Rudy Giuliani had a good run. After decades of making headlines for going head-to-head with New York’s most feared mafia bosses and cleaning up the city’s once-blighted streets, the former New York City mayor became the poster boy for patriotism and American resilience in the wake of 9/11. But ever since Giuliani officially tethered himself to longtime pal and bad luck charm Donald Trump, things have gone, well, not well.
Most recently, Giuliani was stripped of his right to practice law in the state of New York as well as in Washington, D.C. because all the lies he has peddled in the name of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election so that Trump could be declared the winner. Prior to that, he was the subject of an early-morning FBI raid, which is never a good thing. With his legal fees mounting, Rudy’s equally disgraced old pal Bernard Kerik—former New York City police commissioner-turned-felon—decided to make a big show of setting up what he called The Rudy Giuliani Defense Fund, or (more laughably) The Rudy Giuliani Freedom Fund, with the goal of crowdsourcing $5 million to help Giuliani pay his legal fees. As of earlier this week, the “fund” had raised less than .2 percent of that. Now, as the Daily Beast reports, the fund’s page has been shuttered altogether.
The Fundly account, established in Rudy’s name a day before Kerik launched a website for the legal defense fund in late June, raised $9,798 before the page disappeared—far short from its goal of raising $5 million in two months. While the landing page for the Fundly account is gone, the Giuliani account still shows it’s in possession of its nearly $10,000 donor haul, with the website inconspicuously archiving donor names and amounts given. But links to the legal defense fund page they gave to now automatically redirect to Fundly’s general landing page for “politics and public policy” causes.
While Kerik did not respond to Daily Beast’s request for comment, Robert Costello—the man who has the unenviable title of “Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer”—said he had “no knowledge” on the matter.
To say that people have seemed to stop giving a sh*t about what happens to Rudy would be a massive understatement—particularly if we’re basing that opinion on the amount of money his Fundly page raised. Meanwhile, the one person who should be giving Rudy money—not to help with his legal fund, but because he has a pile of unpaid invoices from Giuliani sitting on his desk—is the one who got Giuliani into all this trouble in the first place: Trump. But that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. According to Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Landslide, “Trump is annoyed that [Rudy] tried to get paid for his election challenge work.”
What’s the word for being a persona non grata to someone who is persona non grata?
(Via Daily Beast)