In a preview of an interview with Gayle King for CBS Mornings, Robert De Niro's partner Tiffany Chen said she lost functions in her face after welcoming her baby with the actor earlier this year.
The 45-year-old welcomed a healthy child with De Niro, 79, in April. She began to experience health complications after giving birth. "When I went home, I started to feel like... my tongue felt strange," she told King, as seen in the clip above. "It felt a little tingly, just starting to get a little bit numb. And then I realized, like, my face just felt weird. I didn't know what the feeling was that I was having. It felt weird."
King asked her if her face looked "different" to her when she started to notice the numbness. "Yeah," she replied. "When I got home, it was like everything was starting to just fall down on itself. Like, my face was melting on itself. And then a week after giving birth, that was when it all hit. And I called my doctor, and I ... was trying to eat. I went to put a fork of food in my mouth and everything came out. I couldn't eat. And then I was starting to slur. So I said, 'There's something really going on here.'"
She was told to go to the hospital and when she got there, she said she "lost all facial function the minute I got into the hospital." Chen was then diagnosied with Bell's Palsy, a condition that causes weakness on one side of the face. Luckily, most people fully recover. According to The Mayo Clinic, people in their third trimester up until a week post-partum are most likely to be affected. The full interview with King is scheduled to air on CBS Mornings this Friday, July 14.
De Niro casually revealed he welcomed his seventh child, and his first with Chen, during an interview with ET Canada in May. Host Brittnee Blair asked about his six kids, and he corrected her. "Seven actually ... I just had a baby,” he said.
King called up De Niro to speak about his child with Chen after he shared the news. "I actually thought about [mentioning] it, but we were discussing the movie and I didn’t want to take anything away from the movie. I just didn’t want to do that. And it didn’t come up," he told her of his decision to not go public with the news when they spoke about his new movie, About My Father. She confirmed the couple planned the child and that De Niro was "very excited about it."
Check out the interview with Chen above.
