10th July, 2020
American actor, Robert de Niro has revealed that he is suffering financial losses due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
The 76-year-old movie star had to even cut his soon-to-be-ex wife’s credit card allowance from $100,000 to $50,000 because his restaurant business suffered huge losses during the virus-induced lockdown.
According to a Skype call in his divorce case with Grace Hightower, De Niro’s lawyers explained that he cut her card limit to $50,000 due to the financial crisis.
They explained that the Nobu chain of luxury restaurants and hotels and the Greenwich Hotel in Florida, which are co-owned by de Niro, have been closed or partially closed during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“He is going to be lucky if he makes $7.5 million this year”, said De Niro’s lawyer, Caroline Krauss.
De Niro’s Nobu chain took at least 14 loans from the Trump administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for small businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic. De Niro’s asset in it is estimated at $500 million.
Hightower’s defence, however, said that they do not believe “a man who has an admitted worth of $500 million and makes $30 million a year”, would “all of a sudden” cut her financial support and ban her and their two children from the house, where he is now living during the pandemic.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper said that De Niro will not be required to restore Hightower’s card limit to $100,000.
