Borat 2 Puts Rudy Giuliani at the Center of His Own October Surprise

This article features Borat Subsequent Moviefilm spoilers.

Like many, I admit I was skeptical upon hearing the news that Sacha Baron Cohen was making Borat 2, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, no less. But less than a month later, and a handful of days before its Amazon Prime premiere, I stand corrected. It seems Borat is the exact kind of October Surprise we need this election year… or at least the one we deserve. Look no further than details about Rudy Giuliani lying in a bed with his hands allegedly near his crotch.

As revealed in a report filed in The Daily Beast, late in the film Baron Cohen’s Borat and his daughter Tutar, played by Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, attempt to seduce Giuliani. Why? Because Borat dreams of marrying his daughter to someone inside President Donald Trump’s inner circle. “Rudolph was Donald’s best buddy in the whole world,” Borat apparently says over narration. “And also very dignified statesman of the highest order. This would not be easy.”

Thus the character of Tutar poses as a conservative journalist of the alt-right variety and sets up an interview with President Trump’s personal attorney in a New York City hotel room. There she is reported to flatter and flirt with him by giggling and promising to “relax” him. She then invites Giuliani into the hotel suite’s bedroom, which he “happily obliges” and is soon asking for her phone number and lying on the bed with his “hands down his pants in a suggestive manner.”

Journalist John Aravosis has confirmed the last detail, tweeting this image taken from the film, which finds Giuliani in a compromising situation.

At this point, Baron Cohen’s Borat apparently interrupts the scene by shouting, “She’s 15” and sending the former New York City mayor fleeing for the door.

For the record, this contradicts Giuliani’s previous version of events. Though largely ignored at the time, the politician complained to The New York Post about being “pranked” by Baron Cohen back in June. In his telling, he was simply doing an interview when someone he later identified as Baron Cohen barged in wearing a “pink transgender outfit.”

“This person comes in yelling and screaming,” Giuliani said, “and I thought this must be a scam or a shakedown, so I reported it to the police.”

The above photo appears to paint a much different story. One that is quite revealing given Giuliani’s role in another October Surprise that also ended up smeared across the pages of The New York Post.

Indeed, Giuliani is at the center of a scandal supposedly involving Hunter Biden and a laptop he is alleged to have left at a Delaware repair shop. The Post published images taken off the hard drive of the computer in question, a hard drive provided to the paper by Giuliani on Oct. 11.

According to the former mayor, he provided the hard drive to to The New York Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.”

In fact, he allegedly took it to Fox News first who passed on publishing contents from the hard drive, and according to The New York Times, Bruce Golding, who is a reporter at The New York Post, wrote most of the article but asked to have his byline taken off the piece because of concerns over its credibility. Instead one of the bylines belonged to a former associate producer on Fox News’ Hannity, her first with the New York tabloid.

According that tabloid and Giuliani, the photos show former Vice President Joe Biden using his position in the Obama administration to enrich his son Hunter.

Many have questioned the validity of Giuliani’s story of obtaining the hard drive, which he turned over to authorities, particularly given that U.S. intelligence agencies warned the Trump administration in 2019 that Giuliani was the target of a “Russian intelligence operation” to feed misinformation to the White House.

The White House clearly has not minded. Giuliani remains Trump’s personal lawyer, even after he and his associates were embroiled deep in the scandal that resulted in Trump’s impeachment. It was also a scandal that involved Ukraine and an interest in creating a cloud of corruption around Hunter Biden and his father in Ukraine.

So if one Trump lawyer seeks to stake his reputation on a hard drive alleged to feature scandalous information, him landing in a much smaller scandal of his own making is a definite Borat-worthy twist to the ugliness of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.