‘Top Chef’ producer ‘scared to death’ by Teamsters
A reality television producer whose screen credits include “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” testified she refused to roll film on an allegedly profane and violent siege of a “Top Chef” set by Teamsters, saying, “I didn’t want to die that day.”
“I was scared to death, to be honest,” Justin Rae Barnes testified yesterday in the extortion trial of Teamsters John Fidler, Daniel Redmond, Robert Cafarelli and Michael Ross.
Barnes reluctantly complied with a prosecutor’s request that she tell the jury what vulgar words members of Charlestown-based Local 25 hurled at her when they turned up at a “Top Chef” shoot at the Steel & Rye restaurant in Milton on June 10, 2014, furious they’d lost truck-driving jobs to nonunion help.
“Don’t tell my mom I said this, OK?” Barnes quipped.
Fidler’s attorney Timothy O’Connell pointedly asked Barnes if she had ever done any acting.
Wrinkling her nose and then laughing, Barnes answered, “When I was young.”
Day four of testimony picks up this morning with former production assistant Daniel Kendrick retaking the stand.
Kendrick, an employee for season 12 of “Top Chef” who handled everything from driving trucks to picking up trash, pointed out Fidler yesterday as one of two Teamsters he said were loitering near crew vehicles whose tires had been slashed during the union protest. Despite a no- in- court- identifications order, U.S. District Court Judge Douglas P. Woodlock let it pass with a rebuke to Kendrick not to do it again by gesturing at or otherwise calling attention to the other three defendants.
Kendrick said he was told during his trial prep that if he recognized any of the men he should “naturally point them out.” Woodlock called the instruction “at best, negligent.”
One of the damaged vehicles, a GMC Denali pickup truck, was Kendrick’s. He had been dispatched to remove identifying placards from rented minivans parked outside the Steel & Rye.
Kendrick referred to Fidler as “the big guy.”
“He was saying, ‘What are you doing? Why are you here?’ He was inches from my face,” Kendrick said about their run-in. “I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know why they were by the vehicles. I started to get suspicious.”
Kendrick said he kept his cool when protesting Teamsters “called me faggot, fat, all sorts of things. ... I’ve dealt with bullies my whole life. I’ve become numb to the scenario, quite frankly.”