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Robert De Niro erupted on the witness stand Tuesday against his former personal assistant during the New York City civil trial that will determine whether, among other things, he harassed her at work.
“Shame on you, Chase Robinson!” the actor shouted at the plaintiff in a packed federal courtroom in Manhattan when questioned about the actor’s behavior by a lawyer for Graham Chase Robinson. The question that triggered him was whether he had ever audibly urinated while on the toilet during a phone conversation with his assistant.
“Give me a break with this stuff,” De Niro said toward the end of his second day answering questions from attorney Andrew Macurdy. “You brought us all here for this?”
“I don’t take liberties with people who work for me,” he said, describing the suggestion he made as “so ridiculous, I don’t know what to say.”
De Niro was then asked if he asked Robinson to scratch his back. He protested and gestured on the witness stand as if to show he was asking for help in a difficult-to-reach area. He then mocked Robinson for portraying her life in De Niro’s service as one of endless servitude.
“She indicates that she is on her knees in front of the building and scrubbing the floor,” he said.
“There was never any indecency, disrespect or craziness that you meant to imply,” De Niro said to Macurdy, raising his voice. Then came the cry of “shame” hurled at Robinson as she sat across from him in the well with her lawyers.
Judge Lewis J. Liman intervened and asked if Macurdy would finish his questioning in time for lunch.
At that point, De Niro had spent a total of about five hours on the witness stand between Monday and Tuesday, being questioned about his workplace policies – which he repeatedly said were not written down but based on maxims like “trust” and “do the right thing.” “Thing” – and the conflicts between Robinson and his girlfriend, the martial artist Tiffany Chen.
Earlier on Tuesday, he said: “This whole case is nonsense” when confronted with a text message to Chen in which he wrote: “The balls, the nerves… how dare she” after Robinson demanded a plea deal and himself had refused to waive legal claims against De Niro after she quit the job.
“Tom will get her,” Chen wrote back, referring to Tom Harvey, the in-house attorney at Canal, the firm that manages De Niro’s business and personal affairs. At Chen’s urging and with De Niro’s approval, Harvey led an internal investigation into Robinson’s use of a corporate card for personal expenses and the alleged theft of items from Canal.
Macurdy sought to attack the basis for De Niro’s own lawsuit, in which she sought repayment of Robinson’s salary during her final three years at Canal and financial damages for using a company credit card for expenses such as meals and rides. Robinson’s countersuit calls the De Niro lawsuit retaliatory.
The frosty relationship between De Niro’s new girlfriend and his longtime personal assistant reached its peak with the new couple’s move into a Manhattan townhouse, hastening the end of an 11-year working relationship between the Oscar winner and Robinson.
Who is responsible for their professional separation in 2019 is another question in the federal civil trial that began Monday. Robinson accuses her ex-boss of gender discrimination, wage theft and retaliation. De Niro is suing Robinson for allegedly stealing from the company. The workplace theft included 5 million frequent flyer miles that Robinson transferred to himself on the way out of Canal, according to De Niro’s lawsuit.
On Monday, a lawyer for De Niro wasted no time portraying Robinson as a toxic employee. “Your colleagues will tell you the truth: She was condescending, demeaning, controlling and abusive,” attorney Richard Schoenstein told jurors in opening statements. “I could go on, but it would be better to hear directly from them when they take a stand.”
She was also “a good worker,” her former boss said on the witness stand on Monday. “I relied on her, I trusted her,” De Niro testified under questioning by a Robinson lawyer, Andrew Macurdy. That trust was shattered, according to De Niro and his lawyers, when Robinson summarily resigned in April 2019 as an internal investigation into his corporate spending was launched at the urging of De Niro’s girlfriend, martial artist Tiffany Chen. They first met on the set of his film “The Intern” from 2015.
The trial brings together both De Niro’s original lawsuit and Robinson’s countersuit, providing a first-day window into the privileged life of the acclaimed actor, founder of the Tribeca Film Festival and owner of the Nobu restaurant and hotel chain. Before Robinson quit, she was making $300,000 a year as De Niro’s production and finance director at Canal – a lofty title De Niro gave her “because she wanted to” – working from Los Angeles, London and Spain from with her Company-paid vacation.
Robinson’s portfolio included everything from family gifts to scheduling, press interviews and hotel bookings. She was named his primary emergency contact and the person De Niro called at 4:30 a.m. when he injured his back falling down the stairs at his home.
Robinson, in her own version of the lawsuit, was the 24-hour employee who worked 80 to 90 hours a week for less pay than some male Canal employees and put up with her boss’s crass behavior, uncomfortable requests and sexualization had to put up with jokes. She stuck around partly because she wanted a way to actually work on films and because she feared that De Niro would refuse to give her a written recommendation.
“Mr. “De Niro is one of the best known, wealthiest and most powerful people in the entertainment industry,” Robinson’s lawyer Brent Hannafan told jurors on Monday. “Chase was afraid that if he didn’t give her a recommendation, she wouldn’t get another job would.”
All parties agree that the relationship ultimately failed because of the “townhouse project,” as it was called in court. Robinson helped find the four-story property near Central Park for De Niro, Chen and several De Niro children. She was tasked with furnishing, decorating and childproofing the interior before she was released from townhouse duty by the couple. The final straw, by all accounts, was a delay in removing De Niro’s father’s artwork so the interior could be repainted.
Jurors on Monday saw texts and emails from Chen to De Niro in which they objected to Robinson’s central role in planning the new home and an exaggerated, almost maternal sense of her position toward De Niro’s children. “She is so out of line and lost in her fantasy that she talks like she is the stepmother,” Chen wrote via email. She criticized Robinson’s “stubborn nature and his insane, conceited intimacy with you.”
According to De Niro’s lawyers, Robinson was angry about the demotion and resigned shortly afterward. Robinson responded that she resigned because De Niro and Chen had made her work environment unbearable.
“I didn’t want her to screw everyone over and create a big, messy problem,” De Niro said of Robinson, who watched from her seat among her lawyers. “Of course I wanted everything to work. I wanted everyone to be happy and play well, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.”