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The woman who Claudine De Niro berated at Le Bilboquet on Saturday night for getting her boyfriend Cuba Gooding Jr.’s phone number tells us she was “scared” by the incident and feels “traumatized.”
As Page Six previously reported, De Niro —who is the ex-wife of Robert De Niro’s son Raphael — caused a scene at the fancy Hamptons restaurant allegedly yelling at a woman who got the “Jerry Maguire” actor’s digits.
Now we can reveal that the woman at the center of the conflict was Lieba Nesis, a Harvard-educated lawyer and writer. She tells us De Niro was “aggressive” and “harassing [and] berating” her for at least an hour.
Nesis, who runs with the elite Hamptons and New York City social crowd, tells us that she and Gooding Jr. have known each other for seven or eight years.
“Not well, but we always say hello,” she said.
She says the Oscar winner told her at the restaurant that he’s shooting a film in Miami in September and looking for a place to stay, so she told him that she owns property there that was going to be empty while he was in town. He put his digits in her phone to follow up, Nesis says.
But De Niro saw the exchange go down and lost it.
“His girlfriend goes, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing? That’s my boyfriend! You can’t take down the number,’ and she’s screaming ‘What the f-ck are you doing!” Nesis tells us. “So I started to explain and she was like, ‘You better stop doing that. That’s my boyfriend.”
“She was going on and on so I walked into the other room and thought, ‘Ok, this will simmer down. I come back in and she’s pointing at me and screaming across the room, ‘You better get out of here. You better leave this place.’ Everyone is staring at me.”
“She wasn’t screaming at the top of her lungs,” she added, “but it was very intimidating to me.”
“I really was scared,” she said, “I am not going to fight. I wasn’t expecting to go out and get in a fight. I am spending thousands a weekend to go to the Hamptons and get away from negative energy, I don’t want to do drama. I was like, I’m not going to engage and hopefully she will calm down but she didn’t.”
Nesis says she went into another room again and sat on a sofa to get away from the situation, but that De Niro followed her.
“She comes and stands right on top of me where I am sitting like, ‘You better get the hell out of here,’” Nesis says, adding that De Niro was “cursing me out.”
She says that no one stuck up for her, except for former “Real Housewives of New York” star Jill Zarin, who tried to get management to step in — but nobody from the restaurant intervened.
“The more I tried to explain [that] I was just trying to help, the angrier she got,” Nesis says. “She kept saying, ‘That is my boyfriend, I am a broker, why was I trying to take your business.’ I told her I am not, I am a Harvard-educated lawyer. But she would get angrier and angrier and more out of control.”
Nesis adds, “She was saying she’s a real estate agent and we’re foes, but I don’t know her. I have never met her. I didn’t know she was a real estate agent and I am not a broker. I was in a state of shock. It was out of hand.”
According to her LinkedIn page, De Niro has worked for real estate company Compass for four months. She previously worked at Prudential Douglas Elliman.
Gooding Jr., for his part, seemed to cut and run as things took a turn.
“In the beginning, he was trying to explain and then he just disappeared out of sight,” Nesis says. “I guess he saw she wasn’t going to be mollified … He was somewhere but he wasn’t confronting the situation.”
Nesis wound up leaving to get out of the situation when it allegedly became clear after an hour that De Niro was not going to let up.
She says she now fears another run-in.
“It’s a small circle. I like Bilboquet. It’s a lot of fun,” she says. “I am terrified to go there now. I am worried about seeing her. I was traumatized. I am non-confrontational.”
“It’s like, is she dangerous?” Nesis said. “I wasn’t sure. I felt like I was in danger. You can’t be safe anywhere, even in the Hamptons.”
When we texted De Niro for comment, she wrote in all caps, “Jill Zarin and Lieba are full of s–t,” before texting a few more things and quickly deleting them from WhatsApp, and then adding, “No comment.”
A source previously told Page Six that De Niro’s reaction wasn’t about jealousy over Gooding Jr., but about business. “It’s disrespectful, if you know someone is a broker, to go to their [boyfriend] and offer them help with real estate,” they said.
That source also insisted that De Niro wasn’t yelling — though the original source told us she was loud enough to “make a scene.”
De Niro and Gooding Jr. have been dating since 2018, when Page Six first spotted the pair.
In 2019, De Niro was caught on camera berating Gooding Jr. at a bar in Miami, knocking bottles and glasses off the top of the bar before being removed by security. A lawyer for Gooding Jr., Mark Heller, said she got a “little overly playful” while partying with her beau. A source later said she was upset when the actor took a friend’s side over something she was upset about and “it was just a silly argument.”
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