According to a new book, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani recovered from a 2008 breakdown at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida mansion, the Guardian reports.
In Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor by Andrew Kirtzman, Judith Giuliani says her then-husband was despondent over his poor performance in the 2008 Republican primary for president.
Giuliani’s ex-wife says that he started drinking heavily and showed signs of severe depression. “We moved into Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” she told Kirtzman.
The former mayor “was always falling shitfaced somewhere,” Judith Giuliani says, and once fell while leaving a car, which resulted in a scar on his forehead.
The revelations follow an earlier report in the New York Times, also from Kirtzman’s book, that a Giuliani associate tried to convince Trump to give his friend a general pardon as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.
In the book, Kirtzman writes that Giuliani “had a dark, Machiavellian streak, yet managed to wrap his problematic acts in a cloak of righteousness.” In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a sad tale, expertly told, of corruption, bad judgment, avarice, and treason.”
Giuliani is slated for publication by Simon & Schuster on Sept. 13.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
