The Alleged Sleaze Bag Formerly Known As America's Mayor

The sexual assault lawsuit filed by Noelle Dunphy against Trump consigliere Rudolph Giuliani threatens to make a strange election season even stranger

This is a short post today, folks: it’s my birthday week. But it’s a good one. If you know someone who loves to dish on Republicans, please

Rudolph Giuliani spewing post-election conspiracy theories on Thursday, November 19, 2020. Photo credit: Thomas Williams/Wikimedia Commons

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On Monday, May 15, 2023, attorneys retained by a woman in her 40s named Noelle Dunphy filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court against Rudolph Giuliani and a group of organizations known collectively as "the Giuliani Companies." The suit alleges "unlawful abuses of power, wide-ranging sexual assault and harassment, wage theft, and other misconduct by Rudolph W. Giuliani and his Companies." 

Since I am a historian and believe in the primary document's power, you can read the whole thing here.

But before you do, let's set the scene. The last time you saw Rudy Giuliani, he might have been at Republican National Committee headquarters with hair dye running down his face (see above), declaring that no greater crime had ever been committed than the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

Or maybe it was at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, where he held a press conference meant to be at The Four Seasons (fire that intern!) and explained in a blizzard of fake numbers that Donald Trump had really won Pennsylvania's electors and justice would be done. 

Or maybe you read Olivia Nuzzo's 2019 article where she described him as "probably the most accessible star of an international political scandal in modern history" (i.e., foolishly shoots his mouth off in every direction) and a person whose "friends" openly discussed his excessive drinking.

Around the same time that article was written, there was someone working for Giuliani named Noelle Dunphy, who claims to be a 2001 graduate of Columbia University. I say "claims" because, personally, I find her biography confusing and weird. However, here's how she describes herself on one part of her website:

Noelle Dunphy has modeled for Dove Soap, Teen Spirit Deodorant, and starred in a series of TV commercials that aired internationally.

As a writer, she published articles in The New York Daily News, Newsday, The Norwood Bulletin, NewYorkCool.com and ABC News.

After graduating from Columbia University, she founded Strategic Consultants, a business development, marketing and advisory firm. She is available for public appearances, modeling, writing, business opportunities and spokesperson work.

I’m not saying it’s not true—but it’s unusual, to say the least, to encounter someone who is simultaneously a model, a freelance journalist, and a strategic consultant. According to this story, she also claims to have “worked with politicians including President Donald Trump, President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Senator Chuck Schumer.”

Unusual.

In any case, encounter her Giuliani did, hiring Dunphy in January 2019 and firing her two years later after demanding sex constantly as the condition of her employment. Since this is a family newsletter, I won’t get into the details, but you can read some of the more lurid details cited in the lawsuit here. Two of the tamer claims are that Giuliani promised to pay her $1 million a year plus expenses to be his Director of Business Development and then didn’t pay her; and that he was selling pardons for $2 million a pop and kicking back half to then-President Donald Trump. And I will give you one less tame claim: that Giuliana took Viagra constantly and then insisted Dunphy dispose of the ensuing wood before any work could take place.

In other words, not only did he sexually assault her constantly, but he also failed to pay her what he had promised. In fact, it appears he hardly paid her except to give her dribs and drabs of cash to tide her over. According to the filing,

Giuliani’s offer came with a significant catch: Giuliani was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, and he told Ms. Dunphy that her pay would have to be deferred and her employment kept “secret” until the divorce proceedings finished. He claimed that his “crazy” ex- wife and her lawyers were watching his cashflow, and that his ex-wife would “attack” and “retaliate” against any female employee that Giuliani hired. Giuliani promised Ms. Dunphy that his divorce would be resolved “any day now,” and therefore the deferral of her pay and the need to keep her employment secret would soon end. Ms. Dunphy reluctantly agreed to defer her pay and not to publicize her employment because she viewed the job, the salary, and the free legal representation as being worth the wait.

Worth the wait? While she was being sexually assaulted and told to come to work in a bikini?

As the lawsuit explains, “When she met Giuliani, Ms. Dunphy was highly vulnerable, having just begun the arduous process of recovering from severe domestic abuse,” and “she was desperate for an opportunity to move forward in a positive direction.” I suppose this could explain a lot.

But what is also interesting about this case is that so much of the action occurred in and around the vicinity of the former President. Dunphy and Giuliani allegedly met by chance in the lobby of Trump Tower in September 2016. Then they didn’t see each other for three years. Giuliani then messaged her on Facebook in January 2019. Dunphy was interviewed on January 21, 2019, at the Trump International Golf Club of West Palm Beach, Florida. Giuliani then “offered her a job as Director of Business Development for the Giuliani Companies, and also as his executive assistant for travel, communications, and public relations.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this story terribly confusing on many levels. First, there are those whose basic take is: “Oh my God! Giuliani is even more depraved than I thought he was!” But honestly, is it possible to participate in the violent and corrupt overthrowing of a presidential election and not be thoroughly and entirely depraved? And second, is it completely anti-feminist to wonder why Noelle Dunphy stayed for two years under the conditions described in the lawsuit?

It is more than possible for survivors of domestic abuse to fall out of the frying pan and into the fire: it happened to former porn star Linda Boreman (aka Linda Lovelace) repeatedly. So there is more than enough reason to believe that this occurred precisely as Noelle Dunphy says it did. But if that is so, it’s also hard to know how these things could have been happening in the vicinity of Donald J. Trump without him having a clue that one of his chief advisors was an abusive sex maniac.

Which means that a strange election season may be about to get even stranger.

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Short takes:

• You never know when a new form of status will emerge in New York City, but here it is: the New Yorker’s Emma Green writes about a not-so-secret society called “Gathering of Thought Criminals.” The membership criteria? You must be a media or academic figure who has been canceled or thinks they have been canceled. It sounds like they run around having parties and saying naughty things. “Some people on the guest list are notorious: élite professors who have deviated from campus consensus or who have broken university rules, and journalists who have made a name for themselves amid public backlash (or who have weathered it quietly),” Green writes. “Others are relative nobodies, people who, for one reason or another, have become exasperated with what they see as rampant censorious thinking in our culture.” Nota Bene: The only thing that truly annoys me about this story is that I didn’t write it. (May 17, 2023)

• There was news from yesterday’s elections—and it’s still bad for the GOP. At The Status Kuo, Jay Kuo (best Substack name ever, Jay) looks at two losses for the Party of Trump. “In the heart of GOP territory—in Jacksonville, Florida,” Kuo writes, “the Democratic mayoral candidate, Donna Deegan, defeated the Republican contender by four points—even though he had outspent her four to one.” And in Colorado Springs, a town best known for giving birth to one of the original Christian hate groups, Focus on the Family, the unaffiliated Nigerian immigrant Yemi Mobolade trounced his Republican opponent, Wayne Williams, in the run-off election for mayor. As Democrats take control of major cities across the country, Kuo warns, look for “state legislatures, especially in heavily GOP-denominated states, seek to exert control over their own big cities.” (May 17, 2023)

• At The New Republic, Nina Burleigh looks at the dark money behind the dark money: a Chicago billionaire named Barre Seid has siphoned $1.6 billion to extreme right-wing causes through Leonard Leo. Leo is now famous for giving gobs of money, gifts, and vacations to Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Thomas’s spouse Ginni. “About 20 years ago, as Seid was turning 70 and rolling in the dough, he started thinking about his legacy,” Burleigh writes. It’s a story from a right-wing funding doula named Steven Baer. “Gifting already comfortably well-off relatives didn’t appeal to him. Nor did buying a `Seid’ wing for a hospital or a university.” So Seid started systematically buying institutions: a college here, a law school there, a Supreme Court Justice or two…you have to read this story to believe it.” (May 16, 2023)