Who

Rudy Giuliani's scandal-ridden third wife, Judi served as the former mayor's arm candy during his ill-fated bid for the presidency in 2008.

Backstory

Judi Ann Stish grew up in the coal mining town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania before attending a two-year nursing program in nearby Bethlehem. She never tended to patients, though: Several months after finishing school, a 19-year-old Judi tied the knot with to her first husband, a surgical supply salesman named Jeffrey Scott Ross. She soon joined Ross on the sales trail, marketing surgical staples to doctors and demonstrating the product on mildly-sedated stray dogs, a process that involved removing their organs and then pumping them full of liquid to show that the staples were effective. (The company, not surprisingly, was later besieged by animal cruelty groups.)

In 1979, Judi divorced Ross; five days later, she married a wallpaper dealer named Bruce Nathan who, Judi insisted to friends, was actually a millionaire trust-funder. ("Do you honestly think I'd be selling wallpaper if I had all that money?" Nathan would later ask.) Judi's marriage to Bruce Nathan unraveled by the early '90s—he's since described his former wife as "a manipulator and a pathological liar and exaggerator." She returned to the job force after the split, working as a receptionist at a dentist's office and later taking a position as a sales rep in Brooklyn for Bristol-Myers Squibb.

It was in 1999, while she was sharing a fold-out bed with her boyfriend at the time, psychologist Manos Zacharioudakis, that Nathan reeled in her biggest fish yet. She approached Mayor Giuliani, who was then married to Donna Hanover, at the cigar bar Club Macanudo with her business card in hand. Following a year-long affair, Giuliani came clean about the romance in 2000. A very public, acrimonious divorce ensued and it took nearly three years for the ex-mayor to tie the knot with Nathan. On May 24, 2003, the couple married on the lawn of Gracie Mansion. Mayor Bloomberg conducted the ceremony, and Henry Kissinger, Vera Wang, Donald Trump, and Barbara Walters were among the guests in attendance.

Of note

Of course, few knew much about Nathan—or her checkered past—until 2007 when Rudy decided to pursue the presidency. Nathan campaigned by his side during his quasi-disastrous run, helping him with his (Sept. 11th-exploiting) speeches and serving as his esteemed expert on "biological and chemical" disasters. (Apparently, she packed quite a bit of schooling into those two years of nursing classes.) She was even on the campaign's payroll, earning $125,000 a year for her services.

Her efforts to insinuate herself into the campaign didn't go over well with a number of the former mayor's staffers, and she also emerged as a liability for Giuliani after a number of embarrassing disclosures, such as her admission that Rudy was actually her third husband and not her second, as had been previously reported. More humiliation followed the revelation that she had a full-time, Frédéric Fekkai-trained hairstylist who traveled with her everywhere and always insisted on a extra seat aboard private jet trips so her handbag (or her "Baby Louis," as she preferred to call it) could travel in style.

Personal

Nathan has an adopted daughter named Whitney. She's also step-mom to Rudy's two kids, Andrew and Caroline, although neither child is said to be on good terms with Nathan. (When Giuliani launched his presidential campaign, Andrew made his clear that Rudy's relationship with Judi had seriously strained his relationship with his father.) Judi and Nathan live at 45 East 66th Street, the same building that's home to Nina Garcia. They also have a home in Water Mill and a condo in Palm Beach.

No joke

From the way she describes her first meeting with Rudy, you'd think she was talking about meeting Jesus at the pearly gates: "It was the thunderbolt. Our attraction was instantaneous. There was almost something mystical about the feeling."