Johnny Depp’s love of music didn’t start out happily. Instead, he gravitated towards it to escape his volatile home life. “When I was 12, and my parents were always fighting, I had hardly any contact with the outside world,” Depp told Hello! magazine back in 1997. “As soon as I got my guitar, I locked myself in my room every day after school and did nothing but play until I fell asleep.” His parents’ tumultuous relationship ended in divorce and created a transient life for young Depp. “We moved over 30 times before I finally moved out for good,” he said, explaining that this could be the reason for his peripatetic life as an adult: “It’s my sense of being out of place in the world.”

It wasn’t just the lack of roots that made Depp’s childhood so challenging, however. His mother, Betty Sue Palmer, was allegedly often emotionally and physically abusive towards her children. “She could become quite violent, and … she was quite cruel,” Depp later said in his 2022 defamation trial against Amber Heard, stating that his mom would do things like throw ashtrays at him and his siblings or strike them with a “high heeled shoe or a telephone or whatever was handy.” 

With a lacking sense of “security or safety” being a constant throughout his childhood, Depp noted that his mother’s lashing out was unpredictable. Saying that he and his siblings would flinch when she neared them, Depp added how she would also instruct his father to hit him with his belt — though his father was, by nature, a “kind” and reserved man, according to the actor.

If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

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