Rudy Giuliani: 5 Things To Know About Ex-NYC Mayor Tricked By Sacha Baron Cohen In ‘Borat’ Sequel
Learn more about former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, who fell for an embarrassing prank revealed in Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘Borat’ sequel.
For once, Rudy Giuliani is in the news for something other than defending Donald Trump. It’s not exactly good news for him, though. The president’s personal lawyer was duped by Sacha Baron Cohen with an elaborate prank for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, and the embarrassing incident is going to take some time to live down. In the meantime, here’s what else you should know about the former New York City mayor, 76:
1. He was caught with his pants (almost) down by Borat. Giuliani fell victim to Baron Cohen’s scheme while unknowingly filming the Borat sequel. During his brief cameo, Giuliani is talking to a woman (Maria Bakalova, 24) who he believes his a reporter for a fictional conservative news program. The “reporter” invites him up to her hotel room for drinks, where he is caught in a compromising position, reclining on a bed with his hand down his pants for several seconds. Borat bursts into the room and reveals that the journalist is actually his “teenage” daughter. Giuliani leaves the hotel, and actually filed a police report after the incident. He didn’t know at the time that it was Baron Cohen.
2. He was the mayor of New York City during 9/11. Giuliani served two terms in office as the Mayor of New York City, from 1994 to 2001. September 11, 2001, was actually the same day of the mayoral primaries; Giuliani would soon be out of office. His handling of 9/11 and the aftermath of the terrorist attack led him to be dubbed “America’s Mayor” and he even received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. Polls taken six weeks after 9/11 showed a 79% approval rating among NYC voters, as opposed to 26% one year prior. He was named TIME Person of the Year in 2001, as well.
3. He’s President Trump’s personal lawyer. Giuliani backed Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and went on to become one of his informal advisors once elected. He joined the president’s legal team in 2018 amidst Robert Mueller‘s Russia probe, and has become an outspoken surrogate for Trump on TV. He’s garnered criticism for some of his controversial (and bizarre) moments, including uncontrollably hacking while making fun of people who wear protective face masks.
4. His father was mob associate Harold Giuliani. Late investigative reporter Wayne Barrett revealed in 2000 that Giuliani’s father served 18 months in prison for armed robbery after mugging a milkman at gunpoint in 1934. Harold Giuliani and an accomplice got away with $128.82. After being caught, he lied to the judge in his case and gave him a fake name. When Rudy was a small child in the late 1940s, his father became a bartender for his father-in-law, Leo D’Avanzo, who owned a tavern that doubled as a loan-sharking and gambling operation, Barrett wrote in his book, Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudolph Giuliani.
The elder Giuliani was tasked with collecting debts for D’Avanzo. ”Some of it I knew, some of it I suspected,” Giuliani said of the accounts in Barrett’s book. Then still the Mayor of NYC, Giuliani had refused to answer questions about his father’s criminal past. He has now acknowledged what happened and said that it led to him pursuing a career in law enforcement. “Some of it did come as a shock.”
5. He’s been married three times and has two kids, including daughter Caroline. Giuliani married childhood sweetheart Regina Peruggi in 1968, but by 1975 their relationship had fizzled and the spouses separated. The Catholic church granted the couple an annulment in 1983 after Giuliani discovered they were second cousins. While they were legally separated, Giuliani began dating Donna Hanover. They married in 1984 and had two children: Andrew Giuliani and Caroline Giuliani.
Caroline, an LGBTQ+ filmmaker, has described herself as “multiverses apart” from her father’s ideologies. She penned an essay for Vanity Fair three weeks before the 2020 presidential election titled, “Rudy Giuliani Is My Father. Please, Everyone, Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” which outlined why she’s always disagreed with him. She warned that “women, immigrants, people with disabilities, and people of color” are “under attack by Trump’s inhumane policies” and should absolutely be voted out.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan hits Amazon Prime on October 22.