Lady Gaga didn’t need to “Telephone” when she needed her personal assistant at night — because they were sharing the same bed.Ex-Gaga employee Jennifer O’Neill (pictured with Gaga in 2010) revealed during a deposition that she had to bunk with Gaga during “The Monster Ball” tour in 2010, according to court papers.
“I was by her side virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” O’Neill testified. “That includes sleeping in the same bed with her. Because she did not sleep alone.”
When asked if the unusual task was “required” as part of her job, O’Neill said, “I felt it was.”
“Unlike anybody else on that tour, I did not have my own hotel room. I was not asked if I wanted my own hotel room,” she said.
Transcript excerpts from O’Neill’s July 11 deposition at a Times Square law office don’t suggest there was any hanky-panky between her and Gaga, an outspoken supporter of gay rights.
And O’Neill noted, “I had no privacy, no chance to talk to any family, no chance to talk to any friends, no chance to have sex if I wanted to have sex. There was no chance to do anything.”
O’Neill, who’s suing Gaga for more than $390,000 in unpaid overtime, plus damages, also revealed that her daily duties included making sure Gaga “had taken her medicine,” although the specific drugs aren’t identified in the Manhattan federal court filing.
She said the 26-year-old superstar — who in her own deposition declared: “I’m the queen of the universe every day” — “made it clear” that “I expect you to be working and to be available 24/7.”
"And she was quite irate that she couldn’t reach me on my phone a couple of times, and was quite angry and asked me why she was paying for this hotel room if I was unreachable,” she said.
O’Neill said Gaga even interrupted her while she was getting her hair cut by Gaga’s stylist after he finished with the singer.
“She might have said I need some tea, I need — can you get my computer for me, can you get my phone, my battery is dead, I need a tampon, the toilet doesn’t flush,” O’Neill said.
And “another thing she would do in the middle of the night, would be wake me up to have me change the DVD in the DVD player because she didn’t want to watch that DVD any more and she couldn’t get up to walk across the room to change the DVD herself,” O’Neill said.
Gaga, who’s worth more than $50 million, according to Forbes, spared no expense pampering herself, O’Neill said, including having diet food “sent overnight to her from California” by the Sunfare meal-delivery service.
“So stuff would be FedExed to my room, let’s say, the room that I’m maintaining for her, and then I would have to find where she is in New York, which may be Brooklyn, may be her parents’ house, and I would have to hand-deliver Sunfare food to her so that she had something to eat,” she said.
One time, when Gaga was editing the “Born This Way” video in a hotel room with director Nick Knight, O’Neill said she “was supposed to be having dinner with a friend in the hotel, because I couldn’t leave.”
“But she called me and she said that she needed her food to be heated up in the hotel. So she needed me to come and personally heat up her food while she was looking at the video,” O’Neill said.
Gaga even rented a room in the Trump Soho “which is a whole room of clothes....an entire hotel room that is an actual closet for her,” O’Neill said.
O’Neill’s lawyer, Virginia Trunkes, wrote in court papers that the case “illustrates that dichotomy between celebrity and assistant, between rich and poor, between those who have and those who have not, and, most of all, between the hubris of a person so enamored with her status that she considers herself above the law.”
Meanwhile, legal experts told The Post that Gaga was wrong when she testified that her assistants aren’t entitled to overtime because they’re working “a 9:00 to 5:00 job that is spaced out throughout the day.”
Prominent labor lawyer Justin Swartz said: “If the personal assistant is required to be at Lady Gaga’s beck and call, Lady Gaga has to pay for that.”
source: nypost