From “America’s mayor” to a human punchline, Rudy Giuliani’s descent continues unabated. On Monday, news broke of the septuagenarian Giuliani being slammed with a $10m sexual harassment and unpaid wages lawsuit brought by Noelle Dunphy, 43, a former aide. The mighty have fallen.
Once he was the toast of town. As a federal prosecutor he sent a congressman to jail, locked up mobsters and indicted white-collar criminals. As mayor, he made the streets again feel safe. Love him or hate him, crime precipitously dropped on his watch.
In the days and months following 9/11, he projected strength, confidence and reassurance. He had braced himself for a calamity; he just didn’t know its source or when it would happen. He was steady when crunchtime arrived.
As mayor, his tenure was consequential. His eight years at city hall rank up there with Fiorello La Guardia, Michael Bloomberg and Ed Koch. All that feels like aeons ago.
These days, Giuliani and the words “defendant” and “buffoon” stand adjacent. He remains under criminal investigation by a Georgia prosecutor. Beyond that, he is a defendant in at least three separate pending election-related defamation lawsuits.
His life is tumultuous. He is plagued by an image problem. His appearance in Borat 2 will forever haunt him.
Watching him shove his hands down his pants was pathetic and pitiable. His awkwardness and desperation remain indelible.
But it doesn’t end there. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, hair dye running down Rudy’s face became another unforgettable scene in American political lore.
It presaged what followed. In that moment, you knew that Rudy had gone off the rails, worse that he possessed no limits when it came to Trump.
Yet Giuliani’s latest woes cannot be described as wholly surprising. He always possessed a penchant for drama and a tropism for the transgressive. He loved the opera and his life emerged as operatic. As a prosecutor, he dressed up “undercover”. Then as mayor, he performed onstage in drag with Trump.
All that came with a darker side. The warning signs were there. We just chose to ignore them.
Amid his first campaign for mayor, in 1989, a story broke of a concentration camp survivor, Simon Berger, being held in federal custody, facing a blackboard that read “Arbeit Macht Frei”, the slogan written across the gates of Auschwitz. Berger would be acquitted. Decades later, Dunphy alleged that Giuliani has a problem with Jews.
Fast forward to May 2000. Giuliani publicly announced that he was leaving Donna Hanover, his second wife. No one was more shocked than Hanover. Rudy had shredded the boundary between public and private.
A year later, Rudy attempted to stretch out his term as mayor beyond its legal limits. Then again, his mother was a fan of Mussolini and his father spent time for armed robbery at Sing Sing, a prison located in upstate New York.
Rudy also sought to make Bernie Kerik, his police commissioner, head of US homeland security. That went badly. Kerik eventually wound up in prison and George W Bush was left to do clean-up on aisle seven.
During the 2016-17 presidential transition, rumours swirled of Giuliani coveting an appointment as secretary of state. That moment never arrived.
There were “whispers from the staff ‘about his health and stability’,” Michael Wolff wrote in Fire and Fury, his 2018 blockbuster.
To be sure, they were the same whispers echoed at a pre-inaugural lunch held at a Manhattan steakhouse by veterans of Giuliani’s time at city hall, and those with significant ties to the Trump administration.
For the record, Dunphy’s pleadings are replete with references to Giuliani and alcohol.
Giuliani and Ukraine made headlines, too. He and his buddies played Inspector Clouseau. In the end, Giuliani avoided prosecution, but Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas were convicted on federal charges.
The political dexterity and judgment that Giuliani once demonstrated has vanished. He is conscious of the decline. “I don’t care about my legacy,” he adds. “I’ll be dead.”
Nearly three years after the 2020 election, Trump refuses to concede and remains the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. “Giuliani, on the other hand, [is] finished in every conceivable way,” wrote Giuliani biographer Andrew Kirtzman.
Along the way, Rudy’s future grows bleaker and more mirthless.
