Geraldo Rivera was born in New York City, New York, the United States, on July 4, 1943. He grew raised in the Brooklyn and West Babylon boroughs of New York. His father, Lillian Friedman Rivera, was a Puerto Rican Catholic, and his mother, Cruz Allen Rivera, was of Russian Jewish descent. Sharon, his sister, and Craig, his brother, are his siblings. He is of mixed (Puerto Rican and Russian-Jewish) ancestry and holds an American passport.
Rivera attended West Babylon High School. From 1961 to 1963, he attended the State University of New York Maritime College. He then attended the University of Arizona and graduated with a B.S. in business administration. In 1966, Rivera enrolled at Brooklyn Law School. He interned with the New York County District Attorney as a law student. In the summer of 1969, he was also awarded a Reginald Heber Smith Fellowship in poverty law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Because he has no prior journalism experience, ABC established an introductory broadcast journalism course for him in 1970. It was held as part of the Ford Foundation-funded Summer Program in Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
