Rudy Giuliani told an employee not to talk to the FBI and then asked for her help googling obstruction of justice, lawsuit says
The FBI #TheFBI
Rudy Giuliani asked an employee to delete all communications and avoid speaking to the FBI — before later asking her “for help in Googling information about obstruction of justice,” according to a new lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed Monday by Noelle Dunphy, alleges Giuliani serially sexually assaulted her throughout 2019 and 2020 while she worked for him. The lawsuit claims that, after finding out Dunphy was separating from a partner amid a domestic violence dispute, Giuliani promised her a high-paying job. Throughout her employment as an assistant, Giuliani frequently harassed her and pressured her into sex, Dunphy alleges.
Dunphy’s work for Giuliani overlaps with an FBI counterintelligence investigation into Giuliani that began in 2019 and ended last year without any charges.
According to the lawsuit, around May 2019, Giuliani told Dunphy to delete her messages with him.
“He directed Ms. Dunphy not to talk to the FBI about him and about various matters that she had witnessed while working for him, and he threatened that he had access to professional investigators who could make her look bad even though, Giuliani admitted, she was ‘very innocent,'” the lawsuit says.
Giuliani accompanied those instructions with what Dunphy saw as a threat, the lawsuit says.
“You’ve got to be smart enough to know what I have just said,” Giuliani told her, according to the lawsuit.
Throughout June and July of that year, Giuliani — a former US prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, who at the time was a personal attorney for Donald Trump, the President of the United States — asked for Dunphy’s help with legal research, per the lawsuit.
“Giuliani asked Ms. Dunphy for help in Googling information about obstruction of justice, among other topics,” the lawsuit says.
Members of the FBI began to try to speak with Dunphy for their investigation in October of 2019, the lawsuit says. When Dunphy raised the issue with Giuliani weeks later, Giuliani demanded that she not talk or cooperate with any agents or they would “get totally destroyed,” according to the suit.
“He told her that if the FBI sought to interview her, she should ‘not remember’ anything, and should claim that she did not know Giuliani,” the lawsuit says.
Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment and home were raided in 2021 as part of the FBI investigation, which triggered a court battle over the evidence that prosecutors were permitted to examine. Prosecutors said in a court filing in November that they were closing the investigation, which had examined the legality of Giuliani’s lobbying efforts in Ukraine, which had played a role in Trump’s first impeachment.
Giuliani, through his spokesman Ted Goodman, “unequivocally” denied the allegations: “Mayor Giuliani’s lifetime of public service speaks for itself and he will pursue all available remedies and counterclaims.”