Giuliani Maligns Jews and Women in Audio Recordings Filed in Lawsuit

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Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor and presidential lawyer, faces a variety of legal troubles and has been identified as a co-conspirator in Donald Trump’s indictment.

By Jonah E. Bromwich

Already identified as a co-conspirator in the latest indictment of Donald J. Trump, Rudolph W. Giuliani faced further embarrassment this week when a woman suing him for sexual assault and harassment revealed an assortment of disparaging remarks she said he had made.

The woman, Noelle Dunphy, filed a lawsuit in May claiming that Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, began harassing and assaulting her shortly after he hired her in January 2019. Mr. Giuliani has responded that Ms. Dunphy was never his employee and that the two had a consensual relationship.

Ms. Dunphy said in her lawsuit that she had audio recordings that supported her claims. The recordings themselves have not been made public. In the transcripts filed on Tuesday by Ms. Dunphy’s lawyer, Justin T. Kelton, Mr. Giuliani uses a homophobic slur, makes disparaging remarks about Jews and women and uses sexually explicit language in conversation with Ms. Dunphy.

In one excerpt, he complains that the Jewish people continue to celebrate the ancient holiday of Passover.

“Jews,” he says. “They want to go through that freaking Passover all the time. Man, oh, man. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. OK, the Red Sea parted. Big deal. Not the first time that happened.”

The transcript cut off there, and it was not clear whether Mr. Giuliani elaborated. In another portion, he engaged in a derisive discussion of the size of Jewish men’s genitals.

Mr. Kelton wrote in a filing accompanying the transcripts that Mr. Giuliani’s legal papers were “replete with provably false assertions” and that Mr. Giuliani denied saying things that he had in fact said.

The broader context of Mr. Giuliani’s remarks is not provided in the transcripts, which were filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan and which for the most part contain only brief exchanges between the former mayor and Ms. Dunphy. He often seems to be rambling. He remarks that there are not many Republican celebrities and uses a homophobic slur to describe the actor Matt Damon, apropos of a conversation about a different actor whose name he cannot recall. He then adds that Mr. Damon is short.

“Matt Damon is 5’2,” he says, adding, inexplicably, “Eyes are blue. Coochie-coochie-coochie-coo,” in an apparent allusion to a 1925 song.

“Maybe,” Ms. Dunphy responds. (Mr. Damon has said that he is 5 feet 10½ inches tall.)

In another transcript, Mr. Giuliani says that he is physically aroused by Ms. Dunphy’s intelligence, adding, “I’d never think about a girl being smart. If you told me a girl was smart, I would often think she’s not attractive.”

In June, a lawyer for Mr. Giuliani, Adam S. Katz, asked the court to end her case or, barring that, to strike significant portions of her lawsuit from the record, arguing that her filing was filled with “outright misrepresentations, intentional exaggeration and salacious details meant to create a media frenzy.”

He argued that Ms. Dunphy had made false allegations about Mr. Giuliani’s remarks about minority groups and that Mr. Giuliani had not had affairs that were described in the lawsuit.

In one of the excerpts, Mr. Giuliani appears to reminisce about one of the women with whom he denied having an affair — though he does not use her full name.

Ms. Dunphy says that the remarks were recorded in 2019. The two parties disagree about whether Mr. Giuliani was aware that she was recording him and where the recordings were made. They were transcribed by Veritext Legal Solutions, a court reporting service based in Mineola, N.Y.

A spokesman for Mr. Giuliani, Ted Goodman, repeated Thursday that Ms. Dunphy’s relationship with Mr. Giuliani was consensual and said that her claims amount to “smears and attacks against a man who has dedicated his life to serving others.”

The transcripts are embarrassing. But it is not clear how much they will support Ms. Dunphy’s case, the fate of which will be determined by the presiding judge, Lucy Billings. Mr. Katz said Thursday that he planned to address the transcripts — which he said had been taken out of context, if they were authentic in the first place — in court.

“Ms. Dunphy’s motion is completely meritless, and we will demonstrate that in the opposition,” he said.

Mr. Giuliani is dealing with a number of other legal woes. The special counsel, Jack Smith, who this week filed an indictment against Mr. Trump, referred to Mr. Giuliani as the former president’s chief co-conspirator, saying that the former mayor was involved in much of the effort to subvert the 2020 election.

Mr. Giuliani could be prosecuted by Mr. Smith or by the Georgia district attorney, Fani Willis, who is reaching the final stages of her own investigation into election interference.

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney's office, state criminal courts in Manhattan and New York City's jails. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

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