Fearless Gloria Allred : defender of high-profile sexual assault victims
To her fans she’s a fearless lawyer fighting for the alleged victims of sexual assault; to her critics she’s an overexposed ambulance chaser. Either way, Gloria Allred is America’s most famous attorney – and she has Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Donald
THE last time Gloria Allred took on Donald Trump she won. It was 2012 and Jenna Talackova, a transgender model, had just been barred from the Miss Universe beauty pageant because she wasn’t a “naturally born” woman. A certain celebrity businessman who would one day enter politics and seek to Make America Great Again co-owned the competition. Talackova knew exactly who to contact. She placed a call to a Los Angeles lawyer with a flair for making powerful people extremely uncomfortable.
Allred had been fighting discrimination and injustice, preferably in front of the television cameras, for almost 40 years by that point. Talackova “flew from Canada to my office and we had a big press conference here, standing room only”, she says now, eyes glinting at the memory.
This media briefing was a masterpiece. Talackova, all teased blonde tresses and wounded eyes, spoke first. Then Allred demanded that Trump let her client back into the pageant, in typically headline-grabbing terms. “I said, ‘She didn’t ask Mr Trump to prove that he’s a naturally born man. Or to see the photos of his birth to view his anatomy to prove that he was male. It made no difference to her. Why should it have made a difference to him?’ ”
Trump took the bait. “There will be no apology whatsoever,” he told celebrity news website TMZ. As for Allred’s remarks about his penis, “I think Gloria would be very, very impressed with me, I really do.”
Six years on Allred (76) grins beneath her helmet of highlighted hair and leans into the conference-room table we’re sitting at. “I responded to the press, ‘Mr Trump, I don’t have a magnifying glass strong enough to see something that small.’ ” A few days later she told television interviewer Barbara Walters that Trump had to understand that “the world doesn’t revolve around his penis”.
Anyway, “Bottom line is he put her back in the pageant. He eliminated the rule and then, of course, he said, oh, he was going to do that anyway. Along the way he was trashing me: ‘She’s a thirdrate attorney; she’s this or that or whatever.’ ” (Trump, being Trump, took to Twitter and asked, “Is Gloria a man or a woman? Few men would know the answer to that one.”) “I didn’t find any of that very original, which to me is the main offence,” Allred says. “It’s boring. It’s all been said before.”
A year or two passed. The issue had been resolved. Talackova got to compete. Allred was at the Fox News studios in New York with an unrelated client, about to go on. “All of a sudden the door opens and Donald Trump comes rushing into the green room. He says, ‘Gloria! I heard you were here. I had to come in and say something to your client.’ And he says [to
the client], ‘I just want you to know you have the best attorney you could ever have. This woman is relentless. She’ll never, ever give up until she wins you the justice that she thinks you deserve.’ I was stunned. It’s completely different from what he said publicly. So I just said, ‘ Thank you, Donald,’ and we shook hands.”
ALLRED is now almost certainly America’s most famous practising lawyer. A few weeks ago she stood on a snow-covered stage in Park City, Utah, as a blizzard swirled around her, and declared, “This entire year has been the winter of our discontent.” The rally marked the first anniversary of massive women’s marches in support of reproductive, civil and human rights that were perceived to be at risk under a Trump presidency. That energy found further expression in the global #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct towards women that erupted last year.
She has been on the front line of these battles since the ’70s, supporting women who were “the #MeToo movement before the #MeToo movement existed”. Allred represents alleged victims of each of the unholy trinity of men who have done most to thrust concerns over sexual assault and harassment into the news headlines: an unspecified number of movie producer Harvey Weinstein’s 80-plus accusers, five of the women who claim that Trump groped or harassed them, and 33 who have made misconduct allegations against the comedian Bill Cosby.
She’s been caricatured on South Park and The Simpsons and has represented mistresses of Tiger Woods, Mel Gibson and Scott Peterson, the Californian fertiliser salesman who was sentenced to death for murdering his pregnant wife. Other clients have included a lesbian couple who successfully challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriages, a porn star who was “sexting” with politician Anthony Weiner before he resigned from Congress, a British actress who claimed that Roman Polanski sexually abused her when she was young, a woman who alleged that Citibank fired her for being “too hot”, and the family of Nicole Brown Simpson, the murdered wife of OJ Simpson.
Further back she represented the kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, and Norma McCorvey, whose legal challenge under the pseudonym “Jane Roe” had earlier led to “Roe v Wade”, the landmark US Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion.
Now Allred is about to become even more well known. She was in Park City for the Sundance Film Festival where a Netflix documentary about her life,
HSeeing Allred, was one of the event’s most anticipated offerings. It took the filmmakers two years to persuade her to agree and three more to make it.
“I prefer to talk about issues. I don’t really feel that I want to talk about myself,” she explains.
Eventually she allowed her arm to be twisted. “The whole point for me is to help to empower women. You have to fight to win change. Nobody gives us anything in terms of women’s rights. Nobody ever has.”
She went to the first two Sundance screenings, which, she reports gleefully, both received standing ovations. Afterwards, people came up to her asking for pictures or simply saying, “May I hug you? May I just hang on to you for a few minutes?”
“And some of them were crying.” ER office is high above Wilshire Boulevard in a glass and granite tower just east of Beverly Hills. The firm is called Allred, Maroko & Goldberg and all three names are on the welcome mat as you walk into reception. But only one of the partners has her business cards in a dispenser on the counter – there’s no hiding who the star is here.
A door opens and Allred bounds through it, dressed in a black blazer, black turtleneck, black trousers and black high-heeled boots. Her handshake yanks you forwards. There’s no time to waste.
She sets off at a brisk clip along a corridor to the boardroom where she holds her famous press conferences. Nearby is her corner office with its view of the Hollywood sign and an abundance of awards, plaques with slogans (“Those
Who Say It Cannot Be Done Should Not Interrupt the Person Doing It”), framed newspaper and magazine clippings and an ancient British policeman’s outfit to remind her of the struggles of the suffragettes. Outside there are large pictures of her with presidents Obama, Clinton (“Before Monica Lewinsky”) and Reagan.
Allred works seven days a week and hasn’t taken a holiday since the ’80s. She aims to sleep six hours a night, but can get by on three. She doesn’t drink.
When I ask what she does to relax she repeats the word as if pondering a ludicrous suggestion clearly meant for someone else. “Relax? I’m most relaxed when I’m working.”
Eventually she concedes that “once in a while” she’ll watch a film. She enjoyed The Post because “politics is my sport”. She pauses for emphasis. “It’s a blood sport.”
If this makes her sound boring, she isn’t at all. Allred fizzes with energy, warmth and an infectiously playful spirit. “I have to have a sense of humour,” she says. “I have to be able to laugh at myself. I have to be able to laugh at others.” She does all of that. And she likes to sing, too. At one point she says that she’s about to be on the road and breaks into the chorus of the Willie Nelson hit, On the Road Again.
Her schedule is exhausting. “I always say, ‘Fighting injustice is very good for the health.’ ” Before she was in Utah, she was in New York and Tennessee for cases. She’s about to go to North Dakota to represent the family of 22-year-old Savanna Greywind, who was eight months pregnant when her neighbour cut her baby from her womb and let her bleed to death. “I’m actually not acting as their attorney. I’m acting as their support person. As their spokesperson to the press.”
She calls much of what she does “creative lawyering”, which typically means mounting a public relations offensive to get her client’s perspective in the news before she puts actual litigation on the table. “Lawyers shouldn’t just speak for their clients,” she says. “The clients should be heard.”
As Laurie Levenson, a professor of law at Loyola University, puts it in the film, “If you’re a woman and you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted by a powerful man, there aren’t many people you can go to in the phone book.” Allred is always available, and this has hurt her reputation. The Jewish magazine Tablet called her a “tremendously accomplished lawyer” whose overexposure has made her “something of a national joke”.
She’s been described as an ambulance chaser, and much worse. Allred shrugs it all off. “If they’re calling me names I feel as though I’ve won, because it shows me they have no good argument against what I’ve just said.”
Near the start of the documentary Allred explains why she does what she does. She’s asked: is it personal? For a moment, she stops in her tracks. “It’s always personal if a woman has been a victim of injustice and has been hurt,” she replies. “It’s always personal.” Allred was born into a working-class Jewish family in Philadelphia. At her allgirl’s school she was high-achieving, a cheerleader and the winner of a class award for “most persistent”. In 1960, at 19, she married a “dropdead gorgeous” student at the University of Pennsylvania. She had her daughter, Lisa, a year later. But her husband had bipolar disorder and could become frighteningly angry. (Much later, he killed himself.) She took Lisa, moved back in with her parents and finished her degree, majoring in English. She graduated as a single mother, “flat broke, divorced, and undecided about how to make my way in life”, she wrote in her memoir, Fight Back and Win. In 1966 she moved to Los Angeles because, “I thought if I was going to be poor, at least I’d be poor in the sunshine”, and started teaching. That year, she went to Acapulco in Mexico on holiday with a girlfriend. One night a doctor asked her out on a date and raped her at gunpoint. “After I found out I was pregnant as a result of the rape, I had to get an [illegal] abortion,” she says in the film. “That was before Roe v Wade. I almost died. Had a fever. I was haemorrhaging. That was the worst. That and the nurse saying, ‘This’ll teach you a lesson.’ ”
Her friend Katherine Fugate, the screenwriter, said last year, “If you were to write a screenplay of her life, that’s the catalyst. That’s what motivates her.”
Does Allred agree? “In part, yes. [But] it’s a sum of all my life experiences. Inability to get child support, sexual harassment, sex discrimination in pay, on and on, and some things that I’ve never mentioned yet, and never probably will.”
She met William Allred, a wealthy businessman. They married and she became a teachers’ union organiser and then enrolled in law school, graduating in 1975, by which time she was in her mid-thirties. A year later, with help from her husband, she and two classmates, Michael Maroko and Nathan Goldberg, started their firm.
Allred was soon a familiar figure on local television, with her pixie-cut hair and indomitable confidence. “People really would look at her as if she was nuts,” remembers her daughter, Lisa Bloom (56), who’s now also a discrimination lawyer who often appears on television.
One early breakthrough came when Allred successfully sued L’Orangerie, an expensive French restaurant in LA that gave women menus without prices, assuming that their male companions would pay. In 1987 she became the first female member of the all-male Friars Club and insisted on using their naked steam room. Wearing a bathing suit, Allred knocked on the door, whipped out a tape measure and began singing Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?
She divorced William the same year. He’d been convicted of fraud but had also betrayed her, she’s said, in a fashion that she hasn’t explained and “never will”. She was awarded $4 million (then about R8 million), a judgment that he contested in a bankruptcy hearing. “It’s the height of hypocrisy for her to do this,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I put her through law school, and now she’s going to take everything I ever earned.”
Allred represents more than 10 alleged Weinstein victims from more than one country, but won’t say how many women it is exactly. (“It’s numerous, okay?”) When the allegations broke in October her daughter Lisa, who has her own law firm, was surprisingly defending the disgraced film mogul, whom she called “an old dinosaur learning new ways”.
She resigned days later and acknowledged that she’d made a “colossal mistake”, which looked worse because Weinstein had recently agreed to turn a book by her into a television series. The episode had caused “a rift” with her mother, she said then. How is that relationship now? “She’s my daughter. I love her. I respect her. I’m proud of her,” Allred says. “She cares about women’s rights.”
When the promotional work for her documentary is finished Allred will step up preparations to pursue a child sexual abuse claim against Cosby – it’s a civil case, so must await the outcome of his criminal retrial. Off the back of the Cosby case, she has lobbied successfully for California to scrap its statute of limitations on rape cases and lengthened the time limit to make criminal rape charges in Nevada and Colorado by 10 years.
However, the biggest target in her sights is Trump. Three days before his inauguration Allred held a press conference with Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his old show The Apprentice who’s suing the president for defamation.
During the campaign she’d stated that Trump harassed and groped her in 2007 and withdrew a job offer after she rejected him. She was one of more than a dozen women who made sexual misconduct allegations against him. He replied by branding them all “liars” who will be “sued after the election is over”.
Since then Trump’s lawyers have filed a 58-page motion to dismiss the defamation lawsuit. Allred has lodged a similarly lengthy countermotion and the president has filed his reply to that.
Both parties are awaiting a New York judge’s decision on whether to proceed, which could come “any day”.
Allred is very much hoping that she’ll have a chance to take Trump’s testimony under oath. “We’ll try to accommodate the president’s schedule,” she says.
She was a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Does she see any redeeming qualities in President Trump? There’s a steely silence. “I’m not here to evaluate him. I’m here to be a lawyer and an advocate for my client in her lawsuit. But truth matters. And truth in many ways has been a casualty.
“We’re not proceeding with that lawsuit to make a political statement. We’re proceeding with that lawsuit because truth matters, and her reputation matters.”
Seeing Allred is available now on Netflix