You scratch my back: De Niro court battle lifts veil on celebrity assistants
It’s a brutal truism of corporate America that the simplest way to get rid of an out-of-favour employee is to comb through their expenses – and why many employees never claim expenses at all.
What is less obvious is why a battle over expenses and working conditions between one of the biggest movie stars in the history of cinema and his former assistant landed in a Manhattan court last week in one of the strangest, longest – and most bitterly fought – legal spats ever seen in the world of the US’s A-list celebrities.
On the face of it, the claims and counterclaims are simple: the Taxi Driver star and acting legend Robert De Niro, 80, sued his former assistant Graham Chase Robinson for the return of $6m and 5m Delta frequentflyer miles, claiming that instead of attending to the De Niro family’s dayto-day affairs, Robinson binge-watched Friends and expensed dinners at Paolo’s, an uptown Italian eaterie, on her $300,000-a-year job.
Robinson, 41, a former Vanity Fair fashion department assistant to the late British stylist Michael Roberts, countersued soon after, in 2019, claiming a toxic workplace culture for women. She is seeking $12m in damages for emotional distress and reputational harm.
The details that have emerged from the unseemly fight have been brutal as the celebrity’s private doings – and those of his partner, Tiffany Chen – have been exposed to the public.
Jurors in court last week heard claims that the actor sometimes urinated while on the phone to Robinson, called her a “bitch to her face”, and asked her to scratch his back – a claim he did not deny on the stand. He might have asked Robinson to scratch his back once or twice, but never “with disrespect or lewdness”.
Finally, De Niro exploded: “Shame on you, Chase Robinson!”
A day later, the court heard from Chen, a martial arts instructor who had met the actor on the set of the 2015 movie The Intern. Twice-married De Niro, who practices tai chi, now has a months-old daughter, Gia Virginia Chen De Niro, his seventh child, with Chen.
Chen told the court she had never gotten along with Robinson, who had by 2019 been working for De Niro for 11 years. Chen described Robinson as “psychotic” and a “straight-up nasty bitch” who had formed an “imaginary intimacy” with the actor that was “very Single White Female” – an allusion to the 1992 psychological erotic thriller starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer
Jason Leigh.
Chen confirmed she had pressured De Niro to fire Robinson, and in a text to him called her a “mean, insecure, territorial girl” who was “only nice to the puppies” the couple shared. On the stand, Robinson strongly denied she had any romantic interest in the actor.
To Robinson’s face, Chen had been deeply complimentary. “You are really such an angel,” she texted Robinson after the assistant had gone to the couple’s Upper West Side townhouse to take some pots off the stove Chen had left simmering, setting off the alarms. On the stand, Chen said her praise for Robinson was “sarcastic”. De Niro’s longtime accountant confirmed that he had described Chen as a “psychopath” on a secretly recorded phone call with Robinson.
In one reading, the tale being told is straight from Rebecca – the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who refuses to accept the new wife and does everything in her power to undermine the intruder.
On the other, it’s an executive assistant tasked, as Robinson said on the stand, with answering to the family’s very demanding needs 24/7 on a dedicated cellphone – “the batphone”. It was, she testified, “connected to me”, she had “no personal space” and the job was “difficult and draining”.
The break came in early 2019 when, Chen testified, a private jet back from Antigua to New York was ordered without catering – an omission Chen considered probably deliberate on Robinson’s part. “She was attached to the control she thought she had in this dynamic,” Chen testified.
De Niro, who the court heard has a license to carry a firearm in the city and employed at least one assistant to curate the props and costumes from his long film career, agreed in a text that this was “unacceptable and wearing thin”. Robinson found herself stripped of responsibilities at the townhouse.
The case, which has been working though the courts up to the federal level for four years, even contains an opportunity for legal precedent. De Niro has admitted that there were no written rules for the people who worked for him at his company, Canal Productions, because, he said, he relied on the “rules of common sense”.
That’s a dangerous legal position for both employer and employee, says Brian Daniel at the Celebrity Personal Assistant Network, which finds and places assistants in high-wealth homes.
Daniel says that job descriptions for working in such environments are the most vexing issue he encounters. “This is by far the biggest problem in the celebrity assistant industry,” Daniels says. “Nothing else comes close.”
Daniels says the debate over the celeb-assistant job descriptions has been going on for three decades, and while celebrities and billionaires are entitled to privacy, assistants are entitled to work in non-toxic situations. Recent legal disputes involving domestic or other staff have included Jeff Bezos, Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, Sharon Stone and Kim Kardashian. They are only the tip of the iceberg because most cases never make it into public view.
What typically happens, Daniels says, is that the things that were not discussed in the job interview process start popping up: “I tell employers: ‘Look, tell me everything now, because I don’t want to get a call a week from now, from you or them, saying, ‘We’ve got a problem.’”
Typically, he says, celebrities and billionaires only come to his agency after they have burned through their relatives, childhood friends, friends of friends and neighbor’s niece who couldn’t hack their demands.
“Some people that contact me are candid, some aren’t, so one of the things I do is to bring up unusual duties or ‘combat pay’. There are situations that come up that could make a person queasy, and I don’t mean anything immoral or illegal,” Daniels adds. “What combat situations are they going to be in? Like scratching backs or being gone three months at a time? We have to know that.”
One assistant, he recalls, quit because their boss was nudist around the house.
The average celebrity assistant, Daniels estimates, is paid about $60,000 a year. That’s barely enough, in total, to rent an apartment in Los Angeles or New York. “The reason you can get away with that is because of the access to a luxury lifestyle,” Daniels says.
Vogue’s Anna Wintour recently advertised for an assistant position paying $60,000–$80,000. Applicants were asked to show experience in administrative support, strong writing and proofreading skills, and an “impeccable attention to detail”.
“If you can do those jobs for a year or two or hack it, then doors will fly open,” Daniels points out.
That doesn’t appear to have happened with Robinson.
She was ultimately well-paid but didn’t make an onward leap professionally. Daniels says this suggests that, all things being equal, something in the De Niro family dynamic must have changed. “It’s delicate, but this can be a difficult job,” Daniels says. The decision that jurors make could be consequential to assistants everywhere.