Geraldo Rivera (born Gerald Riviera; July 4, 1943) is an American journalist, attorney, author, 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
Rivera was born at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, New York, the son of Lillian (née Friedman; October 16, 1924 – June 3, 2018) and Cruz "Allen" Rivera (October 1, 1915 – November 1987), a restaurant worker and taxicab driver respectively. He is of Galego Spanish 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. Rivera is a common family name in Puerto Rico, which received a significant population of colonists from Galicia, Spain, in the 16th century. The Rivera is also very common among Sephardic Jews. He is also related to the Lebovitz of Brooklyn.
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 the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx, 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.
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 as a reporter but was unhappy with the first name "Gerald" (as he wanted something more identifiably Latino), so they agreed to go with the pronunciation used by the Puerto Rican side of Rivera's family: Geraldo. Due to his dearth of journalistic experience, ABC arranged for Rivera 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.