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Actor Robert De Niro received a major honor at the Gotham Awards on Monday night.
The “Killers of the Flower Moon” star received the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute award.
While accepting the honor, the Academy Award winner noticed his speech was missing some key elements while he read the teleprompter. Those key elements were about President Donald Trump.
“I just want to say one thing,” he said. “The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out, and I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it.”
Regardless, De Niro decided to read his original speech from his phone.
“History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida, young students are taught that slaves were taught skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease.”
He then referenced John Wayne’s comments about “taking the country away” from Native Americans after he claimed they were “selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”
“Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal,” he continued. “The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office. And he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur.”
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump called Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Pocahontas, as a way to attack her.
After he said these lines, that is where De Niro’s speech picked back up to where the teleprompter was in place.
“This is where I came in and I saw that they had edited all that,” he said. “So I’m going to say these things but to Apple and thank them and all that. Gotham, blah blah blah, Apple. But I don’t really feel like thanking them at all for what they did. How dare they do that, actually.”
KTLA 5 has reached out to Apple and the Gotham Awards for a response to these claims and is awaiting a response.
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