CUNY (The City University of New York) has apologized for publishing an article on Yarelyn Mena, a graduate of Hunter College, who was one of the lawyers on Johnny Depp’s legal team. The article was removed. CUNY released a statement saying: “We appreciate everyone who shared their concerns about an article in our newsletter featuring a recent CUNY graduate who worked on Johnny Depp’s legal team. We understand the strong negative emotions this article elicited and apologize for publishing the item. We have removed it from our CUNYverse blog. The article was not meant to convey support for Mr. Depp, implicitly or otherwise, or to call into question any allegations that were made by Amber Heard. Domestic violence is a serious issue in our society and we regret any pain this article may have caused.”
After receiving her law degree in 2015, Yarelyn Mena joined Brown Rudnick LLP as an associate. She also represented Depp in his defamation case against his ex-wife Amber Heard as his younger lawyer. Mena said in the now-deleted article: “I worked with the team on the opening and the closing and was the master of the facts of all the evidence. If someone needed pictures or text messages, I would look them up and assist everyone as we went along.”
K.C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, addressed the situation in a tweet, saying that Mena is a daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. In his opinion, the deleted article has some advice for students “who might want a future in law, but was removed, it seems, because of protests about the CUNY grad’s client.”
The fact that Depp won his defamation suit against Heard and provided evidence that he was a victim of domestic abuse inflicted by his ex-wife makes CUNY’s decision to remove the story and statement even more perplexing. Heard received $2 million for her countersuit, while Depp received a total of $15 million in monetary damages. Heard’s counterclaim was focused on something that one of Depp’s attorneys stated. The judge explained that Virginia law only allows for punitive damages up to $350,000, so after subtracting Heard’s damages, Depp received $10.35 million for a total of $8 million, reported Daily Wire.
The defamation suit was insanely popular. During the suit, some strange things happened. Related news reveal:
The summons for jury duty was sent out to a Virginia resident in April for the much-delayed $15 million defamation action Depp had set off in March 2019 against Heard for a 2018 Washington Post op-ed she penned on being the “public face” of domestic abuse, according to the redacted filing. But it seems, however, that there are two individuals residing at the same address with, at the very least, “the same last name” — one a 77-year-old and another a 52-year-old, also according to a filing.
It looks like the latter was the one who showed up, despite the former being the one summoned. “Thus, the 52-year-old [redacted] sitting on the jury for six weeks was never summoned for jury duty on April 11 and did not ‘appear in the list,’ as required,” the damning filing asserts.
The filing implies that the younger individual made it all the way to the jury, not noticed by officers or clerks of the court, without apparently ever being asked to produce any ID, or with perhaps fake ID. Additionally, it looks like someone filled out the required online information form either intentionally or accidentally to say that they were born in 1945.
