via Reddit. “Well, this is insanely disappointing. Also, even if it weren’t offensive, this costume is so late to the party,” they wrote.
Depp first sued Heard, whom he was married to from 2015 to 2017, in February 2019 over her December 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post. Heard described herself as a domestic violence survivor in the piece, but didn’t mention Depp by name.
After the jury ruled in Depp’s favor, the actor shared a lengthy statement noting that he was “truly humbled” to have his “life back.” He concluded the message with, “Truth never perishes.”
Depp’s legal victory came three years after a judge ruled against him during his 2020 libel lawsuit against The Sun. (Depp sued the U.K. publication over an April 2018 story which cited allegations Heard had previously made detailing 14 different instances of abuse.) The judge ruled in October 2020 that The Sun’s claims against Depp were “substantially true.”
Depp and Heard officially settled their defamation lawsuit in December 2022, which the Aquaman actress called “a very difficult decision” in an Instagram statement at the time.
“It’s important for me to say that I never chose this. I defended my truth and in doing so my life as I knew it was destroyed,” Heard wrote, calling “the vilification [she] faced on social media” an “amplified version of the ways in which women are re-victimised when they come forward.”
