Robert De Niro (80) won’t let himself be forbidden from speaking. The actor wanted to give his acceptance speech at the Gotham Awards. He accepted an award there. But when he wanted to read his prepared speech from the teleprompter, he apparently noticed that crucial parts were missing. “The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out, and I didn’t know anything about it,” De Niro said, according to US media reports. “And I want to read it.” The Oscar winner went back to his seat and picked up his cell phone, from which he read his original version.
In his speech, Robert De Niro referred to his film “Killers of the Flower Moon”, which is about the murders of Native Americans out of greed.
And he brought it back to the present. “History is no longer history. The truth is not the truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and fueled by conspiracy theories and ugliness,” De Niro said. The allusion to former President Donald Trump (77) and his supporters cannot be ignored.
Then the actor addressed Donald Trump explicitly: “The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office. And in his current campaign of retaliation he is keeping the pace high.” According to De Niro, the Republican, who wants to move back into the White House in 2024, is attacking the weak and “destroying the gifts of nature.”
Trump also showed disrespect for Native Americans by using the name of a chief’s daughter as a swear word for Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren (74). With that, De Niro returned to “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
At this point the thanksgiving was due, as it was written on the teleprompter. But De Niro didn’t really want to do that anymore. He later wants to thank the streaming service Apple TV, which produced the film, in a small circle. He had no kind words for the organizer. “Gotham, blah blah blah, but I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did,” he said. And finally: “How dare they actually do that.”
