Same here. I was always a fan of hers and thought she was cool, and given how private she’s always been, I was confident she wouldn’t speak up during any of this - I assumed if any of his exes were to testify for him, it’d be Winona, since she seemed to be hung up on him for years after their breakup. But lo and behold, Kate’s front and center while Winona went out of her way to hire an attorney to block her testimony from being used to defend him in the U.K. trial. Guess I’m Team Klepto! I’ll be sure to pillage my local department store in her honor.
But there’s been something bugging me about Kate’s testimony, and I wonder if anyone’s thought about this, but did anyone else think it made Amber seem more credible?
Hear me out. For those who didn’t watch it, you can here. It’s a whopping two minutes. Basically, she testified that Johnny never pushed her down a staircase; the truth was that she slipped and fell and he came to her rescue. This was supposed to refute what Amber testified a week earlier about how when she hit Johnny during a 2015 fight, she only did so because she’d heard a rumor that Johnny once pushed Kate down some stairs when they were dating. (For context, the fight in question was atop a staircase in Johnny’s apartment and Amber was worried he’d push her sister, Whitney, who was next to her at the time.)
Of course, the Deppies touted Kate’s testimony as a bombshell and the final blow to Amber’s credibility - “Amber said Johnny pushed Kate, but Kate said that never happened! She’s a liar!” - completely disregarding that Amber never said he pushed her as a fact, just that she’d heard a rumor he did.
And while I’d admittedly never heard that rumor before Amber first mentioned it, as soon as I heard Kate’s testimony, I believed Amber was telling the truth. Here’s why: Amber was 9 when Johnny and Kate were dating. How would she have even known there was a staircase incident unless it really were a rumor? Since, let’s say it was this sweet moment like Kate described it as and Johnny really did come to her rescue, how would Amber have possibly known about it twenty years later? I know Johnny’s in love with himself, but even I don’t think he’s casually recounting minor instances of his chivalry to people two decades after the fact. It seems bizarre Amber would have ever heard about it if that were the case.
The only way it makes sense for Amber to have known about it is if it really were a rumor that he’d pushed her, and either someone around him or in the industry mentioned it to her. If Kate testified that there’d never been a staircase incident altogether, that would’ve helped Johnny more, but the fact she did acknowledge something happened made my ears shoot up like Scooby-Doo. Again, how could Amber have known about something that happened twenty years before her and Johnny got together?
Something in the milk blow ain’t clean.
I saw someone on Twitter say the rumor was first mentioned in a British tabloid back in the '90s, but they had no source, so I can’t say if it’s true. But I have some U.K. followers, though, so if any of you are up for it, I’d be interested in seeing if you guys could snoop around. There are online databases here in the U.S. that catalog old issues of tabloid papers like the New York Post and Daily News; I have to assume there’s a similar one (whether through a university or public library) in the U.K. that has their equivalents (i.e. The Sun, The Mirror, or the now-defunct News of the World). While there’s no guarantee the rumor would appear in any of those (for all we know it could’ve been printed in a British gossip magazine, and those are even harder to find than American ones), it’s worth a shot.
As for Kate saying Johnny never hurt her (at least as far as stairs were related), I mean, we clearly know otherwise. It’s like what Kathy Griffin said in that clip I shared the other day, about when Charlie Sheen shot Kelly Preston - Kelly, Xenu bless her soul, insisted up to the day she died that it was an accident, but c'mon, it’s Charlie. We know better. That same common sense should apply to Johnny. Chances are if a guy’s drunk and high and throwing stuff around a hotel room, something has to hit his girlfriend, even accidentally. Even Woody Allen thought so when he parodied the Johnny-Kate hotel fight in his movie Celebrity (also starring Winona, funnily enough):
(Far from his best movie but there’s a scene where Judy Davis learns to deep throat with a banana.)