Robert De Niro was on hand at the Gotham Independent Film Awards in New York City Monday evening to accept an award on behalf of his and friend Martin Scorsese‘s new movie Killers of the Flower Moon, but he ended up not being too happy about it.
The legendary actor was reading from a teleprompter in accepting the Gotham Historical Icon and Creator Tribute award, when he realized mid-speech that a tangential portion of the speech about former President Donald Trump had been edited out.
Frustrated, De Niro told the audience, “‘I’m sorry. Okay there was a mistake in this,” regarding the script on display before his eyes, and instead pulled out his cellphone to read the original.
“I just want to say one thing. The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out, and I didn’t know about it. And I want to read it,” he said to applause.
“History isn’t history anymore. Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness,” De Niro said in part, claiming, “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.”
After catching up to the portion of the speech he’d read from the ‘prompter, the Taxi Driver star said, “I was supposed to thank [Killers producer] Apple, and Gotham, and blah, blah, blah, but I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did,” getting a laugh from the audience.
“How dare they do that, actually?” the actor continued, before saying, “But now I will go to accepting the award.”
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