Geraldo Michael Rivera (born Gerald Michael Rivera; July 4, 1943) is an American talk show host and political commentator who worked at the Fox News Channel from 2001 to 2023. He hosted the tabloid talk show Geraldo from 1987 to 1998. He gained publicity with the live 1986 TV special The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. Rivera hosted the news magazine program Geraldo at Large, hosts the occasional broadcast of Geraldo Rivera Reports (in lieu of hosting At Large). He served as a rotating co-host of The Five from 2022 to 2023.
Early life
Geraldo Michael Rivera was born Gerald Michael Rivera at Beth Israel Medical Center on July 4, 1943, in New York City, the son of Lillian (née Friedman; 1924–2018) and Cruz "Allen" Rivera (1915–1987), a restaurant worker and taxicab driver respectively. He is of Galician ancestry through his father, who was from Puerto Rico. His mother was Ashkenazi Jewish, while his father was Roman Catholic. Rivera was raised "mostly Jewish" and had a bar mitzvah ceremony. He grew up in Brooklyn and West Babylon, New York, where he attended West Babylon High School. Rivera's family was sometimes subjected to prejudice and racism, and his mother took to spelling their surname as "Riviera" to avoid having bigotry directed at them, although Riviera, Ribeira, Rivera, and Ribera are variations of the same name as spelled by Galician, Italian and Portuguese families.
When I was born, my mother filled in my birth certificate with the name Gerald Riviera, adding an extra "i" to my father's surname. She did the same thing for my sister Irene. Later, she would drop the pretense for my sister Sharon, only to pick it up again with the birth of my baby brother Craig. Whenever we asked about the inconsistencies, she would shrug shyly and joke her way out of it. "I just forgot how to spell it", she would say, and leave it at that. Underneath, I came to realize, she was deeply embarrassed over what was a clumsy attempt at an ethnic cover-up.
From 1961 to 1963, he attended the State University of New York Maritime College in where he was a member of the rowing team. Afterwards, he transferred to the University of Arizona, where he received a B.S. in business administration in 1965 and earned a varsity letter in lacrosse.
Following a series of jobs ranging from clothing salesman to short-order cook, Rivera enrolled at Brooklyn Law School in 1966. While a law student, he held internships with the New York County District Attorney under crime-fighter Frank Hogan and Harlem Assertion of Rights (a community-based provider of legal services) before receiving his J.D. near the top of his class in 1969. He then held a Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship in poverty law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in the summer of 1969 before being admitted to the New York State Bar later that year.
After working with such organizations as the lower Manhattan-based Community Action for Legal Services and the National Lawyers Guild, Rivera became a frequent attorney for the East Harlem-based New York City chapter of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group, eventually precipitating his entry into private practice. This work attracted the attention of WABC-TV news director Al Primo when Rivera was interviewed about the group's occupation of a neighborhood church in 1969. Primo offered Rivera a job and he began to study introductory broadcast journalism under Fred Friendly in the Ford Foundation-funded Summer Program in Journalism for Members of Minority Groups at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1970.
ABC News
Rivera was hired by WABC-TV in 1970 as a reporter for Eyewitness News. In 1972, he garnered national attention and won a Peabody Award for Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace, his report on the neglect and abuse of patients with intellectual disabilities at Staten Island's Willowbrook State School and Rockland County's Letchworth Village, and he began to appear on ABC national programs such as 20/20 and Nightline upon their launches in 1978 and 1979 respectively. After John Lennon watched Rivera's report on the patients at Willowbrook, he and Rivera put on a benefit concert called "One to One" on August 30, 1972, at Madison Square Garden in New York City (which Yoko Ono released posthumously in 1986, as Live in New York City).
In July 1973, Rivera taped the pilot episode of Good Night America, a late-night newsmagazine that he hosted (and executive produced). It began its semi-regular airing from April 1974 to June 1977 as part of the ABC's Wide World of Entertainment program block. The show featured Ringo Starr's "It Don't Come Easy" as the theme. Good Night America tackled controversial topics of the era, including marijuana usage and the status of Vietnam War draft dodgers. The March 6, 1975 episode of the program, featuring Dick Gregory and Robert J. Groden, showed the first national telecast of the historic Zapruder film. All 33 episodes of Good Night America may be viewed and downloaded on Rivera's web site.
On May 19, 1983, Rivera broadcast the first American network television mention of "AIDS" by this name. (Other names had been used in the previous two years, as the disease was poorly understood at the time.) On 20/20, he interviewed New York City lighting designer Ken Ramsauer. Ramsauer died aged 28, four days later; Rivera delivered a eulogy at Ramsauer's Central Park memorial service.
In October 1985, ABC's Roone Arledge refused to air a report done by Sylvia Chase for 20/20 on the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and John and Robert F. Kennedy. Rivera publicly criticized Arledge's journalistic integrity, claiming that Arledge's friendship with the Kennedy family (for example, Pierre Salinger, a former Kennedy aide, worked for ABC News at the time) had caused him to spike the story; as a result, Rivera was fired. During a Fox News interview with Megyn Kelly aired May 15, 2015, Rivera stated the official reason given for the firing was that he violated ABC policy when he donated $200 to a non-partisan mayoral race candidate.
Talk shows, specials, and guest appearances
On April 21, 1986, Rivera hosted The Mystery of Al Capone's Vaults. The special broadcast was billed as the unearthing of mobster Al Capone's secret vaults, located under the old Lexington Hotel in Chicago. Millions of people watched the 2-hour show, which ultimately did not uncover any valuables from beneath the hotel. In a 2016 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Rivera commented, "It was an amazingly high profile program—maybe the highest profile program I've ever been associated with."
In 1987, Rivera began producing and hosting the daytime talk show Geraldo, which ran for 11 years. The show featured controversial guests and theatricality, which led to the characterization of his show as "trash TV" by Newsweek and two United States senators. In another special in 1988, Rivera's nose was broken by white supremacist Wyatt Kaldenberg in a well-publicized brawl during a show whose guests included white supremacists, antiracist skinheads, black nationalist Roy Innis, and militant Jewish activists.
In 1999, Rivera received an offer to host the game show Winning Lines on CBS, which was set to premiere in January 2000, but Rivera could not agree on the contract at the last minute and was replaced by Dick Clark.
From 1994 to 2001, Rivera hosted Rivera Live, a CNBC evening news and interview show which aired on weeknights.
In 1998, Rivera played himself in the Seinfeld finale.
In 2009, Rivera played himself in the My Name Is Earl episodes "Inside Probe" (parts 1 and 2). In the same year Rivera lent his voice to Phineas and Ferb, playing newscaster Morty Williams in the episode "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted!".
Fox News
Rivera left CNBC in November 2001—two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks—to become a Fox News war correspondent. Rivera's brother Craig accompanied him as a cameraman on assignments in Afghanistan.
In 2001…