Giuliani’s ex-wife says he recovered from alcoholism at Mar-a-Lago

Rudy Giuliani turned to Donald Trump in 2008 to help him bounce back from depression and alcoholism after his failed presidential bid that year, a new book excerpt revealed on Wednesday. Giuliani had been seen as a dominant figure in US politics at the time and was affectionately dubbed ‘America’s mayor’ for his leadership of the Big Apple following September 11. He polled well at first before his campaign sputtered and he ultimately dropped out following the Florida Republican primary.

Now, his third ex-wife Judith Giuliani revealed in a new book by journalist Andrew Kirtzman that her then-husband found solace at Trump’s Florida retreat in Palm Beach. ‘We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,’ Judith says in an excerpt published by The Guardian. She said he was in therapy at the time while ‘always falling… faced somewhere.’

The book, which sheds new light on that period in the former mayor’s life, is titled ‘Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor’ and will be released in September. The author writes of Giuliani’s political ambitions, he ‘dreamed of becoming president from a young age, [but] blew his big moment when it arrived.’

Judith told Kirtzman that she believed he was experiencing clinical depression, based off her background as a nurse. He writes that Giuliani, who was known to enjoy high quality spirits, ‘started to drink more heavily’ after his loss. ‘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,’ the book states.

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It got so bad, according to Judith, that while he hosted Saturday Night Live after the dark spell and made jokes about his situation, ‘his makeup barely hid a large scar above his right eyebrow’ that he apparently got from falling while getting out of a car. The couple reportedly moved into a small home across the street from Mar-a-Lago that was connected to the main property via underground tunnels at the time.

Trump, though having never touched alcohol himself, is known for having a decades-long friendship with Giuliani. The only other time he’s known to have discussed moving in with the former president was in 2018, when he told the New York Times that he ‘spent a month at Mar-a-Lago, relaxing’ after the election. That Republican primary was eventually won by late Arizona Senator John McCain.

McCain, notably, lost the race to a then-freshman Democratic senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. Trump’s palatial Florida home and its underground network of rooms and tunnels have been dominating headlines in recent weeks, after it was raided by FBI agents seeking classified documents. A months-long dispute over records sought by the National Archives led to federal law enforcement officers executing a search warrant on the mansion earlier in August. Pictured: Mar-a-Lago.

In the intervening years, Giuliani and Trump’s friendship would take on a much higher and more controversial profile as the former became known to a new generation as the latter’s personal lawyer promoting baseless 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories. Kirtzman writes that Judith ‘contends that, eight years before Washington began talking about Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump in the same breath, the future president took the failed candidate under his protective wing at a vulnerable moment.’

‘What’s clear is the two men’s friendship survived when a hundred other Trump relationships died away like so many marriages of convenience,’ the book states. ‘Giuliani would never turn his back on Trump, much to his detriment.’

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