The former employee, Chase Robinson, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan accusing De Niro of asking her to perform such duties as scratching his back, buttoning his shirts, doing his laundry and vacuuming — making her effectively an “office wife” even as she was promoted. Robinson’s suit also said that he berated her, often while intoxicated, calling her names, and that he underpaid her compared with a male aide doing similar work.
“When he was verbally abusive he would be cursing and calling me names,” Robinson, 37, said, “he would hang up just to call back and do it all over again.”
De Niro’s lawyer did not immediately respond on Thursday to the countersuit. It comes more than one month after De Niro’s company, Canal Productions, accused Robinson of enriching herself by charging hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal expenses on a company credit card, spending, for example, more than $12,000 at a restaurant on the Upper East Side over two years and about $32,000 on Uber and taxi rides. It accused her of reimbursing herself or receiving direct payments for unauthorized purchases like a Louis Vuitton handbag and a dog sitter.
But the accusation that dominated the headlines was that Robinson had spent “astronomical” amounts of time watching television on the company’s Netflix account, including 55 episodes of “Friends” over four days in January. According to that lawsuit, such behavior was common for Robinson. It said that she “loafed” during work hours, streaming shows like “Schitt’s Creek” and “Arrested Development.”
In presenting her own account of her falling-out with her ex-boss, Robinson shifts some of the focus onto De Niro, 76, an intensely private actor who has been in the public eye lately because of his role in the new film “The Irishman,” and his obscene denunciations of President Donald Trump.
Robinson’s lawsuit denies the claims in Canal’s suit, filed Aug. 17 in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, and asserts that it was meant to intimidate Robinson after her lawyer warned De Niro’s lawyer that she had legal claims.
Robinson’s lawsuit asked for at least $12 million, double what her former boss’ lawsuit demanded.
In 2008, De Niro hired Robinson, then 25, as his executive assistant at Canal Productions. The company “contracts the services of Robert De Niro to third parties,” its suit says, and is separate from Tribeca Enterprises, an entertainment company that De Niro started with others in 2003. At Canal Productions, Robinson said, she assisted De Niro on films.
It is common for celebrities to hire people to handle personal matters, but Robinson said some of what she was asked to do crossed into inappropriate territory. Several times, she said, De Niro would ask her to scratch his back, sometimes requesting that she do so in a bathroom adjoining his office.
Robinson said that several times when they were on the phone together, she could hear him urinating. Once, when he had asked her to buy a television for his bathroom, she said he asked her to imagine him sitting on the toilet so that she could figure out a good place for the television. She did not say his behavior ever rose to the level of groping or sexual propositioning.
Her lawsuit alleges gender discrimination, asserting that De Niro’s treatment of Robinson, including his name-calling, was gendered and that she was paid less than a male counterpart.
In an audio file of a 2012 voicemail message posted on the website of the firm representing Robinson, De Niro can be heard berating her, calling her a “spoiled brat” and saying “you’re history,” with an added expletive.
Robinson said that even as she took on new job titles throughout her 11 years at the company, eventually becoming vice president for production and finance, De Niro required that she do domestic work, such as vacuuming the floors and setting the table in his private home. She said that she complained to De Niro about his behavior and that, at times, things would improve temporarily.
Twice, Robinson’s lawsuit mentions an unnamed “paramour” of De Niro’s who is described as “disparaging” Robinson and assigning her “demeaning job duties.” De Niro is currently in divorce proceedings with his wife, Grace Hightower.
Robinson said in an interview that, in April, she decided to resign over email because the work environment had become “so unbearable.”
De Niro’s lawsuit painted a starkly different picture of Robinson’s time at Canal Productions. The lawsuit described her as a once-trusted employee who used her operational knowledge to benefit herself. Robinson’s salary climbed to $300,000 in 2019 from about $175,000 in 2017, the lawsuit said.
Robinson said that the detailed expenses documented in De Niro’s lawsuit were made at the direction of the actor himself (the Louis Vuitton handbag was a gift for one of his employees, she said) or allowed under company policy. She said that other employees at the company, and sometimes De Niro’s family members, made use of her company credit card and that not all of the charges were hers.
As for the accusations about binge-watching, Robinson said that she and her colleague put on “Schitt’s Creek” in the background while they were working on a monotonous task in the office. She said she would sometimes turn on “Friends” for “white noise” as she was falling asleep but that she has “never binge-watched during working hours.”
This article originally appeared in
.