“Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi recalled the heart-stopping moment she was confronted by an enraged union worker in Boston three years, saying she feared the situation would turn violent.
“I felt he was bullying me. I felt he was saying, ‘I might hit you,’” Lakshmi testified Monday in the ongoing federal trial of four Teamsters Local 25 members accused of harassing crew members of the hit Bravo show.
The model-turned-cookbook author was accosted as her car pulled up to the set at a restaurant in Milton, Massachusetts, where the show had been filming in June 2014.
Teamster defendants John Fidler, Daniel Redmond, Robert Cafarelli and Michael Ross were on site, allegedly hurling gay and racial slurs at cast and crew because the show had hired non-union workers.
“Oh, looky here, what a pretty face, or what a shame about that pretty face,” Lakshmi said one of the men growled at her, according to reporters covering the trial in Boston federal court. “And he said something to my driver which was very derogatory.”
Lakshmi said the man leaned in and rested his elbow on the passenger-side window of the car. He was so close, “I could kind of smell him,” she said, the Boston Herald reported.
Lakshmi, 46, said the chaotic ordeal left her feeling “terrified” and “threatened.”
“I really didn’t want to cross the line. … I don’t like confrontation, and this was a very heated confrontation,” she said, according to Deadline.
“I could feel my heart beat in my chest, like when you’re scared as a child,” Lakshmi added.
Staffers of the show testified last week that the union members threatened that they wanted to “smash” Lakshmi’s “pretty face.”
Prosecutors said the man who threatened Lakshmi that day was Fidler.
The four men are charged with attempting to extort producers of the show for jobs.
Earlier in the day, Gail Simmons, another “Top Chef” judge, testified one of the men stuck his head through the window of her car, yelling, “Scab!”
“I remember them being aggressive, and I was scared,” Simmons said. “I remember thinking they were men who wanted to harm us.”
With Post Wires