Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers aren't buying Rudy Giuliani's 'Borat' excuses
Wednesday was a bad day to be Rudy Giuliani and a great one to be a late-night TV host.
Both Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers spent parts of their opening monologues lampooning President Trump's personal attorney after a compromising scene from Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm" showed Giuliani placing his hand in his pants while lying down on a bed in a hotel room.
The incident occurred in the presence of a young actress playing Borat's daughter, who poses in the film as a conservative journalist interviewing Giuliani over drinks.
"This was a late-breaking story by — can we put the name of the publication on the screen?" Meyers said on "Late Night" as the "Mad Libs" logo appeared on the screen. "There we go. Of course. The libs are at it again."
On "The Late Show," Colbert took a dig at CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who was suspended by the New Yorker earlier this week after he reportedly masturbated on camera during a work Zoom meeting.
"Thanks to hidden cameras that Sacha set up in the movie, we see Giuliani reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed," Colbert said. "Jeffrey Toobin, it's over already."
In the movie, Baron Cohen's Borat quickly interrupts the questionable hotel scene by running into the room and declaring, "She's 15! She's too old for you." (Maria Bakalova, the actress who plays Borat's daughter, is actually 24.)
"Never a great sign when the moral authority of the situation comes from a guy who once handed a woman a bag of his own poop," Colbert quipped, referencing a scene from the original "Borat."
"During the interview with the daughter, Giuliani drank scotch, coughs, fails to socially distance and agrees, at least in theory, to eat a bat with his interviewer," Colbert said. "This doesn't look great, but Rudy says he has a perfectly innocent explanation."
On Wednesday, Giuliani defended himself on social media, claiming, "The Borat video is a complete fabrication" and dismissing Baron Cohen as "a stone-cold liar."
"I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment," he tweeted. "At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate."
Colbert wasn't buying it.
"Why did you go into a bedroom, at the suggestion of a young woman, to have cocktails, to take off a mic?" the comedian mused. "I take off a mic every night. Never once have I reclined on a king-size bed and then launched a fact-finding mission into my own groin."
The new "Borat" film, officially titled "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," arrives Friday on Amazon Prime Video.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
