This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated August 11, 2023
Former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, is currently a subject in several legal proceedings, both civil and criminal, as well as a disciplinary hearing to disbar him. Some may ask how the man once-dubbed “America’s Mayor” is now a man facing serious criminal charges, and multiple lawsuits for egregious acts of wrongdoing, but this is who Rudy has always been. He has done many of the same things we have see him do the past few years back during his own time as a political candidate and elected official.
Last week, a woman who formerly worked for Giuliani filed transcripts in a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court alleging abhorrent and disgusting behavior, harassment, and abuse. Giuliani denies the allegations, but the plaintiff has text messages and audio recordings of interactions that support her claims that he made sexist, racist, and anti-semitic statements.
“Come here, big [breasts]. Come here, big [breasts]. Your [breasts] belong to me. Give them to me.”
Rudy Giulini, addressing a female worker, as per a transcript of an audio recording she made
The language from Giuliani in the transcripts of these recordings is frequently vulgar. In one recording, he said to his female subordinate, “Come here, big [breasts]. Come here, big [breasts]. Your [breasts] belong to me. Give them to me,” except he used a profane term instead of the word breasts. It continues, with him repeating those same sentences about her breasts.
It gets worse. In a recording where Giuliani attempted to play out some twisted sexual fantasy, his roleplay shifts from saying he needs “a little time with my girlfriend here,” referring to the plaintiff, to him saying, “With my daughter… with my little girl.” In another recording, he tells her that if he thinks of her, he gets aroused, though he uses a crude term, then continues, “I’d never think about a girl being smart. If you told me a girl was smart, I would often think she is not attractive.”
In addition to his sexist and sexually abusive comments, Giuliani was also recorded saying that Jewish people need to “get over the Passover” and “Jewish men have small [penises],” though he used a four-letter-word for the male anatomy. In addition to sexual harassment and abuse, the plaintiff alleges that Giuliani forced he into several sexual acts.
This lawsuit came at the same time Donald Trump was charged with four felonies related to his effort to overturn the result of the 2020 election, with Giuliani certainly one of the six unnamed co-conspirators mentioned in the charging document. A week earlier, in a case brought by two Georgia election workers whose lives were ruined after Giuliani accessed them of election fraud, he admitted he made false statements about them. And two weeks before that, a Washington, D.C. bar discipline committee ruled that Giuliani should be disbarred for frivolously trying to overturn the 2020 election. The New York State bar has already taken away his ability to practice law in the state for the same conduct.
Three decades before Giuliani urged an angry crowd to march to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he stoked the already high ire of assembled off-duty police officers at a 1992 City Hall rally, leading to an out-of-control riot. The anger was directed at then-Mayor Dinkins, who had defeated Giuliani in the election three years earlier and who Giuliani was poised to run against in 1993.
Before he made a buffoon of himself, arguing in multiple states that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud, Giuliani made unfounded claims that there would be election fraud in the 1993 mayoral election he was a candidate in. He hired off-duty cops, firefighters, and corrections officers to “monitor polling places” in predominantly black and brown neighborhoods, which many stated would intimidate minority voters from casting their votes.
And when it come to what he is best known for – his response to 9/11 – Giuliani has not been without criticism, including from families of first responders who dies that day. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the city determined that the radios used by firefighters did not work properly. A no-bid contract for new radios finally had them in the hands of the FDNY in early 2001, but within two months, those radios were recalled, leaving them stuck with the ineffective old radios. The 9/11 Commission found that these radios could have led to the deaths of firefighters in the towers on 9/11.
FDNY leadership directed all firefighters to evacuate before the towers collapsed, but communication had been severed and 343 perished. When Giuliani testified before the 9/11 Commission, he did not mention that firefighters never heard the evacuation order and instead said that they ignored it so they could save lives, as family members, visibly upset with his testimony, protested it in the hearing.
This is who Rudy Giuliani is and has always been, during his time in New York City politics through his disturbing exploits the past few years. He is not America’s mayor and it is sad that he was ever our city’s mayor at all.
