Rudy Giuliani retreated to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to recover from a bout of depression and a drinking bender after losing the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, a new book claims.
The former New York mayor’s ex-wife, Judith Giuliani, told political reporter Andrew Kirtzman in his soon-to-be published book, Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, that the pair left for Mr Trump’s Palm Beach estate after an embarrassing defeat that saw Mr Giuliani secure just one delegate.
“We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” his third wife told Mr Kirtzman, according to The Guardian who obtained a copy of the book, due out in September.
Ms Giuliani, who was married to Trump’s one-time personal attorney between 2003 and 2019, details in the book the struggles her then-husband faced in the fallout from the 2008 election, noting that the behaviour she believes she was witnessing, based on her experience as a nurse, “was a clinical depression.”
Mr Kirtzman writes: “She said he started to drink more heavily. 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.”
It’s hardly the first time that accusations of problematic drinking have been lobbed in the direction of the former White House adviser.
Earlier this summer, Rep Liz Cheney began the second public hearing of the House committee investigating the 6 January riot by suggesting that “an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani” told then-president Trump to declare victory before the votes had been counted on the night of the 2020 presidential election.
This claim seemed to be further substantiated by former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, whose own video testimony was screened at the Capitol riot public hearing and showed him claiming Mr Giuliani had indeed had too much to drink on election night.
“The mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke to the president” Mr Miller said under questioning. “There were suggestions, by I believe it was Mayor Giuliani to go and declare victory and to say we, won it outright.”
For his part, Mr Giuliani has pushed back and claimed that he only imbibed in his favourite soda – diet Pepsi.
Out of control drinking was also a central topic of conversation during a bizarre 2019 interview with New York magazine, which detailed how Mr Giuliani drank two bloody Marys while talking to a journalist.
And the issue of his suspected excessive drinking was taken up once more by the election-denying Trump loyalist’s ex-wife on occasions outside of the forthcoming book, including in a separate New York magazine interview where she implied Mr Giuliani had developed an unhealthy relationship with alcohol.
Speaking to the New York journalist about the couple’s 2019 separation, she described how the relationship began going off the rails “when he lost the presidential campaign,” and when she was specifically pressed about what the cause of their undoing was, outside of extramarital affairs, she vaguely gestured at a possible health-related concern, noting: “For a variety of reasons that I know as a spouse and a nurse … he has become a different man.”
Those suspicions are all but confirmed in Kirtzman’s book, where the previous spouse of the politician once described as America’s mayor describes the period when the couple moved into a bungalow across the street from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago as being a time when he was “always falling s***faced somewhere”.
By Ms Giuliani’s telling, though the couple had absconded to a smaller property across the street from Mr Trump’s sprawling resort, they were able to remain in close contact with the one-term president through a secret tunnel that lay metres below South Ocean Boulevard and connected the two properties.
This, she noted to Mr Kirtzman, allowed the group to remain in contact with one another without raising any alarms from the media about the reason for their prolonged stay.
Mr Kirtzman concedes that Mr Giuliani’s third wife has been known to “exaggerate” and therefore the full details of his supposed recovery at Mar-a-Lago are, by his assessment, “something that only she and Giuliani knew for certain”.
Underscoring the segment on the Mar-a-Lago episode, Mr Kirtzman highlights how the moment seemed to presage the Mr Giuliani’s and Trump’s uncommonly loyal relationship, a fact that has been laid bare as the latter faces a special grand jury in Atlanta as part of an investigation into the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
“What’s clear is the two men’s friendship survived when a hundred other Trump relationships died away like so many marriages of convenience. Giuliani would never turn his back on Trump, much to his detriment,” writes Mr Kirtzman, who has covered the failed presidential candidate for three decades and previously penned a book about his tenure as New York’s mayor.
Mr Kirtzman’s book is set to be on bookshelves in September and is being published with Simon & Schuster.
