The undoing of Rudy Giuliani
As mayor of New York he was a hero. As Trump’s ally, and ‘star’ of Borat, he’s anything but.
Late in the new Borat film Sacha Baron Cohen, disguised as the Kazakhstani journalist of the title, rushes into a hotel lobby to find a security guard blocking his way. “But I must defend my daughter’s vagine from America’s mayor!” he shouts.
Rudy Giuliani was given the title by Oprah Winfrey for his heroic comportment on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, as mayor of New York City. He appears in the Borat film being interviewed in a hotel suite by the young actress who plays Borat’s daughter. She suggests that they go into the bedroom, where America’s mayor sits on the bed and says he wants her phone number and her address. We see him lie back and reach into his trousers.
Then in bursts Cohen, as Borat, dressed in lingerie, shouting: “She’s my daughter, please, take me instead!”
For the past two years Giuliani had been serving as a personal lawyer for Donald Trump, defending the president, investigating the family of Joe Biden and giving freewheeling interviews on television.
The Borat film was released in the midst of what was supposed to be Giuliani’s moment of triumph. For months he had been promising an “October surprise” that would upend the election race. In mid-October he supplied emails to the New York Post, apparently taken from a laptop left in a repair shop and supposed to belong to Biden’s son Hunter, suggesting that Biden may have been somehow involved in his son’s business dealings. The Wall Street Journal had apparently been given the story first, but concluded after an investigation that corporate records “show no role for Joe Biden”. The story failed to gain traction with mainstream audiences.
Days later, viewers of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm saw Giuliani on his back. Giuliani said the clip was “a complete fabrication”. He added: “I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment.” He seemed to suspect that Cohen was in league with the Bidens. “This is an effort to blunt my relentless exposure of the criminality and depravity of Joe Biden and his entire family,” he tweeted.
The next time a lot of people saw Giuliani he was outside a gardening company in Philadelphia, claiming the election had been stolen. President Trump had announced the press conference on Twitter, saying it would be held at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. He then issued a correction: it would be held at “Four Seasons Total Landscaping”, a gardening company on an industrial estate and next to a sex shop.
Alongside Giuliani, as one of his supposed witnesses of electoral fraud in Philadelphia, stood a convicted sex offender from New Jersey. Daryl Brooks still denies the allegations that he exposed himself to minors, for which he served three and a half years in prison. Now he was seeking to help to overturn the results of the election.
Bernie D’Angelo, the proprietor of the Fantasy Island sex toy and adult book store, said she was amazed to see “the former big-time mayor of New York, 9/11, you know” outside her shop.
How did America’s mayor end up here? Giuliani grew up as the grandchild of Italian immigrants in a tough working class neighbourhood of Brooklyn. His father, Harold, served time in prison for armed robbery. He became a prosecutor who made his name taking on the mob and wasn’t shy to talk about it.
Giuliani’s mother, Helen, told a biographer that her son was a Democrat or an Independent. “He only became a Republican after he began to get all these jobs from them,” she said. “He’s definitely not a conservative Republican. He thinks he is, but he isn’t.”
As mayor of New York in the 1990s he would be credited with reducing crime, but it was on September 11, 2001, that he sprang on to the national stage. President Bush had addressed the nation from an undisclosed location; then Giuliani appeared from the wreckage of a command centre, covered in ash. The number of casualties “will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately”, he said.
Time made him its person of the year and he was given an honorary British knighthood by the Queen. In the years afterwards he made millions, giving speeches and serving as a consultant for foreign governments and corporations including the Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma. Questions were raised about some of this work during his run for the presidency in 2008. Joe Biden echoed the other criticism. “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11,” he said during a Democrat debate. Apparently, Giuliani did not forget it.
He emerged once more in national politics in 2016, after it became clear that Trump had locked up the Republican nomination. At the time, Giuliani was starring in late night commercials for an identity theft protection company. Now he appeared at the Republican convention. In October of 2016 when there emerged an old tape in which Trump could be heard discussing how he liked to grab women by the crotch, Giuliani toured television studios defending him.
After Trump’s election there were suggestions that he serve as attorney general, but he hoped to be secretary of state. There were indications, however, that his business ties and dealings would make things awkward in a Senate nomination hearing.
Not getting the job was “a bitter disappointment,” his former wife Judith told The New York Times. Their divorce, which was settled a year ago, offered evidence of expensive habits.
Legal filings detailed six homes, 11 country club memberships and a monthly expenditure of dollars 230,000. Giuliani was said to have spent dollars 7,131 on fountain pens.
His former wife claimed that he had left his law firm in 2018 to work pro-bono for the president to reduce any future alimony. He was certainly working hard, making contacts in Ukraine and digging for information on Biden’s son.
There were suggestions that he was not entirely helping the president; he told an interviewer that Trump did know of payments made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels, apparently to secure her silence about an affair in the run-up to the 2016 election. (Trump had denied any knowledge of it.)
When the 2020 election results were called by television networks, Giuliani was outside the gardening company in Philadelphia. “What are the odds, you know?” D’Angelo, of Fantasy Island, told a reporter. “Donald Trump starts out playing around with Stormy Daniels, and next thing you know, one of his final hurrahs is going to be down the street from an adult bookstore … You can’t write this stuff.”
The Times
