Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to prepare for trial after he failed to silence “sordid” sex claims hurled against him — and a lawyer made famous by a movie took up his accuser’s case.
The disgraced former New York City mayor and Donald Trump lawyer must sit for a deposition before the end of January next year — and be ready to go before a jury by the end of March, according to a judge's order filed in New York Supreme Court this week.
It follows a 3-year fight by Noelle Dunphy, who claims she was subjected to booze-and-Viagra-fueled sexual harassment, including being forced to have sex, while working for Giuliani between 2019 and 2021. She claims to have recordings of many of Giuliani’s demands.
The order from Manhattan Judge Nicholas Moyne quashes efforts by Giuliani’s legal team to have the case thrown out — and brushes aside arguments that he’s too sick and poor to stand trial.
“This has been going on a long time,” Dunphy’s lawyer, Bill Robedee, who took over the case in May, told Raw Story.
“The wrongs that were done to Noelle were done nearly a decade ago and it’s time to get her the resolution that she deserves.”
Giuliani's lawyer, Adam Katz, did not respond to interview requests from Raw Story.
Dunphy’s lawsuit is seeking $10 million in damages. In it, she claims she was hired by Giuliani for “business development work and other work,” but he harassed her and demanded sex until he fired her, owing $2 million in unpaid wages.
“Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former US Attorney, once hailed as ‘America’s Mayor,’ is a sexist sexual predator and abuser,” she said in the lawsuit.
The suit added, “Giuliani threatened [Dunphy] with further retaliation if she did not stay silent, stating that his private investigators and political connections to President Trump enabled him to retaliate in other ways, express and implied."
“This is a pretty sordid case,” Robedee said.
“It's just another window that you can peek into to kind of get a look at … the vapid depravity of those who rule over us. It reminded me of when I first started going through the Epstein files online.”
Giuliani has scrambled to get the case dismissed, with his legal team claiming Dunphy never actually worked for him, but instead the pair “dated for a few months.”
But Moyne refused to dismiss earlier this year.
Giuliani’s team has also argued he’s too ill to stand trial, and too poor to pay any resulting damages.
The former mayor, 82, was hospitalized in May with severe pneumonia and placed in a medically induced coma that required a ventilator. He later described having a near-death “spiritual experience.”
In 2024, he filed for bankruptcy after being ordered to pay $148 million in damages to two election workers he was found to have defamed with election tampering claims in Georgia. A federal judge dismissed the filing in 2024.
He has also been disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C., after he lied repeatedly about the 2020 election results.
“The challenge with Mr. Giuliani in the last year or so,” said Robedee, “Is that he seems to be very ill and, at the same time, he seems to be flying all around the world.
“... In July, he addressed the Italian parliament. The day we were in court, I believe the same day, he was at Castel Gandolfo for a conference and was photographed with the Holy Father. … He was in Bulgaria, he had a big birthday party at our embassy in Greece.
“And, you know, for a guy who’s not working and is poor, who pays for these private jet flights? … I think there’s a lot of question marks around what the true state of Mr. Giuliani’s health is and what the true state of his income and asset status is.”
Robedee is probably best known for representing Colin Warner, a Black man in Brooklyn who was jailed for 21 years for a murder he did not commit. The successful fight to free him was told in the 2017 movie “Crown Heights.”
When he began his law career in New York City, he said, Giuliani was widely revered.
“He was the Italian-American lawyer that took on the mafia,” he said. ”Whether you loved him or hated him, you admired him.
“You can’t delight in a fall from grace as spectacular, as humiliating, as what’s happened to Rudy Giuliani.”
