Judge won't send Johnny Depp's defamation suit Amber Heard's $100M counter claim to Virginia Supreme Court

In a ruling from the bench, Judge Penney Azcarate refused to allow lawyers for actress Amber Heard, Depp's ex-wife, to petition the Virginia Supreme Court to weigh in on legal issues at the core of her last attempt to dismiss the Depp's case.

Essentially, [Heard's] attorneys wanted the state's high court to tackle whether [USA] case law supports their contention that the court should embrace findings from a United Kingdom [libel laundry] that Depp, 58, abused his ex-wife on a dozen occasions. This would have ended the [Depp's] Virginia case, which is based upon Depp's charge that Heard, 35, defamed him by describing herself as a domestic abuse survivor.
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Filed in March 2019, Depp contends that an op-ed written by Heard and published in the Washington Post defamed him....Depp lost his "Pirates of the Caribbean" part four days after publication of the editorial.
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Depp's attorney, Ben Chew ... pointed out that in August, Azcarate handed down a 10-page opinion rejecting [Heard's] argument that the case should be dismissed because of the U.K. ruling.
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In her opinion, Azcarate noted, "[Depp's] defamation claim [against The Sun] in the U.K. was based on completely different statements than the present case." In her ruling today, Azcarate ticked through each legal standard required to send [Heard's appeal] to the Virginia Supreme Court and concluded that the case didn't qualify.