‘Unhinged’ Rudy Giuliani behaved in drunken and Islamophobic manner at law firm dinner, book claims

Rudy Giuliani, the former personal attorney to Donald Trump, reportedly went on “unhinged” rants about Muslim people at a dinner party he attended in 2016 at the same time when he was being considered by his former boss to head a commission on “radical Islamic terrorism”, according to a new book.

The former mayor of New York was attending a law firm dinner where Geoffrey Berman, a former US attorney for the southern district of New York (SDNY) and author of a forthcoming memoir about his legal battles with the Trump administration, described Mr Giuliani as behaving erratically towards people he perceived were Muslim and drinking heavily.

“It was unbelievable,” Mr Berman writes. “Rudy was unhinged. A pall fell over the room.”

The Guardian, who obtained an early copy of the memoir which is set to be on shelves next week, described an excerpt where Mr Giuliani made horrifying comments to a Jewish man at the dinner. Mr Giuliani believed that the man, who was apparently “wearing a yarmulke [who] had ordered a kosher meal,” was Muslim.

“I’m sorry to have tell you this, but the founder of your religion is a murderer,” Mr Giuliani said to the man in the excerpt.

Mr Berman had just recruited Mr Giuliani to join his law firm and the dinner was headlined to be a “cross-selling dinner”, functioning to both introduce the former mayor and other new lawyers to clients “at a large financial institution,” writes the author.

Mr Berman concedes in the excerpt that his new attorney “behaved well to start with”, but he “continued to drink” and “shifted the conversation to his work for Trump on immigration”.

That’s when he describes how the dinner took a turn for the worse and became “an utter and complete train wreck”, he writes.

Mr Giuliani went on to share a “wholly inaccurate, alt-right history of the creation and development of Islam, stating that it was an inherently violent religion from its origins to today”.

He then, according to Mr Berman, went on to use his phone and “showed the group drawings of violent acts purportedly committed by Muslims”.

Mr Berman’s memoir, Holding the Line: Inside the Nation’s Preeminent US Attorney’s Office and its Battle with the Trump Justice Department, is just the latest to grace shelves this year that details some of Mr Giuliani’s less savoury moments in recent history.

Political reporter Andrew Kirtzman’s soon-to-be published book on the former New York mayor cites conversations with his ex-wife where she claims the pair retreated to Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate so that her ex-husband could recover from a drinking bender that was triggered by his loss for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

“We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” his third wife Judy Giuliani told Mr Kirtzman, according to The Guardian who obtained a copy of Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, due out on 13 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. She notes 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.”

Mr Berman follows-up on those accusations of out-of-control drinking in his own memoir. Though he acknowledges that Mr Giuliani was not “slurring his words” at the soiree, he writes that his “his impulses had control of him”.

By Mr Kirtzman’s telling, the former mayor’s relationship with alcohol became such a fixture within New York and DC circles that it ultimately influenced Trump’s decision to not appoint him secretary of state, which he had purportedly planned to do at one point.

Mr Berman’s memoir is due out on 13 September, as is Mr Kirtzman’s.