Couples: Tish Durkin

The Giulianis Break Up And Rudy breaks down? How Judith diagnoses her ex’s new “dissembling” condition.

“THE MAN THAT he is now is absolutely not the man he was when I married him.” Judith Giuliani is every bit as calm and cool as the empty, deeply air-conditioned Mount Fuji restaurant in Southampton, where she has opted to meet on a blistering August afternoon. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband, commenting on her commenting on his infidelity and alleged mendacity, has told reporters she is spiteful and full of rage. Many of his associates have told me she’s pretty much Lucifer and Marie Antoinette rolled into one. Sitting here sipping her tea, though, she seems like a petite, pristinely groomed lady with much more story to tell than nerve to tell it. So as if to get the whole thing over with, she has raced straight to answering the big question buzzing like a bee around the table, New York, and, apparently, her life: What has happened to Rudy?

Somehow, one can’t help but sense that the question is mixed up with the question of what happened to their marriage. No one is ordering anything to eat, but we’re digging into quite some stew.

Ask Judith to spell out the difference she sees between the Rudy she married and the Rudy she is divorcing and she’ll contrast his (supposedly) straight-talking mayoral past with his current presidential-lawyer habit of “dissembling, to put it kindly.”

These days, it’s not just Trump he’s dissembling over. “I am not upset about Maria Rosa Ryan,” Judith declares, referencing the hospital exec with whom Rudy was caught spending a night at a New Hampshire hotel in March, according to the New York Post. (Rudy claimed the two weren’t up to anything carnal, just dining and watching The Godfather—which the former mayor is, in fairness, widely believed to consider better than sex.)