Judith Giuliani, who was married to the former New York mayor between 2003 and 2019, says in Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, a copy of which was obtained by The Guardian, that her then-husband broke down after his unsuccessful presidential campaign.
“We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” Judith Giuliani is quoted as saying by the book’s author, Andrew Kirtzman. She says that her husband fell into “what, I knew as a nurse, was a clinical depression” after dropping out of the presidential election following a number of poor primary and caucus results.
“She said he started to drink more heavily,” Kirtzman writes. “While Giuliani was always fond of drinking scotch with his cigars while holding court at the Grand Havana or Club Mac, his friends never considered him a problem drinker. Judith felt he was drinking to dull the pain.”
Kirtzman writes that Judith Giuliani, the former mayor’s third wife, “was known to exaggerate, and the depth of his depression is something that only she and Giuliani knew for certain.” Newsweek reached out to Rudy Giuliani for comment.
When Trump came to help his longtime friend, the couple moved into a bungalow across the street from Mar-a-Lago and used an underground tunnel to enter and leave the resort without the press being aware.
Rudy Giuliani has frequently denied having a drinking problem following a series of accusations.
In their book I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker wrote that “some people thought Giuliani may have been drinking too much” on election night in 2020 when he told Trump to falsely declare he had won.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign the House Select Committee, also testified to the January 6 House Select committee that Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” on election night, which Giuliani denied.
In Kirtzman’s book, Judith Giuliani says she and her husband stayed at Mar-a-Lago during a time when he was “always falling s***faced somewhere.”
She says that when her husband eventually turned to public life with an appearance on Saturday Night Live, the make-up he was wearing “barely hid a large scar above his right eyebrow” which he got from falling down while getting out of a car.
There has been scant reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s stay at the Mar-a-Lago resort. In 2018, Giuliani told The New York Times that he “spent a month at Mar-a-Lago, relaxing” in 2008 after his failed presidential bid, without elaborating.
Update 08/24/2022, 9:42 a.m. ET: This article was updated with an additional quote from Andrew Kirtzman’s book.
