WELL HEELED: Lady Gaga walks in Paris with then-assistant Jennifer O’Neill, who is now suing the star, claiming to have been stiffed on overtime pay. (
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She really is “The Fame Monster.”
Lady Gaga unloaded on a former personal assistant who’s suing her for overtime pay — blasting the woman in a sworn deposition as a “f–king hood rat who is suing me for money that she didn’t earn.”
“She’s just — she thinks she’s just like the queen of the universe,” Gaga ranted, court records obtained by The Post show.
“And, you know what, she didn’t want to be a slave to one, because in my work and what I do, I’m the queen of the universe every day.”
I SLEPT WITH LADY GAGA: FORMER PERSONAL ASSISTANT
The “Born This Way” singer couldn’t maintain her poker face, either, shooting a nasty aside at ex-aide Jennifer O’Neill near the start of Gaga’s marathon, six-hour testimony in a Midtown Manhattan law office.
“Are you going to stare at me like a witch this whole time — honestly?” Gaga asked.
“Because this is going to be a long f–k ng day that you brought me here.”
Gaga even had some choice words for one of O’Neill’s lawyers, Paul Millus, at one point answering him: “No, no, no. Listen, listen, sir, if you’re going to ask me questions for the next five hours, I am going to tell you exactly what f–king happened, so that the judge can read on this transcript exactly what’s going on.”
Gaga’s foulmouthed assertions came in response to a 2011 suit filed in Manhattan federal court by O’Neill, who claims she’s owed overtime for serving at Gaga’s “beck and call” around the clock while the singer’s career skyrocketed between early 2009 and March 2011.
O’Neill says she put in 7,168 hours of unpaid overtime during two stints working for Gaga — who’s listed in the suit under her real name, Stefani Germanotta — and is owed more than $393,000, plus damages.
During her videotaped Aug. 6 deposition, Gaga said none of her employees get paid overtime, adding that O’Neill “knew exactly what she was getting into, and she knew there was no overtime, and I never paid her overtime the first time I hired her, so why would she be paid overtime the second time?”
“This whole case is bulls–t, and you know it,” she added.
But under questioning, she conceded her decision not to pay overtime wasn’t based on labor laws, but is “actually based on a bubbly, good heart.”
“I’m quite wonderful to everybody that works for me, and I am completely aghast to what a disgusting human being that you have become to sue me like this,” she said.
“Because she slept in Egyptian cotton sheets every night, in five-star hotels, on private planes, eating caviar, partying with [photographer] Terry Richardson all night, wearing my clothes, asking YSL [Yves Saint Laurent] to send her free shoes without my permission, using my YSL discount without my permission.”
Gaga said O’Neill’s job, which paid $75,000 a year, “was essentially a favor, and Jennifer was majorly unqualified for it.”
“I expect there to be a certain level of, like, you know, knowledge and academia about, like, your job,” she said.
Gaga — who now has two personal assistants — said a good assistant “is somebody that can anticipate what you need before you need it, so they buy it for you, or they — they set it up for you.”
But Gaga said O’Neill failed at even the most basic of tasks, noting that “one of the biggest problems I had with Jen is that I felt like she didn’t enough lay out all my stuff for me” while traveling, because “there is 20 bags and there is only one me, and I can’t sift through everything.
“She would only open a couple of bags, and it was very stressful for me because then again on my off days I couldn’t really have a day off because, you know, I weigh 115 pounds, and I was trying to move these huge, big luggages all by myself in the room, and I did it all the time — by the way, she was asleep until 12:00 most of the time, so I was very often waking up and moving my own luggage and doing s–t by myself, and it was — it was a problem that I had,” she said.
And while previous assistants “would like set up my room, and I would know where my clothes were, I would know where my toothbrush was, I would know where my soap and everything was,” Gaga said that when O’Neill “got lazy she didn’t always do those things for me.
“I can’t walk down the street and go buy myself toiletries, I have to call security, I’ve got to call Jen or now I got to call Wendi, I’ve got to get a whole bunch of people together to help me fix the problem, which wouldn’t happen if she was doing her job properly on regular days,” Gaga said.
Gaga also portrayed O’Neill as an ingrate who took for granted the parties, “five-star hotels” and other luxuries — including “caviar, champagne and yachts” — that she got to enjoy as part of Gaga’ s entourage.
“It is, like, such an amazing luxury that I get to travel the world and have planes, she doesn’t even see what a luxury it is, but she thinks it’s owed to her for no reason,” the singer said.
At one point, Gaga bragged about how the night before, her employees enjoyed a “beautiful $3,000 meal that I paid for” at Spiaggia in Chicago, billed as the only four-star Italian eatery in the Windy City.
Gaga said she picked up the tab “just because,” noting, “They were on their day off, and they all just wanted to be with me.”
She also insisted that all her employees work only an eight-hour day — while also noting, “This job is a 9-to-5 job that is spaced out throughout the day.”
“You don’t get a schedule that is like you punch in and you can play f–king Tetris at your desk for four hours and then you punch out at the end of the day. This is — when I need you, you’re available.”
Gaga said she appreciates that “an eight-hour workday could still be a very difficult workday, you know, if you’re digging ditches or, you know, you’re, you know, putting sealing on a roof, you know.”
“I’m not in any way discounting how hard an eight-hour work day can be, or discounting the role of an assistant.”
But she also noted, “I do six shows a week, and I make a lot of money. I work, I work 24 hours a day. I’m not standing next to Steve holding tea, waiting for him to take a sip, that is not what I do,” Gaga said.
“Not that people who do that don’t deserve their hourly pay, but I’m just pointing out that I deserve everything I’ve worked for. I deserve every dollar of it. And she deserves every dollar of her $75,000 that we agreed to. But she does not deserve a penny more.”
Rather than paying off O’Neill, Gaga said, “I’m going to give all the money that she wants to my employees that work hard for me now that deserve it.
“I’m not going to give it to her so she can go to Intermix and buy herself a new tube top,” the snippy superstar groused.
While the court papers don’t detail the start of their relationship, Gaga said it ended when, during a flight to Paris, O’Neill slept in one of two beds on Gaga’s jet.
“Most of my assistants in the past always offered it to my mother or my family,” the singer said. “Jennifer was the first person that never offered it to anybody and always took it for herself.”
Even worse, Gaga said, O’Neill refused to share any pillows with two other women.
“And she said, ‘No, I need my three pillows so I can sleep,’ ” Gaga said.
“I heard it. I immediately was so sick by it and upset that I turned over and went back to sleep.”
In Paris, Gaga, who was there to walk the runway at Thierry Mugler’s fall 2011 fashion show, said O’Neill “wore my coat when we were at the show, she wore my clothes.”
Afterward, “we partied until 5 in the morning, we got s–t hammered, I was crawling on the streets in Paris, I was screaming.
“Jennifer was there. She hung out all night with me and Terry Richardson, and tons of socialites from Paris, and she had the time of her life,” Gaga said.
The next morning, Gaga said, she “barely could talk” but had to fly back to America that night — “I mean, what a rock-star moment, right?”
But on the flight back, Gaga said, O’Neill insisted on sleeping in the second bed and “completely, like, flipped out at me, beyond belief” when “I told her no.”
“I said, ‘Jennifer, this is really inappropriate in front of Terry Richardson,’ and she was like, ‘Don’t I get some sort of seniority because I’ve been here longer and I’m your friend?’ ” Gaga said.
“And I remember those words as clear as day, because when your best friend looks you in the eye and says ‘Why can’t I have that seat on your private plane, I’m your friend,’ the first thing I thought was ‘You’re not my f–king friend.’ ”
“You are not my f–king friend.”