2023-09-20 15:25:53
Washington. The massive leather armchair and the brown bookshelf with your own biography are intended to give the impression of dignified seriousness. But the speaker’s yellow shirt clearly looks too loud. “Hello, I’m Rudy Giuliani,” the man says: “Give me the chance to do something nice and funny. I can say congratulations on birthdays or anniversaries (…) or even say encouraging words. Some people need that.”
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The prominent 79-year-old needs money above all else. For $325 (plus $32.50 processing fee and $21.45 tax) you can book former President Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer for a video message on the celebrity platform Cameo, where otherwise washed-up actors, pop stars or athletes supplement their income. Anyone who transfers $975 will even receive a personal video call from the politician.
More than $1.3 million in debt to his own lawyer
Rudy Giuliani was once the most famous mayor in the USA. Time magazine named him “Person of the Year” in 2001. Now just 16 percent of Americans have a good opinion of him, and the exalted self-promoter is on the verge of bankruptcy. The law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP, which has represented him in numerous lawsuits since 2019, has just sued him for unpaid legal fees amounting to $1.36 million. The broadcaster CNN reports, citing insiders, that Giuliani now has outstanding bills for lawyers, fines and sanctions piling up around $5 million. Further high damages judgments are imminent.
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Giuliani has already tried to sell signed T-shirts (for $911 each) commemorating his role following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when he hands-on led the rescue and cleanup efforts in New York. He had Trump help him with a fundraising dinner whose participants had to shell out $100,000 each. And two months ago, he put his three-bathroom, fireplace, and oak-paneled dining room on the Upper East Side up for sale for $6.5 million. The property offers “an abundance of sunlight, high ceilings and wonderful parquet floors,” enthuse Sotheby’s agents. A buyer has apparently not been found yet.
“He has become a different man,” says his third ex-wife
From the celebrated New York mayor, who was given an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, to a social pariah and bankrupt – it is an unprecedented fall that Rudy Giuliani has made. His decline began when he tied himself entirely to the right-wing populists following Donald Trump’s election victory. Giuliani was initially a legal advisor, then the president’s personal lawyer and a spreader of the wildest conspiracy legends. “He has become a different man,” said his third wife Judith Nathan during their divorce in 2019. Giuliani was the driving force behind Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Later he invented increasingly crude lies regarding alleged manipulation in the presidential election.
The legendary press conference in front of the Four Seasons – actually a horticulture business in the industrial district of Philadelphia – in November 2020 finally made Rudy Giuliani a joke.
© Quelle: imago images/TT
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In autumn 2020 at the latest, the public image of the former mayoral idol was seriously damaged when he was shown in a Borat film as a horny old man talking to an allegedly underage reporter. Shortly followingwards, dye dripped from his hair during a public appearance. The bizarre press conference in front of the Four Seasons in Philadelphia – actually a horticulture business in the industrial area – finally made him a joke.
Giuliani has now lost his license to practice law in New York and Washington because of his electoral lies that fueled the attempted coup on January 6th. Two voting machine manufacturers have sued him for billions in damages. Now he is facing charges in Georgia for his attempt to distort the vote. Separately, two election workers from the state brought him before the Kadi for defamation. In the process, he alone is said to have incurred legal fees of $90,000. The actual sentence is expected early next year.
Together with Donald Trump, Giuliani is on trial in Georgia for attempting to falsify votes – here is the mugshot from August this year.
© Quelle: IMAGO/USA TODAY Network
According to media reports, Giuliani’s friends have repeatedly tried to pressure Trump to pay his former lawyer’s enormous legal costs. But the ex-president is said to have refused so far. He doesn’t like to surround himself with losers, and in his eyes a payment might be seen as an acknowledgment of guilt.
This makes Giuliani all the more desperate to emphasize his closeness to the ex-president, who remains popular. At the beginning of September, he broadcast his “Rudy Giuliani Show,” in which he daily airs right-wing conspiracy myths and anecdotes from his life on radio station 77 WABC, from Trump’s golf club in Bedminster. But he mightn’t offer an interview with Trump: “Today he left the house early to fly to North or South Dakota,” Giuliani rambled, obviously ignorant: “So one of the two Dakotas, anyway.”
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