After Weinstein...
The mother and daughter holding abusers to account
Bloom briefly advised Weinstein himself, but says now it was ‘a colossal mistake’
If you were standing outside the Manhattan court where Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault on Monday, you would have witnessed a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie. Just as the fallen film mogul’s defence team were about to address reporters about the verdict, trailblazing women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred stepped up to the mic instead. “You’re not going to silence me again,” growled Allred, who represented two of the women who testified against Weinstein – and a titter went up from the crowd.
It would be as impossible to silence the 78-year-old feminist activist as it would be to silence her powerhouse lawyer daughter, Lisa Bloom. These two are the only two to call if you’ve been a victim of sexual misconduct. But although the glamorous 58-year-old sitting across the table from me in a Beverly Hills restaurant looks and sounds an awful lot like Allred and, like her mother, Bloom has spent decades defending women against a number of highprofile abusers and sexual assaulters that include US talk show host Bill O’reilly and actor Bill Cosby – the pair don’t always see eye to eye and prefer to operate separately.
Today, as Weinstein awaits sentencing and women around the world finally have proof that sexual misconduct – even by the rich and powerful – will no longer be ignored or tolerated, mother and daughter are focused on breaking another code of silence: this time around Jeffrey Epstein. Bloom is representing five of the late American billionaire sex offender’s alleged victims in civil suits, as well as a woman who alleges she saw Prince Andrew with Virginia Roberts Giuffre at Tramp nightclub in 2001 – and her mother a similar number.
Ms Roberts Giuffre is at the centre of the case, you’ll recall, since she claims to have had sex with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions between 2001 and 2002, after having been trafficked by Epstein. Only with Andrew denying the allegations and famously insisting he’d never met her (he was at Pizza Express in Woking on the night in question), and Epstein having managed to evade justice by hanging himself in his Manhattan jail cell back in August, Bloom is becoming increasingly frustrated.
“I’m not a fan of conspiracy theories,” she tells me. “But people have said to me that they don’t even think Epstein’s dead, that he was squirrelled out somehow. And, honestly, in this case, there has been so much craziness that we have to keep an open mind.
“There have to have been a lot of coincidences for Epstein to have killed himself. His lawyers say he was doing OK, two prison guards would have both had to have been careless and negligent at exactly the same time…” Bloom narrows her eyes: “This is a guy who wanted to inseminate endless young women at his ranch in New Mexico.”
She shrugs. “Where there’s a lot of craziness and a lot of money, you feel anything might be possible.”
Bloom is more aware than most of the depths of human depravity. She spends much of her time mired in them at a firm that now “only represents victims”, she tells me. Which may or may not be because of the single side-switching schism in Bloom’s career, when she briefly advised Weinstein himself in 2017, before resigning when the extent of the allegations against him became clear and admitting the decision was “a colossal mistake”.
Yet I’m struck today by how upbeat this mother-of-two has somehow remained in the face of it all. Every day, Bloom talks to victims of abuse, assault and rape. Those victims are not always female and they’re not always celebrities, as people are inclined to think. “Probably 2 per cent of my cases involve celebrities, and
I’m not going to apologise for that: they’re human beings like everyone else. But
98 per cent are assistants, waitresses, models, actors, camerawomen, LAPD… regular people.”
Nevertheless, she concedes that, in 34 years, Epstein’s may be the most horrific case she has ever worked on. “He may be the most prolific paedophile I’ve ever seen. I suspect there were hundreds of victims, maybe even thousands.
Some of the witnesses say there were as many as three girls being brought to him a day.” And with more rich and powerful men being quizzed about the nature of their relationships with Epstein, Bloom and her mother are determined to pressurise Prince Andrew into cooperating.
While Allred chose a rather unorthodox method of doing this, arranging last week for an American-style school bus to drive past Buckingham Palace with a message on the side asking Prince Andrew to speak to the FBI, Bloom prefers to address a direct plea to the Royal family member – through this newspaper.
“Here’s what I want to say to Prince Andrew,” says Bloom, her gravelly tones shrill with exasperation. “You said you were going to cooperate: was that just to stave off the public’s outrage, or did you mean it? Because people are hurting. ”
Bloom’s not done. “You say that you were at Pizza Express. Where are the records, the diary entries? Surely all of your comings and goings are tracked, and your staff will have kept logs?
“Lastly, I would invite Prince Andrew to sit down with my client, Kiki [a former New York model who claims to have been assaulted by Epstein at 19], and hear her pain. Because when something’s abstract, it’s very different to sitting there listening to somebody tell you about what sexual assault has done to their life.”
Prince Andrew’s decision to step down from his royal duties last November is far from enough, Bloom goes on. “Because that doesn’t help the victims. He was very good friends with Ghislaine Maxwell. And does anyone know where she is? No. But maybe in a country that doesn’t extradite to the US, right? So give the FBI the information, Andrew. It’s never too late to do the right thing.”
One of Bloom’s mantras is: “You are defined by your choices.” It’s what she tells a lot of clients who are afraid to speak out – “because they didn’t choose to be sexually assaulted, but they can then choose to speak out and see justice done”. Which is poignant when you consider that both Philadelphia-born Bloom and her mother were themselves victims of sexual violence – and that both watched the statute of limitations’ clock run down without reporting their aggressors.
Allred was raped at gunpoint on a holiday taken shortly after her bipolar husband, Peyton Bray – Bloom’s father – killed himself. And Bloom was abused between the ages of 11 and 15. “I was 18 before I told somebody, and 28 before I cut him off completely. So when people say, ‘Why do these women continue to email the guy and continue to have a relationship afterwards?’, I get how hard that is to understand, but it happens all the time; it happened to me. I needed someone to say: ‘You don’t have to have a relationship with him at all. You have the right to be angry.’”
Crucially, neither Bloom nor her mother before her felt they would be believed. “And, actually, my biggest fear was: ‘I’m going to lose my whole family, I’m going to go and live in an orphanage,’” Bloom admits. “That’s what I thought.”
She tells me about a case she has just won – one of the biggest sexual harassment payouts in California history – involving a British entrepreneur named Alki David who was found to have sexually assaulted an employee. “She had written him a birthday card that was really over the top – ‘You’re the best boss’, and so on. And the defence tried to use that and say: ‘You could have just said happy birthday.’ But jurors are workers, not billionaires. Had they ever said something nice to their bosses that they didn’t mean or feel? Literally every day. So they didn’t hold that against her.”
Today, what a woman was or wasn’t wearing is “no longer significant to most juries”, she tells me. “Equally, delay in reporting most people now understand. They will even allow some inconsistent behaviour, though not a lot. But here’s the problem with sexual assault: a victim and a non-victim will often act in the same way. Which is why we do have to have due process.”
One of the hardest parts of Bloom’s job is assessing credibility. “I can’t ever be 100 per cent sure. And I’ve definitely made the wrong call on some people I really believed in,” she murmurs in unmistakable reference to her involvement with Weinstein, something she will clearly always bitterly regret – especially after a memo Bloom sent the disgraced film titan suggesting ways in which he might discredit the women accusing him of abuse was reprinted in full in Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book, She Said: Breaking the
Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement.
Given Bloom’s tremendous energy and positivity, I’m surprised to see her pause when I ask how huge she thinks the strides we’re making in her area are now. “I don’t think we are making huge strides. I think we still have a long way to go. We have to educate boys about proper behaviour, and teach girls to understand what they want and speak up for it.” She hopes to have done this with her own daughter, Sarah, who, in joining her mother’s firm in 2018 as another “brilliant feminist attorney”, became the third-generation victims’ rights lawyer in one of the most powerful legal families in America.
Because it was Sarah’s birth 30 years ago, rather than seeking justice for others, that really helped Bloom to heal.
“I remember looking at her and thinking: ‘I have to fix myself, because she’s not going to have a mother who is mentally unstable.’ And so I did. But as every victim of abuse and assault knows, it’s never done, and always there a little. But that’s something else I tell my clients: ‘Look at me, I have a good life. So can you.’”
‘I would invite Prince Andrew to sit down with my client and hear her pain’