Robert De Niro’s former assistant awarded $1.2 million in gender discrimination lawsuit

Robert De Niro’s former personal assistant has been has awarded more than $1.2 million (£982,000) after one of his companies was found responsible for subjecting her to a toxic work environment.

While the jury found Mr De Niro was not personally liable for the abuse, it said on Thursday that his company, Canal Productions, engaged in gender discrimination and retaliation against ex-assistant Graham Chase Robinson.

The company has been ordered to pay two payments of $632,142 to her.

Mr De Niro, who spent two days on the witness stand a the two-week trial, has been ensnared in two lawsuits with Ms Robinson since she quit in April 2019.

He was not in the New York courtroom when the verdict was delivered on Thursday afternoon.

Lawyers on both sides claimed victory.

"We're thrilled with the verdict," Ms Robinson's attorney, Brent Hannafan, said as he stood with his client outside the courthouse. "Couldn’t be happier."

Meanwhile, Mr De Niro attorney Richard Schoenstein called the verdict "a great victory for Mr De Niro."

"He is absolved. He is not liable for anything that was charged against him at all," Mr Schoenstein said.

"There's a modest award against the company. But, you know, they were looking for $12 million."

Ms Robinson, 41, had testified that De Niro, 80, and his girlfriend, Tiffany Chen, teamed up against her to turn a job she once loved into a nightmare.

Mr De Niro and Chen each testified that Ms Robinson became the problem when her aspirations to move beyond Canal Productions, the De Niro company that employed her, led her to make escalating demands to remain on the job.

Emails in which Chen told Mr De Niro that she thought Ms Robinson was having "imaginary intimacy" with him and wished she was his wife were shown to jurors.

Ms Robinson testified that she never had romantic interest in De Niro.

In two days on the witness stand, the actor told jurors that he boosted Ms Robinson's salary from less than $100,000 annually to $300,000 and elevated her title to vice president of production and finance at her request, even though her responsibilities remained largely the same.

When she quit, Mr De Niro said, Ms Robinson stole about $85,000 in airline miles from him, betrayed his trust and violated his unwritten rules to use common sense and always do the right thing.

At times, Mr De Niro acknowledged from the witness stand many of the claims Ms Robinson made to support her $12 million gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit, including that he may have told her that his personal trainer was paid more than her in part because he had a family to support.

He agreed he had asked her to scratch his back on at least two occasions, dismissing a question about it with: "Ok, twice? You got me."

He also admitted that he had berated her, though he disputed ever aiming a profanity her way, saying: "I was never abusive, ever."

He also denied ever yelling at her, saying every little thing she was trying to catch him with was nonsense and that, at most, he had raised his voice in her presence but never with disrespect.

Then, he looked at her sitting between her lawyers in the well of the courtroom and shouted: "Shame on you, Chase Robinson!"

The actor has won two Oscars over the past five decades in films such as Raging Bull and The Deer Hunter.

He currently stars in Martin Scorsese's film Killers of the Flower Moon.

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