Robert De Niro’s former executive assistant said she found it “creepy” when the actor insisted she scratch his back, an example of behavior she found controlling and abusive before she left her job in 2019 quit, as she testified Friday at a civil trial in New York.
During a full day of testimony, Graham Chase Robinson became emotional several times as she claimed that the trauma she suffered before she quit working for De Niro in 2019 after 11 years left her unemployed and depressed.
“I had an emotional and mental breakdown. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I couldn’t run. I was overwhelmed. I felt like I had hit rock bottom,” she told jurors in Manhattan federal court.
He said he suffers from anxiety and depression and has not worked in four years, despite applying for 638 jobs.
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“I don’t have a social life. I feel so humiliated and ashamed and I feel so judged. I feel so hurt in a way. …I lost my life. I lost my career. I have lost my financial independence. I lost everything,” she said.
Robinson, 41, is seeking $12 million in damages from De Niro, 80, for gender discrimination and retaliation. De Niro has asked a jury to award him $6 million for breaching his duties of loyalty and loyalty.
Robinson said the scratches on his back appeared several times over the years until he once gently protested and suggested to De Niro that there was a device he could use instead.
“I like the way you do it,” De Niro said.
She described the comment as “creepy” and “disgusting.”
During his testimony earlier in the week, De Niro mocked the reckless claim and other allegations, saying he always treated Robinson with respect and never with “disrespect or lasciviousness.”
He also claimed he never yelled at him in court, yelling, “Shame on you, Chase Robinson!” He quickly apologized for the outburst.
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Robinson said that her duties, which required her to be available 24 hours a day, included helping De Niro navigate a complicated love life that at one point included a wife, an ex-girlfriend and a new girlfriend , which he didn’t want. The world doesn’t know anything about her yet.
Robinson described De Niro in her statement as sexist in his language toward female employees and discriminatory in the way he paid them.
Her testimony was challenged under cross-examination when a lawyer for De Niro confronted her with the fact that the actor’s highest-paid employee was a woman and that a man who worked for one of De Niro’s companies, Canal Productions, as well as Robinson, earned less as a third of the $300,000 salary she was earning before her resignation.
Robinson testified about several cases in which he claimed that De Niro, who has found fame in Florida over the past five decades in films such as “Raging Bull,” “The Deer Hunter” and Martin Scorsese’s new film “Killers of the Moon,” and “won two Oscars,” he exploded angrily, sometimes using profanity.
Around Christmas 2017, Robinson said, a drunken De Niro called her one night angrily because he couldn’t find some gifts that had been sent from the office for the holidays.
“He was screaming because he couldn’t find some of the presents. He was cursing left and right,” Robinson said.
He then insulted her and hung up on her, he said.
He said he found it “incredibly hurtful… especially when you’re just trying to do your job.”
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