It's time to count down to the "cancel culture" complaints: Rudy Giuliani has been sued for sexual abuse.
In a case that is both somehow stomach-churning and completely unsurprising, Noelle Dunphy claims she was hired in 2019 with a promised salary of $1 million a year for "business development work," but soon discovered that Giuliani expected lots of sex as part of the deal. She is accusing the former New York City mayor, who found a second career as a lead attorney in Donald Trump's 2020 coup attempt, of multiple forms of rape and sexual harassment.
The nearly 70-page complaint is overwhelming in its descriptions of Giuliani's depravity, though all of it is completely believable in light of Giulilani's already known and often quite public bad behavior. On top of the relentless sexual abuse, she also describes him as constantly drunk and spewing invective about women, people of color, and Jews. She also portrays him as thoroughly corrupt, offering to sell pardons from Trump for $2 million a pop, and discussing their plans for an attempted coup long before Trump lost the election. Throughout all this, Dunphy claims Giuliani never did pay her what was promised.
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Dunphy claims to have documentary evidence in the form of emails, tapes, and texts. Only a few are included, likely in hopes Giuliani will settle out of court to keep the rest from being released. No need to recount the disturbing details here, as they can be read in Gabriella Ferrigine's reporting for Salon or in the lawsuit itself. But the grim reality is only the alleged drinking, which makes him embarrassingly sloppy, has done any real damage to Giuliani's standing with the GOP base.
What Giuliani stands accused of is what all the right-wing whining and crying about "cancel culture" has always been about: the "right" to drop racial slurs and abuse women — or worse — without fear of social consequence.
After all, what Giuliani stands accused of is what all the right-wing whining and crying about "cancel culture" has always been about: the "right" to drop racial slurs and abuse women — or worse — without fear of social consequence. No doubt that some will take umbrage at this characterization. They'll insist they're not talking about protecting people like Giuliani, who is alleged to have called people names like "c*nt" and "f*g," and who reportedly said Jewish men had "inferior" penises due to "natural selection."
But it was just this month that the MAGA crowd rushed to the defense of Tucker Carlson, after the Fox News host got fired, supposedly because of similarly racist remarks made in text messages. According to the New York Times, the text that "set off a panic" at Fox was one in which Carlson fantasized about watching Proud Boys would "kill" a leftist protester, even though that kind of gang violence, according to Carlson, is "dishonorable" and "not how white men fight."
There haven't been "limits" in a long time, not for the crowd that treats the January 6 insurrectionists like heroes.
Many commentators were understandably skeptical that these comments did Carlson in. They didn't differ all that much from what he said nightly on-air, where Carlson would routinely repeat talking points clearly drawn from reading white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites. But even the perception that Carlson got canned for being a white supremacist was enough to set off a temper tantrum in the Fox News audience. The network's ratings have plummeted, with the primetime viewership being half what it was when Carlson had the 8PM slot. This was driven in no small part by a chorus of prominent right-wingers, including former NFL player Brett Favre, calling for a "boycott" of Fox to punish them for this supposed sop to anti-racism.
Gross, but also just how things work on the right now. It's not just the MAGA movement has no boundaries when it comes to bigotry or violence. They are eager to reward people for both with adulation.
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Donald Trump's CNN "town hall" last week is a good example. After some perfunctory denials of raping journalist E. Jean Carroll, even though a jury just found him liable for "sexual abuse," Trump ranted at length on the topics of how Carroll had it coming and how "fortunately," men like him usually get away with rape. The crowd was elated, laughing and applauding as Trump rolled out these apologies for sexual violence.
The same crowd is turning Daniel Penny, a former Marine who was filmed killing a homeless man on a subway, into a hero. So far, Penny's GoFundMe has raised $2 million, due to open support from Republican politicians. This was after Texas's Republican governor, Greg Abbott, vowed to pardon a former US Army sergeant similarly named Daniel Perry, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for killing a US Air Force veteran at a Black Lives Matter protest in Austin. Abbott hasn't backed down, even though text messages reveal that Perry shared "white power" memes, compared Black Lives Matter protesters to "a zoo full of monkeys" and wished he could shoot protesters and "get paid for hunting Muslims in Europe." Perry's online communications also involved sexualized exchanges with minors, after he googled "good chats to meet young girls." And this all comes after MAGA rallied around Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen who killed two men after deliberately arming himself to confront Black Lives Matter protesters.
Jack Teixeira, who was arrested on serious charges of leaking troves of classified documents online, did not kill anyone. But there was little doubt from the get-go that he was both radicalized and racist. Teixeira spent much of his time online in a group called "Thug Shaker Central," which was mostly dedicated to racist jokes and memes. Recent reporting from the Washington Post shows Teixeira imagined he was prepping for a civil war aimed at destroying people he hated, including Jews, LGBTQ people, and people of color. "Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump," he declared in one video. ("Mag dump" is slang for firing off an entire gun's magazine at once.) Teixeira was also swiftly adopted as a hero-martyr on the MAGA right. Carlson, before he was fired, pretended Teixeira leaked documents as some kind of "expose" of government wrongdoing, though there's no actual government wrongdoing uncovered in the leaks. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., falsely claimed that Teixeira was targeted for being "white, male, christian, and antiwar." Far from being anti-war, the Washington Post reporting shows Teixeira spoke eagerly of "race war" and of preparing for "violent struggle against a legion of perceived adversaries — including Blacks, political liberals, Jews, gay and transgender people."
There haven't been "limits" in a long time, not for the crowd that treats the January 6 insurrectionists like heroes.
Giuliani is a gross old man who butt dials reporters and whose vodka sweats have led to hair dye leakage on national television.
It seems he's quietly getting cut loose from the larger MAGA world. But mostly because he's sweaty and, as an aide to Fox News head Rupert Murdoch complained in a leaked text message, "I think the booze has got to him." But in most ways, Giuliani remains the avatar for what MAGA is talking about when they speak of the "freedom" supposedly under threat from "cancel culture": The ability to be a loudmouth racist who, to quote Trump, can "grab them by the pussy," all without facing a single social consequence for it.
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