Rudy Giuliani wanted the NYPD to bust the “Borat” crew for extortion after he got caught in a compromising-appearing position in a Manhattan hotel — but police determined no crime had been committed, a law enforcement source told The Post.
Giuliani called the cops after he was filmed in the hotel room with Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova for the 2020 Sasha Baron Cohen movie “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” with the actress portraying Cohen’s barn-raised 15-year-old daughter, Tutar.
He didn’t know he had been duped into the scene, which shows the former mayor reaching down into his pants as he lay on his back on a bed with the actress at his side, until Cohen burst into the room in a pink tutu.
“So, he calls the police and, you know, when they arrive he describes the events that occurred,” the law enforcement source said. “And he’s talking about, you know, the possibility of a federal crime having been committed.”
“So then they kind of figured out over time that this was Borat,” the source said. “And, you know, he got scammed in a Borat thing. And, you know, that there had been no crime committed there.”
Giuliani has claimed that was merely tucking in his shirt in the racy scene with the Bulgarian actress — who said recently that she was unsure at first how the whole thing would play out.
“I was kind of scared that something would happen. But fortunately, we escaped,” Bakalova said in a recent interview with the New York Times.
When he realized he’d been pranked, Giuliani “claimed we were trying to extort him at the time [but] we didn’t ask for anything,” the movie’s producer Monica Levinson said Saturday in a Producers Guild of America panel, Deadline reported.
“He called all of his New York City cops and said ‘extortion,’ which was a federal crime. Very smart to bring that up,” Levinson said.
Levinson said the hotel then locked the film crew out of the suite where they had shot the scene — but they had already transferred the footage out of the room.
“That’s always out first,” Levinson told the panel, according to Deadline. “We would hide tapes in our pants. There’s always ways to make sure we got out the data.”
However, the crew members were unable to move the equipment out of the room and they had more scenes to shoot the day after the one with Giuliani.
“We actually had to rent new equipment,” Levinson said. “It was a really stressful time that evening because the hotel wouldn’t let us take anything out of the rooms.”
The producer said she spent 19 hours in the slammer during the filming of the original “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazahkstan,” so she wanted to make sure none of the crew in the latest flick would end up behind bars too.
“We ended up confabbing with our lawyers,” she said. “I called the production team and said, ‘Let’s get everyone to New Jersey tonight.’ It was 11 o’clock at night. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened to me on the first movie happening to the entire crew.”
Giuliani told Page Six in July 2020 that he called the cops after Baron Cohen entered the hotel room in a pink thong.
“This guy comes running in, wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit,” Giuliani said. “It looked absurd. He had the beard, bare legs, and wasn’t what I would call distractingly attractive.”
