Robert De Niro yells "Shame on you!" at former assistant while on the stand

Robert De Niro especially didn't appreciate the claim that he would take phone calls while using the bathroom

By Sam Barsanti | October 31, 2023 | 9:04pm

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Robert De Niro Photo: David Dee Delgado

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much fun getting sued generally is, Robert De Niro does not seem to be having a good time today in court. He’s on the stand today in the case brought by his former personal assistant, Graham Chase Robinson, who has accused her former boss of subjecting her to—among other things—unwanted physical contact, sexually-charged comments, “stereotypically female duties like housework,” and other “office wife” duties like making her “scratch his back, button his shirts, fix collars, tie his ties, and prod him awake when he was in bed” even after De Niro made her an executive at his Canal Productions label. (You can read more about the accusations here.)

But it was another very specific allegation that pushed De Niro over the edge today, with Deadline reporting that he shouted “Shame on you, Chase Robinson!” on the witness stand when asked whether he had ever “audibly urinated while in a bathroom on a phone call with his assistant”—which, and this is not to be taken as an opinion in favor of either side of this suit, is the kind of stereotypical “bad boss” behavior that a bad boss might do in a comedy about a bad boss.

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De Niro later offered exasperated responses like “Give me a break with this stuff” and “You got us all here for this?” while reacting to the list of things he’s been accused of. He also exclaimed “She implies that she’s out in front of the building on her knees scrubbing the floor” when asked if he had ever asked Robinson to scratch his back—with De Niro also “gesticulating on the stand as if to demonstrate that he was asking for help with a hard-to-reach spot,” as Deadline describes it.

De Niro was reportedly on the stand for “about five hours” over the past two days.