WHO IS GERALDO?

  One of media’s most enduring broadcasters, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Geraldo Rivera has been breaking news, providing insightful commentary and conducting revealing interviews for more than five decades. One of America’s most consequential TV reporters, he has been winning awards and breaking ratings records since 1970. A veteran of ABC, NBC, and Fox News, Geraldo is currently Correspondent-at-Large for cable’s NewsNation.

  After graduating from the University of Arizona, where he earned a varsity letter for lacrosse, his public life began after he graduated with honors from Brooklyn Law School and attained a Reginald Heber Smith fellowship in Poverty Law. Working as a street lawyer for New York’s urban poor, Geraldo gained media attention representing the Young Lords, a historic Puerto Rican activist group. As the Lords made headlines, Geraldo caught the eye of Al Primo, the creator of WABC’s Eyewitness News. Primo sponsored Geraldo for a Ford Foundation fellowship at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

  At the prestigious program’s completion, Geraldo went to work for Primo’s WABC-TV where he soon became perhaps television’s first gritty street reporter. Covering the hard core of big city life, he shined the light on urgent issues like street gangs and the savage heroin epidemic then gripping the big city. His world changed in 1972 when he presented a series exposing the deplorable conditions at the Willowbrook State School a huge institution for the handicapped housing a population then treated out-of-sight, out-of-mind. These historic reports are credited with ending 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 and home care as alternative.  The subsequent sea change in the care and treatment of the developmentally disabled is Geraldo’s most important contribution to society’s well-being.

  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.” He then began an eight-year association with ABC’s “20/20” as lead investigative reporter. One of his hour-long reports, “The Elvis Cover-Up” was for more than two decades “20/20’s” highest rated show.

  After leaving ABC, in April 1986, Geraldo produced the highest-rated syndicated show in history. A two-hour live special, The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault was seen live throughout the nation and abroad.

   In 1987, Geraldo began producing and hosting his eponymous daytime talk show for 11 years. His epic 1988 on camera brawl with racist skin heads is still talked about today. In 1994, he led the nation with his comprehensive coverage of the O.J. Simpson murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. His “Rivera Live” program became appointment viewing and the highest rated show on CNBC. 

  A native New Yorker outraged by the terror attacks of 9/11 2001, Geraldo took a major pay cut and left “Rivera Live” to join Fox News as senior war correspondent, providing weeks of dramatic live reports from Afghanistan during the initial siege on Osama bin Laden’s hideout. Geraldo returned to Afghanistan ten more times to cover Operation Enduring Freedom. His many other combat assignments ranged from Mogadishu to Khartoum to Colombia to the Golan Heights. He traveled to Gaza and to the West Bank to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict live from the Church of the Nativity siege in Bethlehem. He also covered the Iraqi elections from Baghdad and did a total of eleven extended assignment in Iraq, riding out of the country on what all hoped in vain would-be America’s last military convoy leaving Iraq in 2011. 

  One of Geraldo’s favorite live television moments came on May 1, 2011, when he anchored FNC’s coverage of the successful raid that took down the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden. 

  Rivera also reported from virtually every hurricane and natural disaster to cause significant damage including Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He reported from Charleston, SC on the horrific, racially motivated massacre in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and on the riots that followed the death in police custody of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, MD. Deeply engaged in reporting the spike in urban violence, Rivera provided live coverage of the funeral of fallen NYPD officers. Additionally, Geraldo hosted hour-long specials for Fox News, exposing the cushy life in prison of wife and child 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 2009, he secured an exclusive interview with Joe Jackson, just after the death of his son Michael. Geraldo had previously interviewed the late Michael Jackson on the evening before his 2005 trial and acquittal for child molestations charges.  

  Geraldo’s 21-year career at Fox News ended sensationally in 2023 when he quit the network after being fired from the hit show “The Five.” 

  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 the author of eight books, including two best sellers, “Exposing Myself” and “His Panic.” He is a philanthropist who donates and raises millions to aid various causes including education and the care and treatment of the autistic. Since 2003, he is married to the former Erica Michelle Levy and has five children and five grandchildren. The Rivera’s reside in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

 

The winner of the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy journalism award (his third) for his NBC News documentary on “Women In Prison,” and the Scripps Howard Foundation national journalism award for “Back to Bedlam,” Rivera has received more than 170 awards for journalism, including the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, three national and seven local Emmys, two Columbia-DuPont and two additional Scripps Howard Journalism Awards.