Johnny Depp says he provided marijuana for his daughter to smoke when she was 13. This revelation came at a hearing on July 7 at London's High Court. Depp is suing The Sun for libel over an article that claimed he abused his ex-wife Amber Heard.
“I don’t want a 13-year-old going into some sort of paranoid tailspin. I knew the marijuana I had myself, that I smoked myself, is trustworthy and good quality.”
Depp had previously said he'd prefer that Lily-Rose, his now 21-year-old daughter with Vanessa Paradis, would smoke with him first to make sure she has a good experience.
Well, that happened in 2012. Here's how Depp described it at the hearing:
“My daughter was 13-years-old and as we all know at 11, 12, and 13-years-old when you go to a high school party you are approached by people who will want to give you drink because they are drinking at 12 and 13, doing cocaine at 12 and 13, and smoking marijuana at 12 and 13, doing ecstasy and doing many many drugs.
“My daughter was at a party and someone passed the joint to her. She was just 12 and she said she didn’t know what to do.
“I said, ‘Listen sweetheart, if you're at a party and someone hands you the joint, take the joint from the person and pass it to the next person. Please don’t experiment with drugs with people you don’t know.
"'Please, please, when you are really at the moment in your life when you are passed the joint and you really want to try it. Please do me the honor of coming to me when you are ready, and you really feel you are ready. I don’t want your first experience to be with people you don’t know, taking things you don’t know, that you don’t trust.'
“It’s a safety issue, it’s a father worried about his daughter in this kind of situation, when she came and said, 'We are ready.'
“I know the most important thing for a child if you are going to do something like that, I would rather have them be honest with me and me be honest with them, so she doesn’t go out there and do things and hide them from me. I want her to trust me.
"If my daughter says she was ready, she was ready. I wanted to make sure the settings were perfection, put on family TV, fill the refrigerator with ice cream, fill the freezer, make a situation where the experience is as pleasant as possible.
“I don’t want a 13-year-old going into some sort of paranoid tailspin. I knew the marijuana I had myself, that I smoked myself, is trustworthy and good quality.”
“If this is wrong in your eyes, I appreciate what you think but I was raising a daughter and I was being a responsible parents so far as I’m concerned," Depp told barrister Sasha Wass QC.
Depp and Heard, both actors, were married in 2015 and divorced in 2016. He paid her a $7 million settlement. Depp was in a relationship with the Paradis, who is French and also an actor, from 1998-2012. They have two children, Lily-Rose and Jack, who's 18.
Perhaps known best for his character Jack Sparrow in the four Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Depp has also portrayed Hunter S. Thompson twice (in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Rum Diary) and appeared in Donnie Brasco, Blow, Alice in Wonderland, Dead Man, Edward Scissorhands and many other movies. He's never won an Oscar, but has been nominated three times.
Lily-Rose is an actor/model. She last appeared in The King in 2019.
