FACT CHECK: Does This Photo Show A Neighbor Watching The FBI Raid Rudy Giuliani’s Home?

Charlese Freeman | Contributor

An image shared on Facebook allegedly shows former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s neighbor watching the FBI raid his home.

Verdict: False

The picture shows a woman watching a 2017 protest in the District of Columbia, not the 2021 FBI raid on Giuliani’s home.

Fact Check:

The FBI in late April raided Giuliani’s Manhattan apartment and office as part of a federal investigation into his dealings in Ukraine, The New York Times reported. In a statement, Robert Costello, Giuliani’s lawyer, said that the search warrants involved “one indication of an alleged incident of failure to register as a foreign agent.” Giuliani has denied wrongdoing.

The claim that the image shows a neighbor in a fur coat holding a glass of wine while watching the former New York City mayor’s home get raided by the FBI started circulating after the news of the search warrants broke. However, photos of neighbors watching Giuliani’s home get raided by federal agents could not be found online at this time.

A reverse image search, revealed the picture in question doesn’t show what the April 28 Facebook post claims. Check Your Fact found the photo, which is credited to a photographer for the Daily Mail, in a tweet that appears in an April 2017 Time article titled “Meet the Woman Who Was Sipping Wine in a Fur Coat at an Ivanka Trump Protest.” The Daily Mail published the picture in early April of that year.

Both outlets identified the woman in the fur coat as Dianne Bruce, who, according to Time and the Daily Mail, was watching protesters hold a demonstration in the Washington neighborhood where Ivanka Trump, the daughter of former President Donald Trump, lived at the time. The demonstrators gathered there to protest against Donald Trump’s rollback of some of former President Barack Obama’s environmental policies, Time reported.

“It was the entertainment for Saturday night,” Bruce explained to Time. “A neighbor had a couple of glasses of wine, and we were standing so they gave us one as neighbors do, and at the end, I gave her back her glass.”  (RELATED: Did Rudy Giuliani Tweet That It Is ‘Highly Likely’ People Contract COVID-19 By ‘Having Sex With Barnyard Animals’?)

One woman who said she lives in the same apartment building as Giuliani told reporters she “probably saw FBI jackets” and saw investigators “bringing out a lot of stuff,” Business Insider reported.

Charlese Freeman

Contributor

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