Rudy Giuliani is “recovering from pneumonia” and remains in “critical but stable” condition in a Florida hospital after it was announced that the former New York City mayor had been hospitalized, according to his spokesperson.
The 81-year-old is being monitored as a “precautionary measure,” his spokesman Ted Goodman told The Independent in an email Monday.
Giuliani, who was mayor during the September 11 terror attacks, “ran toward the towers to help those in need, which later led to a diagnosis of restrictive airway disease,” Goodman wrote.
“This condition adds complications to any respiratory illness, and the virus quickly overwhelmed his body, requiring mechanical ventilation to maintain adequate oxygen and stabilize his condition,” he added.
Giuliani is “now breathing on his own, with his family and primary medical provider at his side,” Goodman said.
“Mayor Giuliani is the ultimate fighter — as he has demonstrated throughout his life — and he is winning this battle,” he said.
It remains unclear when Giuliani was hospitalized, which Goodman announced Sunday evening.
The announcement, however, arrived days after the former mayor was heard coughing on his nightly America’s Mayor Live streaming broadcast. He told his audience that his voice was “a little under the weather.”
“My voice is a little under the weather, so I won’t be able to speak as loudly as I usually do, but I’ll get closer to the microphone,” he said.
Giuliani — who led a spurious legal battle to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election — has spent the last several years in courtrooms across the country battling criminal indictments, bankruptcy and a defamation lawsuit in the election’s volatile aftermath.
Last summer, he was involved in a car crash in New Hampshire in which he suffered a fractured vertebra. He made at least one public appearance in a wheelchair in the months that followed.
An avalanche of legal and financial troubles in the months after the 2020 election nearly spiraled the former mayor into ruin after he spent weeks elevating bogus claims about the results and joined what prosecutors alleged was a criminal conspiracy to undermine the outcome.
Trump’s former attorney was disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C., and faced criminal indictments in Arizona and Georgia.
He also was sued for defamation after repeatedly and falsely accusing two election workers in Georgia of manipulating votes, which fueled a wave of harassment and abuse directed at the women.
