Actress Amber Heard, whose court showdown with ex-husband Johnny Depp made lurid headlines around the world, has announced the arrival of twins, sharing a precious image of the tiny feet of infants Ocean and Agnes.
The boy and girl are thought to have been born via a surrogate – like their sister Oonagh, four – and Heard says that she is ‘elated beyond words to celebrate the completion of a family I’ve strived to build for years’.
Her path to their birth will not have been simple: she has been living since 2023 in Madrid, Spain, a country where surrogacy is not legal and where ‘renunciation contracts’ signed by biological mothers, to give up babies they have birthed, are not legally valid.
Indeed, it’s thought that Heard, who remains a US citizen, arranged for the surrogacy to take place in America. She wrote on Instagram: ‘Becoming a mother by myself and on my own terms despite my own fertility challenges has been the most humbling experience of my life.’
Not to say one of the most dramatic – it appears the babies were born around a month prematurely, and certainly the piercingly tiny legs and feet in her shared picture would back up that theory.
As for the paternity of the infants, friends confirm that Amber is single, and has been since late 2021 and the break-up of her romance with Bianca Butti. (Camerawoman Butti has recently worked on the films Challengers and Queer.) Heard hasn’t shared the name of the twins’ father, if indeed she knows it – she could well have used an anonymous sperm donor.
Heard with her ex-husband Johnny Depp. The couple married in 2015 and divorced two years later in 2017
However, within minutes of sharing her post on US Mother’s Day on Sunday, theories began to circulate that the dad is Heard’s former boyfriend Elon Musk.
Why would anyone think this? Musk, the world’s richest man – and until recently right hand man to US President Donald Trump – has fathered at least 14 children and possibly more in a series of mostly unconventional relationships. He sees it as his mission to have as many children as possible – a ‘legion’ he says.
Earlier this year he was revealed as the father of a baby with influencer Ashley St Clair, reportedly telling her they would need to ‘use surrogates’ in order to have as many babies as he desired.
There has long been speculation that Musk and Heard created and froze some embryos during their 18-month romance, which caught fire after she and husband Johnny Depp broke up in 2016.
Much of this was driven by a statement from Jennifer Howell, a colleague of Amber Heard’s sister Whitney. When Heard was sued for libel by Johnny Depp in 2022 – over a piece she had written for the Washington Post alleging she was a victim of domestic abuse – Howell filed a statement into the US court saying: ‘Whitney told me…. [Amber] was in a legal battle with him [Musk]over the rights to embryos they had created together. He wanted to destroy them, and Amber tried to keep them to have a baby.’
Although Musk has said their romance was ‘mind bogglingly painful’, he has also maintained that he and Heard remained friends after breaking up, which could lend credence to the idea that he would support her in having his children.
In August 2017, confirming the split, he said: ‘We are still friends, remain close, and love one another.’
Speaking to his biographer in 2023, Musk said the romance had been ’18 months of unrelenting insanity’. He added: ‘It was brutal… I am often a fool but especially for love.’ His brother Kimbal described Heard as ‘toxic’ and ‘a nightmare’.
