Amber Heard donated just $1.3 million of the $3.5 million she pledged to the ACLU from her Johnny Depp divorce settlement, and $500,000 of that likely came from Elon Musk, nonprofit says

• Amber Heard pledged to donate $3.5 million of her divorce settlement with Johnny Depp to the ACLU.
• The ACLU's COO and general counsel testified Thursday the organization received only $1.3 million.

When Johnny Depp and Amber Heard reached a settlement in their divorce in 2016, Heard announced that she would donate the entirety of her $7 million payout to charity. She said the money would be split between two organizations: the American Civil Liberties Union and Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

But the ACLU said it never received the full $3.5 million it was promised and believed about half the donations it received in Heard's name came from Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla whom Heard started dating after her breakup with Depp.

Terence Dougherty, the general counsel and chief operating officer of the ACLU, spoke about Heard's donations to the nonprofit in a prerecorded deposition played on Thursday in Depp's defamation trial against Heard.

Depp has accused Heard of ruining his reputation and career by insinuating that she had been the victim of domestic violence in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed. Heard has denied Depp's defamation allegations and says he physically assaulted her on multiple occasions before and during their marriage.

Dougherty said the ACLU received four donations in Heard's name, which totaled $1.3 million.

Only one of those payments was from Heard directly: a payment for $350,000 in August 2016.

The other payments were a $100,000 check from Depp, $500,000 from a donor-advised fund at Vanguard, and $350,000 from a donor-advised fund at Fidelity.

Dougherty said the ACLU believed the $500,000 Vanguard payment was from a fund set up by Musk.

Musk had emailed Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, indicating that Heard would donate the total $3.5 million over a 10-year period, Dougherty testified.

"Amber, I described your plan to donate $3.5 million to the ACLU over the next 10 years as you very much believe what you were doing," Musk wrote in an email sent to Romero in August 2016.

Heard hasn't donated the rest of the money, and she never signed a pledge form that ACLU staffers prepared for her, Dougherty said.

Heard asked the ACLU not to issue a press release about her $3.5 million pledge, Dougherty testified.

In 2019, when the ACLU expected the next installment, it never came, he said.

"We reached out to Heard starting in 2019 for the next installment of her giving, and we learned that she was having financial difficulties," Dougherty said.

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the donation in Heard's name. A representative for Heard also didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Within months of Depp and Heard's split in May 2016, rumors started to swirl about her dating Musk.

In text messages shown in court on Wednesday, Heard acknowledged to her former agent that she never really loved Musk. Reports that they had broken up came out in August 2017.

In December 2018 on the same day Heard's op-ed in The Washington Post was published, Heard announced she had taken on a role as an ACLU ambassador on women's rights. ACLU lawyers — including David Cole, the national legal director who has argued before the Supreme Court numerous times — had helped draft the op-ed, Dougherty testified.

After Twitter announced on Monday that it reached a deal for Musk to purchase the platform for $44 billion, the ACLU described the billionaire as "one of our most significant supporters" but said people should be anxious over the prospective effects of his ownership.

"We should be worried about any powerful central actor, whether it's a government or any wealthy individual — even if it's an ACLU member — having so much control over the boundaries of our political speech online," Romero said in a statement.