Best Known As: Television Actor

Gist:  Geraldo Rivera (born July 4, 1943) is an American attorney, journalist, writer, reporter and former talk show host. He is known to have an affinity for melodramatic, high-profile stories. Rivera hosts the newsmagazine program Geraldo at Large, and appears regularly on Fox News Channel.

Life Facts:  Rivera was born in Manhattan, New York, the son of Lillian (née Friedman), a waitress, and Cruz "Allen" Rivera, a restaurant worker and cab driver. Rivera's father was Puerto Rican and his mother was Jewish, and he was raised "mostly Jewish" and had a Bar Mitzvah. He grew up in Manhattan and West Babylon, New York. His mother inspired him to become a journalist when she signed him up for a journal camp at his high school his sophomore year. He is an alumnus of University of Arizona, where he played varsity lacrosse as goalie. From September 1961 to May 1963, he attended the State University of New York Maritime College, where he was a member of the rowing team. He received his J.D. from Brooklyn Law School in 1969, did postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania that same year, and briefly attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism during the summer of 1970. After a brief career in law enforcement where he served the NYPD as an investigator, he returned to law and became a lawyer for a New York Puerto Rican activist group, the Young Lords and attracted the attention of news producer Al Primo when he was interviewed about the group's occupation of a Spanish Harlem church in 1969. Primo offered Rivera a job as a reporter but was unhappy with the first name "Gerald" (he wanted something more identifiably Latin) so they agreed to go with the pronunciation used by the Puerto Rican side of Rivera's family: Geraldo. He is a member of Tau Delta Phi fraternity.

In the film UHF, he is parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic by Yankovic playing the character of George Newman. Newman, in addition to being the president of the UHF network, has a tabloid talk show called "Town Talk with George Newman".

A humorous promo starts with Newman asking guests, "Sex with furniture, what do you think?? Newman is then shown opening "Al Capone's glove compartment? and exclaiming, "Aha! Road maps!? Finally, the fake commercial ends with a full scale brawl in the studio. Newman first gets knocked out cold with a chair and then the brawl really starts. The guests: a Klansman, a man in a Jason-style hockey mask with an axe, a freaky smiling teen girl, and others, break out in a fight on stage. The audience, armed to the teeth with nooses, torches and other weapons, join in. The last frame has a close-up of a bandaged Newman hyping an upcoming show, "Lesbian Nazi hookers abducted by UFOs and forced into weight loss programs, all this week, on Town Talk."

Rivera had a small, uncredited part in the 1990 film The Bonfire of the Vanities as a television reporter named "Robert Corso". He also has a short cameo on the series finale of Seinfeld with his former news colleague, Jane Wells. He was also the inspiration for the character Wayne Gale (portrayed by Robert Downey Jr.) in Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Born Killers; in fact, much of the character's interaction with the murderers Mickey and Mallory Knox was inspired heavily from Rivera's interview with Charles Manson. A Rivera parody, "Hector Ramirez", was a recurring character in several Sunbow-produced cartoons based on Hasbro properties of the 1980s, including Transformers, GIJoe, and Jem.

Rivera is lampooned in the South Park episode A Million Little Fibers, in which he investigates allegations, revealed to him by Oprah Winfrey's private parts, that Steven McTowelie, author of a Million Little Fibers, is actually a towel.

Kurt Vonnegut mentions Rivera several times in various novels, including Palm Sunday and Fates Worse than Death, never in a favorable light. Rivera was married to Vonnegut's daughter Edith. They divorced in 1974.

Stephen Colbert has frequently lampooned Rivera on The Colbert Report, especially calling attention to his mustache. He has explained in interviews that Rivera was one of the inspirations for the "man with a mission" facet of Colbert's right-wing pundit character. "That's the heart of [Rivera's] persona: that he really is changing the world with every interview he does -- just slowly, syllable by syllable, he is changing the great ship of human destiny with his will toward justice." Colbert's character, in turn, "thinks, 'We're gonna bust things wide open with this report,' when in fact he never has an idea of what he's talking about." Rivera has since appeared on the show.

Rivera appeared in a Dilbert strip surrounding Dogbert's cult of personality. Rivera hypes the show, only for Dogbert to feign confusion over what Rivera is talking about. Rivera then looks embarrassed into the camera, while Dogbert ads "I love live television" (in reality, Geraldo was always taped).

The One Life To Live character Markko Rivera was born under the name "Geraldo Rivera," but changed it to Markko because he hated having the same name as the reporter.

"...and the women who love them" has become a catchphrase that is often used as an ironic description of scandalous, usually domestic drama that frequently injects elements of sexuality and deviant behavior.

Geraldo Rivera has also been spoofed several times on Saturday Night Live.

Career Facts:  In 1994, he began hosting nightly discussion of the news on CNBC called Rivera Live while continuing to host Geraldo. The show was portrayed in the final episode of Seinfeld, with Rivera as himself reporting on the lengthy trial of the show's four main characters.

Later, he would take his talk show in a different direction, moving it from "Trash TV" to a more subdued, serious show, and changed its name from Geraldo to The Geraldo Rivera Show. By this time, however, the show had run its course, and was cancelled in 1998.

In 1997, Rivera contracted with NBC to work as a reporter for six years for $30 million, including hosting Rivera Live on CNBC. During 1998 and 1999, he extensively covered the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he accepted a pay cut and went to work for the Fox News Channel as a war correspondent in November 2001. Rivera's brother Craig accompanied him as a cameraman on assignments in Afghanistan.

In 2008, Rivera came out with a book called His Panic: Why Americans fear Hispanics in the U.S.. The title "His Panic" is a play on the word "Hispanic," and describes the anti-Hispanic racism in the United States. Rivera himself is part Hispanic, his father coming from Puerto Rico.

On September 12, 2008, during the FOX News coverage of Hurricane Ike, Rivera was knocked over by the storm surge debris while reporting live in Galveston near the 17 foot high sea wall.