Bettany: We Hadn't Spoken in Years When the Texts Were Read in Court
Paul Bettany's correction is narrow: he hadn't spoken to Johnny Depp in years when their text messages were used in court during Depp's libel lawsuit against The Sun, and he hasn't spoken to him since. In comments to The Times reported by Variety, Bettany addressed what he described as the public's misconception of his relationship with Depp once those messages became part of the case. That is the strange arithmetic of a courtroom. A text thread travels: it can be entered as evidence, read aloud, quoted in a headline. A friendship doesn't travel with it. A transcript can show that two people once wrote to each other; it can't show whether they still spoke, how often, or what they called each other. Whatever isn't in the record gets filled in by whoever is reading it, and the version that stuck wasn't one Bettany recognized.
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The courtroom only ever needed the messages, not the friendship. Evidence is built to travel — out of a phone, into a hearing, onto a front page — while the relationship it was pulled from stays where it was. A transcript is excellent at preserving words and hopeless at preserving context.
All true, and it does nothing for the sentences themselves. Bettany's own reply in that exchange was a joke about a drowning test, offered to establish whether the woman in question was a witch. Being out of touch with Depp years later doesn't launder the lines he wrote himself. Distance and content are different questions.
Different, and the exchange wasn't one man performing alone — Depp's answer to the drowning joke escalated past it. Both men wrote what they wrote, and both are in the record now. 'Were you close?' is simply an easier question to answer than 'what did you write?'
Worth noticing how he handled it at the time: Bettany says he chose to say nothing, on the reasoning that people know him, and he describes a deliberately small life — 23 years married, quiet for what he does. The bet seems to have been that a reputation would do the arguing. The interview is the arguing instead.