Robert De Niro’s voice punched through the respectful hush of the Manhattan courtroom like a hammer through plate glass. “Shame on you,” he shouted. A ripple of astonishment spread across the chamber. Had the actor, 80, mistaken a civil lawsuit for a Hollywood set during the hard-swinging prime of his career?
The outburst provided an immediate talking point during this week’s legal jousting between De Niro and his former assistant and vice-president of his production company, Chase Robinson, who is suing him for $12m ($20m) in damages for “severe emotional distress and reputational harm”.
The lawsuit has dragged on for several years, and De Niro has angrily denied the accusations. For good measure, he is counter-suing Robinson for $6m (£4.9m), accusing her of repurposing company funds for her personal use.
It’s far from clear how the case will play out now it has finally reached court. Whatever happens, it seems sure to banish any lingering illusion that De Niro is nothing like the hot-headed characters he plays on screen.
The allegations against De Niro include “gratuitous unwanted physical contact” involving the actor requesting Robinson scratch his back. She suggested using a backscratcher – he said, “I like the way you do it”. De Niro didn’t deny making such requests but that it was never with “disrespect or lewdness”. It was this inference that prompted him to shout “Shame on you” towards Robinson from the witness stand this week.
A sketch of Robert De Niro testifying in Manhattan. Photo / AP
Other claims include that De Niro asked Robinson to fetch him a martini from the Nobu sushi restaurant at 11pm. He also said that he called her twice during her grandmother’s funeral, asking that she order a bus ticket for his teenage son. “So?” he shrugged in court.
De Niro has conceded several points. He “might have” called Robinson a “bitch to her face”. And when she failed to remind him of an urgent meeting, he concedes he lost his temper and “possibly” called her a brat.
“De Niro would unleash tirades against Ms Robinson – often while he was intoxicated – in which he denigrated, berated, bullied, and hurled expletives at her,” her lawyers charged in their original lawsuit in 2019. De Niro’s representatives hit back. “The allegations made by Graham Chase Robinson against Robert De Niro are beyond absurd,” his lawyer, Tom Harvey is quoted as saying.
Robert De Niro's former assistant Graham Chase Robinson outside court in New York, October 30. Photo / Getty Images
De Niro’s production company, Canal, was quick to file a counter-suit against Robinson. It accuses her of misappropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and of “loafing during working hours, binge-watching astounding hours of TV shows on Netflix”.
His lawyers will no doubt put up a robust defence in the weeks ahead. And yet a voicemail attached to Robinson’s suit paints an arguably damning portrait. It is alleged that De Niro left it for her following her move to Europe.
“Chase, you are living in Spain and you’re f______ upset with me cause now you tell me how nice you have it your life over there and you f______ don’t answer my call?
“How dare you, you are absolutely fired you’re f______ history. How dare you with all the good things you do this is b_______ after Christmas f___ this how dare you f______ disrespect me how much you did.”
Whatever happens, De Niro will still be regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time. It’s almost as if we’ve known all along that he was sweary and grumpy but have gifted him a free pass… because he’s Robert De Niro.
Robert De Niro drives his taxi in a scene from the film 'Taxi Driver', 1976. Photo / Getty Images
Nobody inhabits a street-level bad-boy with the same ferocity. Whether portraying a simmering gangster in Goodfellas, an avenging psychopath in Taxi Driver or a self-referential cartoon Nazi in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Movie, he’s always intensely watchable. Rocket-fuelled villainy has never burned so brightly than when the twirling moustache is figuratively affixed to De Niro’s upper lip.
The irony is that, off-screen, he has been built up as a secular saint. That despite his long history of intemperate behaviour in public and his past as a Sunset Strip party animal. Or the fact that, over the past 25 years, could you count on one bloodied stump his truly memorable performances. Modern De Niro can be a sulky, slumming hack – one who, many contend, is guilty of double standards.
Consider his ongoing tirades against Donald Trump: just last month he labelled the former President “evil” and a “wannabe tough guy”. De Niro apparently sees no disconnect between his attacks on the Republican party and his part in the turbocharged gentrification of New York, which has seen the city turned into Disneyland for high rollers.
He is, for instance, owner of the $1000 ($1667)-a-night Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca. The adjoining Tribeca Grill showcases work by his artist father. You can gawp at them as you wonder if you can afford the $21 ($35) heirloom tomato salad starter.
That’s just the tip of De Niro’s business iceberg. He’s co-founder of the upscale Japanese-Peruvian chain Nobu, which runs 39 restaurants and eight luxury hotels. Inevitably De Niro has banned Trump from his Nobu restaurants. Given the president’s reputation for blacklisting journalists, one might hope De Niro would take the higher ground. Apparently not.
He can also be vindictive against fellow actors – or so claims Mickey Rourke. The two had a falling out shooting Angel Heart almost 40 years ago. De Niro is not, it would appear, inclined to allow bygones be bygones. Rourke alleges that he vetoed him from appearing in The Irishman. “The casting person told my manager that Robert De Niro said he refused to work with me in a movie,” Rourke told an Italian TV show.
“I don’t look up to him no more; I look through him,” Rourke continued. “I came up from the s___. He doesn’t know that life. I lived that f______ life, so every time I look him in the face I look right through his asshole.” (A representative for De Niro subsequently released a statement on behalf of The Irishman’s producers and casting director: “Mickey Rourke was never asked to be in The Irishman, nor was he ever even thought of, discussed or considered to be in the movie,” it said.)
Robert De Niro in Cannes. Photo / Getty Images
It isn’t just fellow actors that get on his wrong side. He is a notoriously truculent interviewee – and neurotic to boot. “He’s become as paranoid as Marlon [Brando],” actress Shelley Winters confessed to Vanity Fair in 1987 “Bobby’ll phone to ask if I’ve seen him in Angel Heart — y’know, where he plays the Devil? — and I’ll say no, and he gets mad and hangs up on me. And another thing — I don’t see him no more!”
Vanity Fair touched on his reputation, during the golden period of his career, as a party animal. In the late 70s he ran with Robin Williams and John Belushi. De Niro was in fact one of the last people to see Belushi alive prior to the comedian’s fatal drug overdose in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in March 1982.
“He… gets very upset if people say anything about his friend John Belushi,” the magazine reported. “After the great comic died of cocaine-and-heroin poisoning in March 1982, De Niro broke down in sobs. He had been in Belushi’s room at the Chateau Marmont the night of his death, but he had left almost immediately, feeling that the woman Belushi was with was “trashy”.
Typically celebrities, like the rest of us, mellow as they age and become less hung up on themselves. Not De Niro. In 2015 he walked out of an interview with the Radio Times. He’d bristled at the “negative” questions and then bristled a little more when the interviewer made it clear she wasn’t thrilled about being addressed as “darling”.
The extraordinary faux-pas Emma Brockes had committed was to wonder whether Tribeca had not become overrun with wealthy bankers. She also asked De Niro about the challenge of not switching to autopilot on a movie set. She wasn’t accusing him of being on autopilot. The question was the inverse: an invitation for the actor to explain how he maintained his remarkable ferocity and focus in front of the camera.
“Paranoid” De Niro didn’t take it that way. “All the way through. Negative inference,” he told the astonished Brockes. “The whole way through and I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it, darling.”
“When someone is being unco-operative in that kind of interview, when they are obviously grumpy and knackered, you ask them a number of straightforward questions and you leave,” she later wrote. “You try to be respectful and polite, which I was. It wasn’t a hostile interview. Poor guy – who would want to be contractually obliged to do this stuff? But you make the best of it so you can go home.” (In 2006, US GQ writer Chris Heath spent three weeks profiling De Niro and managed to get him to say exactly 972 words).
It’s a great shame that the ugliness in the courtroom is unfolding just as De Niro puts in his finest performance in years, as a murderous sheriff in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. In that film, he expertly keeps his character’s temper in check; perhaps he’ll soon learn to do so when the cameras are off too.
