Robert De Niro accused Apple of censoring his speech at the awards ceremony
Famous actor Robert De Niro is accusing Apple and the Gotham Film & Media Institute of secretly censoring his speech at an event.
Details
The actor attended the Gotham Awards on Monday night to present the Gotham Historical Icon Award and honour Martin Scorsese's Killers Of The Flower Moon. He had prepared a speech and it was only after some time on stage that he realised that the text displayed on the teleprompter had been changed. As it turned out, from the speech were removed whole pieces of text, in which De Niro criticised the entertainment industry and former US President Donald Trump.
The actor was not confused and read his speech from his phone and said that he wanted to thank Apple and the Gotham Film and Media Institute, but changed his mind after the incident.
Here are the very deleted snippets of the speech:
"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 developed skills which can be applied for their personal benefit. The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease." - The Duke, John Wayne, famously said of Native Americans, "I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. 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."
According to Variety's sources, an edited version of the speech was uploaded to the teleprompter just minutes before the ceremony began by a woman who identified herself as an Apple employee. In addition, the publication writes that that evening two Apple employees emailed the corrected script of the speech, but De Niro did not know about it.
In turn, a source close to the film, assures that there was a misunderstanding. According to him, several versions of the speech were created, and neither Apple nor the film's creators knew that De Niro had not approved the final version of the speech.