WHO IS GERALDO?

One of media’s most enduring broadcasters, in the Summer of 2023, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Geraldo Rivera left Fox News, after 22 years with the network as Senior Correspondent and rotating co-host on the FOX News Channel’s hit program The Five. Currently he is appearing on various networks including CNN and NewsNation.

He joined Fox in 2001 following the 9/11 terror attacks that killed friends and neighbors. Six dads with children in his daughters’ grade school were killed when the planes were crashed into the World Trade Center. A native New Yorker, Geraldo was outraged and vowed to chronicle the nation’s crusade to bring justice to the perpetrators of the worst act of terror on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.

For weeks in December 2001, he and his team provided dramatic live reports from Tora Bora, Afghanistan during the initial siege on Osama bin Laden’s hideout. Over the next decade, Geraldo returned to Afghanistan ten more times to cover Operation Enduring Freedom.

Beginning with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he also did eleven extended assignments covering Operation Iraqi Freedom. While reporting A Thousand Miles of Bad Road, a 2004 Fox News Special Report, Rivera, and crew were ambushed in the city of Mosul, their vehicle hit fourteen times. Miraculously, only one person in their convoy was injured, an Iraqi driver hit in the shoulder. Geraldo rode out of the country on what all expected would be America’s last military convoy leaving Iraq in 2011.

During his two decades with Fox, Rivera did dramatic, up close, and personal live reporting from Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Maria, and many other natural disasters. He was on the scene in Charleston, SC to report on the horrific, racially motivated massacre in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and on the 2015 riots that followed the death in police custody of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, MD. Deeply engaged in reporting urban violence, and a huge supporter of cops everywhere, Rivera also provided live coverage of the 2014 funeral of NYPD officers killed in the line of duty.

Additionally, Geraldo reported hour-long specials, exposing the cushy life in prison of previously condemned killer Scott Peterson, the 35th anniversary of the overdose death of Elvis Presley, and on the untimely death of Geraldo’s longtime friend, comedian Joan Rivers. In 2005, Geraldo secured an exclusive, hour long interview with Michael Jackson on the evening before his trial and subsequent acquittal on child molestation charges.

Rivera began his more than 50-year career at WABC-TV in New York where he presented a series exposing the deplorable conditions at the Willowbrook State School. These historic reports are credited with helping end America’s policy of institutionalizing the developmentally disabled, leading to government investigations, institutions across the nation being eventually shut down and the civilized world adopting small, community-based housing as an alternative. Geraldo considers the subsequent sea change in the care and treatment of the disabled his most important contribution.

Before becoming a member of the original cast of ABC’s Good Morning America, in 1975, Rivera presented the first television broadcast of the infamous Abraham Zapruder film of the assassination of President John Kennedy as host of ABC’s Good Night America.

Beginning in 1977, he was on the original cast of ABC’s 20/20, an eight-year association as senior investigative reporter. One of his hour-long reports, The Elvis Cover-Up was for more than two decades 20/20’s highest rated.

In April 1986, Geraldo presented The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults. Once owned by the Chicago Prohibition-era gangster, the vaults turned out to be empty except for stratospheric ratings that made the show the most popular syndicated special in television history.

In 1987, Geraldo began producing and hosting The Geraldo Rivera Show. For 11 years, the afternoon talk show provided America with topics ranging for the frivolous to the profound. The highest rated episode was his infamous, live, on-camera 1988 brawl with racist skinheads, during which he suffered a broken nose.

An avid sailor who circumnavigated the globe, skippered four Marion to Bermuda races and took his boat Voyager 1,400 miles up the Amazon River, Rivera is a graduate of the University of Arizona, where he played varsity lacrosse, and Brooklyn Law School. He is an attorney, and author of eight books, including two best sellers, Exposing Myself and His Panic. He is a philanthropist who has donated and raised millions to aid various causes emphasizing the care and treatment of the disabled. He is married to the former Erica Michelle Levy and has five children.