Attorneys for Johnny Depp have asked a Virginia judge to deny Amber Heard's post-trial motions asking for a mistrial, calling the legal arguments "frivolous."

Heard and Depp were both found liable for defamation in their lawsuits against each other last month. The jury initially awarded $15 million in damages to Depp and only $2 million to Heard. Though, because punitive damages in the state of Virginia are capped at $350,000, the judge reduced Depp's $5 million in punitive damages to that amount.

Attorneys for Heard asked the court to declare a mistrial and order a new trial in a motion filed last week.

Depp's attorneys argued in a memo filed Monday that a judge cannot arbitrarily substitute their judgment for that of a jury.

The memo also said Heard's contention that the damages awarded to her ex-husband are excessive and unsupported by the evidence is "baseless."

"While Ms. Heard slings an exceptional amount of mud at the wall in the hope that something might stick, the jury's verdict on damages was perfectly reasonable and supported by the evidence and testimony in this case," Depp's legal team states in the memo.

Attorneys for Heard also claimed in a court filing last week that the information on the jury panel list sent to counsel ahead of trial does not appear to match the demographics of one of the jurors, compromising Heard's rights to due process.

Heard waived her right to challenge the accuracy of the jury panel information because her team didn't raise the issue with the court at the time, Depp's attorneys argue.

"Mr. Depp respectfully requests that this Court deny Ms. Heard's frivolous motion in its entirety and reject her outlandish requests to set aside the jury verdict, dismiss the complaint, or, in the alternative, order a new trial and investigate Juror 15," the memo says.

Depp sued Heard for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post in which she described herself as a "public figure representing domestic abuse." Though Depp was not named in the article, he claimed it cost him lucrative acting roles.

Heard countersued Depp, to whom she was married from 2015-2016 before divorcing, for defamation over statements Depp's attorney made about her abuse claims.

After several weeks of testimony, the jury found that Heard defamed Depp in three separate statements in The Washington Post piece, and that Depp defamed Heard with one statement his attorney made.

Prenups, or pre-nuptial agreements, don't always have the most positive connotation. 

While they are legal agreements entered into by couples before marriage — often to keep finances separate despite being otherwise legally joined  — they can be a touchy subject for couples starting to build a life together.

But that stigma seems to be fading away. A new report from The Harris Poll said that this year, 15% of U.S. adults surveyed signed a prenup, which is up from just 3% in 2010. It also found that 35% of unmarried people say they're likely to sign a prenup in the future.

In the Americas, prenups go back to 17th century Canada, when French colonist men married women who came to the country with financial assistance from King Louis XIV. These women were so highly sought after that they were able to convince their husbands to sign prenups. This came at a time when men outnumbered women, so women had a leg up. Eventually that gender ratio evened out, and prenups went away.

They got popular again in the U.S. much later. A 1970 Florida case Posner v Posner ruled that prenups should be a standard practice.

One big possible factor in their usage today is the fact that millennials now have more debt than previous generations. One survey found that nearly three quarters of millennials have over $100,000 in debt on average, not including mortgages. 

The most common debt is credit card debt followed by student loans. There's also medical debt and personal loans. 

Prenups can protect your partner from taking on your debt in the case of death of divorce. In some states, your spouse can be held accountable for all of your debt acquired during the marriage.

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Kelly Chang Rickert is a family law attorney in California who specializes in prenups, and she sees debt come up in divorce cases all the time.  

"It's not unusual for me to have a divorce where one side has a Neiman Marcus card and charged up $70,000, and the other side... they are responsible for half the debt because it was acquired during the marriage," Chang Rickert said.

But the breakdown of who's responsible for what differs from state to state. For instance, some states are community property states, meaning unless you sign a prenup, everything acquired during the marriage must be split 50/50. That's how things work in Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.

In other states, laws differ. There can be different rules around what makes prenups enforceable. For example, in Connecticut there's a specific window of time between when the prenup is presented and when the marriage happens for it to hold up. So, it's important to see what a state requires beforehand.

Another reason more people could be getting prenups is because they're getting married later in life and have more assets to protect coming into the marriage. According to Pew, in 2019 the average age a man first got married was 30, and for women it was 28. That's three years later for both men and women compared to 2003 and four years later than 1987.

"These days, a lot of people work for themselves," Chang Rickert said. "If you're a social media influencer or you're an artist or you're a writer, a lot of people make money off their creative efforts. So if they have a business coming into the marriage, a lot of them don't want to share that in case it doesn't work out."

This leads to the question of how finances are split. This determines what a prenup could look like. In the 70s and 80s, it was common practice to put all your money into shared accounts with your spouse. But over the past several years, the number of married couples who keep some of their finances separate has risen.

Experts say if couples have a joint account for things they share, they can opt to keep everything else separate, and in the case of divorce, they'll only have to worry about dividing the joint account. But it's important to note that separate accounts won't stay separate unless a prenup is signed stating that.  

"Even if you don't have a prenup, you kind of do: It's called the law," Chang Rickert said. "So if you don't have a prenup, you're just going by what your state law says. California says community property, so your debt is my debt. That's what the state law says. So if you don't like that, then you should craft your own."

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Rickert Chang recommends getting a prenup ideally a year before your wedding. She also points out a few pros of prenups. For one, the stereotypical scenario we see in movies where a rich guy asks his fiancé to sign a prenup — it could actually be a good thing.  

"If you were smart about it, and the guy's like, 'I want you to sign a prenup saying I don't want community,' then what you could do is you can negotiate it," Chang Rickert said. "You could be like, 'Fine, I won't touch your stuff, but in lieu of that, I would like 50,000 a year or 1,000, 100,000 a year,' and that way you can negotiate, and you can actually get money by agreeing to sign a prenup."

There's also certain professions where it's strongly encouraged to protect the other person. 

"Definitely lawyers or doctors, I think you should always get prenup," Chang Rickert said. "Not just only because it's my business — I don't want you taking half of it, but also it's a business that I can get sued on. So, I would like to protect you from any lawsuits that I might get."

As prenups have become more common, more people have dug into this topic on social media platforms like TikTok. Chang Rickert has an account of her own where she educates people on prenups to help break down myths and stigmas, including that they aren't just for rich people and not just in case of divorce.

Now, there aren't necessarily more divorces now. CDC data shows that divorces declined between 2000 and 2020. 

However in the case of a divorce, not signing a prenup could really pile on to the cost of divorce, which can already be pretty high, costing between $15,000 to $20,000 on average.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk took the witness stand Friday to defend a 2018 tweet claiming he had lined up the financing to take Tesla private in a deal that never came close to happening.

The tweet resulted in a $40 million settlement with securities regulators. It also led to a class-action lawsuit alleging he misled investors, pulling him into court Friday.

The mercurial billionaire took the witness stand wearing a dark suit on the third day of a civil trial in San Francisco that his lawyer unsuccessfully tried to move to Texas, where Tesla is now headquartered, on the premise that media coverage of his tumultuous takeover of Twitter had tainted the jury pool.

The nine-person jury assembled earlier this week will be responsible for deciding whether a pair of tweets that Musk posted on Aug. 7, 2018 damaged Tesla shareholders during a 10-day period leading up to a Musk admission that the buyout he had envisioned wasn't going to happen.

A month later, Musk stepped down as Tesla's chairman while remaining CEO as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission settlement without acknowledging any wrongdoing.

In the first of those those two 2018 tweets, Musk stated “funding secured” for a what would have been a $72 billion buyout of Tesla at a time when the electric automaker was still grapping with production problems and was worth far less than it is now. Musk followed up a few hours later with another tweet suggesting a deal was imminent.

On the stand Friday, Musk — who last year bought Twitter for $44 billion — said tweeting is “most democratic way” to communicate with investors.

"I care a great deal about retail investors,” he said during questioning by shareholder attorney Nicholas Porritt.

But he acknowledged that investors can get more detail in a traditional corporate filing with securities regulators, given the character limits set on Twitter.

“I think you can absolutely be truthful" on Twitter, Musk said. “But can you be comprehensive? Of course not.”

Even before Musk took the stand, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen had declared that the jurors can consider those two tweets to be falsehoods, leaving them to decide whether Musk deliberately deceived investors and whether his statements saddled them with losses.

Musk has previously contended he entered into the SEC settlement under duress and maintained he believed he had locked up financial backing for a Tesla buyout during meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.

The trial over his Tesla tweets come at a time when he has been focusing on Twitter, which he acquired in October after trying to back out of that purchase.

Musk’s leadership of Twitter — where he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers — has proven unpopular among Tesla’s current stockholders, who are worried he has been devoting less time steering the automaker at a time of intensifying competition. Those concerns contributed to a 65% decline in Tesla’s stock last year that wiped out more than $700 billion in shareholder wealth — far more than the $14 billion swing in fortune that occurred between the company’s high and low stock prices during the Aug. 7-17, 2018 period covered in the class-action lawsuit.

Tesla’s stock has split twice since then, making the $420 buyout price cited in his 2018 tweet worth $28 on adjusted basis now. The company's shares were trading around $133 Friday, down from the company’s November 2021 split-adjusted peak of $414.50.

After Musk dropped the idea of a Tesla buyout, the company overcame its production problems, resulting in a rapid upturn in car sales that caused its stock to soar and minted Musk as the world’s richest person until he bought Twitter. Musk dropped from the top spot on the wealth list after the stock market’s backlash to his handling of Twitter.

Three former inmates have reportedly filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after they say they were forced to listen to the children's song “Baby Shark" on repeat.

According to The Oklahoman, they are suing Oklahoma County commissioners, the county sheriff, the jail trust and two former officers at the jail.

An investigation found the officers handcuffed the inmates to a wall and played the song loudly, over and over, as a form of punishment, The Kansas City Star reported. The lawsuit reportedly compares the action to torture.

The officers were charged in 2020. They are scheduled to go to trial in February, The Oklahoman reports.

The inmates are reportedly seeking $75,000 in damages.