The admission was made in court where his estranged wife has asked for an emergency order to raise her monthly American Express card credit limit.

The Irishman actor appeared on a Skype call in his Manhattan divorce case with Grace Hightower as her lawyer told a judge that De Niro unfairly cut her monthly AmEx allowance from $143,000 to $71,000 and said she and their children had been banned from an upstate compound where De Niro is staying during the coronavirus pandemic.

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DE NIRO ‘DOESN’T HAVE THE CASH’

Lawyers for De Niro said he cut Ms Hightower’s credit card limit because he’s taken a huge financial hit as the restaurant chain Nobu and Greenwich Hotel, both of which he has stakes in, have been closed or partially closed for months with barely any business.

De Niro’s lawyer, Caroline Krauss, told the judge that Nobu lost $4.32 million in April and another $2.69 million in May.

And he had to pay investors $719,000 on a capital call, which he borrowed money from his business partners to make, “because he doesn’t have the cash,” Krauss said.

Ms Krauss also explained that under the terms of their 2004 prenuptial agreement, De Niro is only required to pay Ms Hightower $1.44 million a year as long as he’s making $21.58 million or more in income, and if his income declines, his payments to her proportionally do too.

“His accounts and business manager … says that the best case for Mr De Niro, if everything starts to turn around this year, … he is going to be lucky if he makes $7.5 million (AU$10.7 million) this year,” Ms Krauss said.

Unsurprisingly, people were pretty unsympathetic to De Niro’s revelation that he would be only making $10.7 million (US$7.5 million) this year.

COVID PUTS PROJECTS ON HOLD

Krauss added that proceeds from Netflix’s The Irishman have mostly already been paid out and he is likely to get just $3.6 million in 2020 and 2021.

And a movie project that De Niro was scheduled to begin filming this summer in Oklahoma has been put on hold, Ms Krauss explained.

“These people, in spite of his robust earnings, have always spent more than he has earned, so this 76-year-old robust man couldn’t retire even if he wanted to because he can’t afford to keep up with his lifestyle expense,” Ms Krauss said, adding that De Niro has begun cutting back spending “dramatically.”

Ms Hightower’s lawyer, Kevin McDonough, fired back that “the idea that Mr De Niro is tightening his belt is nonsense.”

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“Mr De Niro has used the COVID pandemic, my words would be, to stick it to his wife financially,” Mr McDonough said.

“I’m not a believer that a man who has an admitted worth of $500 million (AU$719 million) and makes $30 million (AU$43 million) a year, all of a sudden in March he needs to cut down (spousal support) by 50 per cent and ban her from the house,” Mr McDonough said.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper issued a temporary ruling that De Niro should keep Ms Hightower’s credit card limit at $71,000 a month and pay her $107,000 so she can find a summer home for their two kids while De Niro and his other children remain in his three-house compound upstate.

“I am not requiring at this point that Mr. De Niro restore the credit card to $100,000 (AU$143,00),” Mr Cooper said. “$50,000 (AU$71,000) seems to be certainly enough to avoid irreparable harm.”

De Niro — who had been with Ms Hightower on and off since 1997 — filed for divorce from her in 2018. The pair — who share kids Helen, 8, and Elliot, 21 — divorced in 1999 and patched things up again in 2004.

This story first appeared in the New York Post and has been republished with permission