Johnny Depp's Wife Amber Heard To Appear In Court Over Dog Smuggling

That old dog smuggling thing in Australia just won’t go away for Johnny Depp and his wife Amber Heard.

Heard has now been ordered to appear in court in the Gold Coast in November over allegations she illegally brought her and Depp’s Yorkshire terriers Pistol and Boo into the country earlier this year.

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According to magistrate Jackie McGee, she will face commonwealth offences of illegally importing animals into Australia and producing a false document.

Heard’s lawyers had obtained a two month adjournment on the court appearance.

Technically, the offence could mean that Heard could go to jail for 10 years, but it’s unlikely such severe action would be taken.

But she is being asked to defend herself in the official channels, so some punishment could well be levied if she’s found to have broken the law.

The news of Depp and Heard’s dogs swept the world’s media in May, aided in no small measure by remarks made by Australian agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce.

After it emerged that Heard had brought Pistol and Boo into the country on a private jet without proper documentation (thanks to pictures taken in a dog grooming parlour which were later posted online), Joyce went on the offensive.

Threatening to have the terriers put down if they were not removed from Australian soil, he said: “It’s time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States,” Joyce said.

“He [Depp] can put them on the same chartered jet he flew out on to fly them back out of our nation.”

He then gave the couple a deadline of 48 hours to remove the dogs, which they adhered to.

“They should be screened like everyone else,” he added.

“The reason you can walk through a park in Brisbane and not sort of have in the back of your mind – what happens if a rabid dog comes out and bites me or bites my kid – is because we’ve kept that disease out.

“I’ll tell you how close it is, it’s in Bali, it’s just next door, so this is not fanciful stuff and therefore we’re very diligent about what comes into our nation.”

Depp was on the Gold Coast filming the latest movie in the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ series at the time of the incident.

Speaking about the incident at the Venice Film Festival over the weekend, Depp said: “I killed my dogs and ate them, under direct orders of some kind of, I don’t know, sweaty, big-gutted man from Australia.”

Image credits: AP/Getty