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Thursday, March 14, 2024 | Back issues
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Salacious $10M suit accuses Giuliani of sex harassment, drunken abuse

The former New York City mayor denies the lurid civil claims of sexual harassment, wage theft, selling presidential pardons and drunken invective.

MANHATTAN (CN) — A constantly drunk and Viagra-bolstered Rudy Giuliani demanded sexual gratification from a female employee “at any moment,” his former public relations consultant says in a $10 million civil suit that alleges Giuliani stiffed her on what was supposed to be a million-dollar annual salary.

Represented by Justin Kelton with the firm Abrams Fensterman in Brooklyn, Noelle Dunphy says Giuliani hired her in January 2019 during his tenure as personal attorney for then-President Donald Trump.

“Giuliani began abusing Ms. Dunphy almost immediately after she started working for the Defendants,” says the complaint, which was filed late Monday, building upon a Manhattan Supreme Court case originally opened with a summons with notice in January. “He made clear that satisfying his sexual demands — which came virtually anytime, anywhere—was an absolute requirement of her employment and of his legal representation.”

Dunphy says Giuliani promised her a salary of $1 million a year, in addition to expenses and pro bono legal representation for a domestic abuse case that she had brought against a former partner.

But during her two years of work, Dunphy alleges, Giuliani kept her employment “secret” and paid her only about $12,000, plus some reimbursement of her business expenses. She seeks $1,988,000 in unpaid wages.

Giuliani “vehemently” denied the allegations on Monday through a spokesperson. “Mayor Giuliani’s lifetime of public service speaks for itself, and he will pursue all available remedies and counterclaims,” said Giuliani’s communications adviser, Ted Goodman.

The lurid allegations detailed in the complaint are copious, but there are claims about Giuliani's political machinations as well.

Dunphy alleges Giuliani told her he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and then-President Trump would split.

“He told Ms. Dunphy that she could refer individuals seeking pardons to him, so long as they did not go through ‘the normal channels’ of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, because correspondence going to that office would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act,” the complaint states.

The allegations about Giuliani's steady diet of erectile dysfunction medication aligns with a portrait of the former mayor that the satirist Sacha Baron Cohen captured in his 2020 mockumentary “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” Paired against a still from a scene of that film where Giuliani is lying on a hotel bed with his hands down his unzipped pants, the complaint says “depicts Giuliani acting in a similar manner to how he acted with Ms. Dunphy.”

Dunphy claimed Giuliani, now 78, “often demanded” she perform oral sex while he made calls on speakerphone, including to then-President Trump, because it made him “feel like Bill Clinton.”

“While working with Ms. Dunphy, Giuliani would look to Ms. Dunphy, point to his erect penis, and tell her that he could not do any work until ‘you take care of this,’” the complaint states. “Thus, Ms. Dunphy worked under the constant threat that Giuliani might demand sex from her at any moment.”

Dunphy also quotes Giuliani as having told her he was attracted to a 20-year-old employee who was more than 50 years his junior, and that he had kissed her on the lips.

The complaint says Giuliani often made crude comments about women’s bodies in front of Dunphy, in addition to racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks.

Many of these “alcohol-drenched rants” were recorded, Dunphy says.

He will be represented in the case by attorney Adam Katz from the New York firm Russo Law, who also represented him in the $2.7 billion civil defamation suit filed in the same court by the Smartmatic voting company.

Two decades after he achieved national hero status as New York City mayor following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Giuliani had his law licenses suspended in New York and Washington, D.C., in 2021 due to false and misleading statements he made while challenging the results of the 2020 election.

Follow @jruss_jruss
Categories / Civil Rights, Employment, Law

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