Rudy Giuliani apparently left out a few key details when he said in July that he’d called the cops on Sacha Baron Cohen.
Several reports on Baron Cohen’s new film, a sequel to his 2006 hit “Borat,” say it shows Giuliani getting into bed while in a room with a young woman and putting his hand down his pants. Baron Cohen then interrupts the scene.
The British actor is known for going undercover in his movies, in Borat’s case as an offensive journalist from Kazakhstan. In the new film, Borat tries to make amends for his last movie by attempting to give away his 15-year-old daughter “Tutar” (played by the apparently 24-year-old Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova) to various prominent Republicans.
That, apparently, included a somewhat successful attempt at seducing Giuliani.
According to reporters at The Guardian, Vanity Fair, and The Daily Beast who’ve seen the scene in question, it begins with Tutar interviewing Giuliani in a hotel suite. The former New York City mayor compliments Tutar and holds her hands before following her into the bedroom. He lies down in bed and, in The Daily Beast’s description, “starts sticking his hands down his pants in a seemingly suggestive manner.”
Borat then bursts in, per the reports, and yells at Giuliani: “She’s 15! She’s too old for you!”
In a radio interview flagged by The Daily Beast Wednesday, Giuliani said the motion was just him tucking his shirt back in after taking off the electronic equipment he’d had on for the staged interview.
“They have this picture they take which looks doctored, but in any event, I’m tucking my shirt in. I assure you that’s all I was doing,” he said.
Rudy made the point himself on Twitter soon after:
(2) In fact, the NY Post today reports "it looks to me like an exaggeration through editing."
As soon as I realized it was a set up I called the police, which has been noted in THR article on July 8th.
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) October 21, 2020
(4) We are preparing much bigger dumps off of the hard drive from hell, of which Joe Biden will be unable to defend or hide from. I have the receipts.
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) October 21, 2020
At the time, in July, Giuliani spokesperson Christianné Allen said the mayor had “foiled” Baron Cohen’s “scam interview” and chased the filmmaker off before calling the cops.
“Un-fooled and placid, Mayor Giuliani notified security to call the police,” Allen said. “It was then, upon hearing the word police, Cohen turned from a screaming banshee into a fleeing hyena.”
Un-fooled and placid, Mayor Giuliani notified security to call the police. It was then, upon hearing the word police, Cohen turned from a screaming banshee into a fleeing hyena.
I hear he was last seen running down the street in his bathrobe.
Better luck next time, Sacha!
— Christianné L Allen (@Christianne_L_A) July 9, 2020
Giuliani did apparently call the cops, as he said publicly at the time. But he didn’t mention anything about having been seduced.
Some far-right internet activists rushed to Twitter to defend the former mayor’s honor.
Jack Posobiec, who once infamously used a “Rape Melania” poster to sabotage an anti-Trump protest, accused people sharing stills from the scene of violating New York’s revenge porn law.
Posobiec, who the Southern Poverty Law Center called a neo-Nazi collaborator for his well-documented ties to the far-right, was a driving force behind the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which alleged that Democrats ran a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in the nation’s capital.
Congrats to everyone posting those Giuliani pictures, you just broke the New York State revenge porn lawhttps://t.co/L28VsRKCkt
— Jack Posobiec ?? (@JackPosobiec) October 21, 2020
In his own video, fellow former pizzagater and anti-feminist “gorilla mindset” guru Mike Cernovich said that Baron Cohen, not Giuliani, should be “investigated immediately” because Baron Cohen’s character in the scene says that his daughter is only 15 years old.
“In the video, from what I can tell, Sacha Baron Cohen runs out while Rudy and that women are in a compromising position, and he says, ‘She’s only 15,’” Cernovich said. “So I think that Sacha Baron Cohen should be investigated immediately. People are going, ‘Well, the actress was a certain age.’ What did he know, when did he know it? These are Sacha Baron Cohen’s own words.”
“How many conservative media news anchors are 15?” Cernovich added, defending Giuliani from claims that he knowingly got into bed with a purported child.
