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The 52-year-old woman who filed suit earlier this year against actor Johnny Depp and the management of the Hollywood Palladium is defending her choice to file the suit anonymously in new documents submitted to the court today.
"Jane Doe," a UC Irvine medical professor and mother of two who has been on disability leave from her practice since 2009, says she is keeping her name and face out of the public eye to help her in "recovering from this horrific trauma," according to City News Service.
That trauma, she alleges, was sustained in December 2011 while she and her husband attended an Iggy Pop concert at the Palladium, and she holds Depp's security team partially responsible. Doe claims "Depp's goons went berserk" as she attempted to return to her V.I.P. seat at the show. The suit claims Depp's musclemen grabbed her from behind and bear-hugged her, restrained both of her wrists and ripped her cell phone from her hand "one finger at a time." The suit further states that one of the bodyguards handcuffed her and dragged her on the ground, causing her pants to fall off, exposing her rear-end to other patrons.
Doe also claims she "lost a bladder of urine on [her]self in public" while she was being "dragged through the Palladium." She lists several injuries from the incident, including a dislocated left elbow, bleeding, swelling, bruising, possibly broken bones and more damage to her pre-existing spondyloarthritis and fibromyalgia.
Depp is, not surprisingly, looking to have the suit against him dropped, despite Doe's allegations Depp is responsible for "civil rights violations and negligent hiring," among other accusations. Depp's legal team says the actor has nothing to do with any of this:
"For example, although (she) seeks to hold Depp liable under a negligent hiring and/or retention theory, she fails to allege any facts indicating that Depp was actually the employer of the individuals who purportedly caused her harm. Indeed, he was not.''
Live Nation, who run the Palladium, are also seeking a dismissal.
Incidentally, Depp's court documents also tsk-tsk "Jane Doe" for filing anonymously, since several articles and documents already publicly identify her as Robin Eckert; her name was on the police report, as gossip site TMZ initially reported back in December, adding that police note Eckert appeared "wasted" at the time.
