COALITION HAS SUED RESTAURANTS, BARS — EVEN A TRUMP GOLF COURSE
(“Combat Deaths 99.9% Male”), stacks of books (“Hotsy Totsy Feminazi” and “Abused Men: The Hidden Side of Domestic Violence”), buttons (“Prosecute false accusers!” “California is Sexist & Hateful Against Men”) and bumper stickers (“Don’t be THAT girl: Embarrassed about a hookup? Angry at a boyfriend? Willing to destroy a life?”).
Allison was sitting with Allan Candelore, 34, another NCFM member and frequent plaintiff, and Harry Crouch, 68, the coalition’s president.
Crouch, who grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, said he began working in men’s rights after a relationship with an abusive woman led him to seek state funding for a program for abused men. He was told men don’t qualify for such grants, he said.
After moving to Southern California, Crouch met Philip W. Cook, the author of “Abused Men,” who told him about NCFM, which emerged from men’s rights groups that formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the wake of feminism’s second wave. Crouch attended a meeting in Los Angeles and joined.
He started a paternity-testing business in San Diego, but it didn’t take off. He then opened a space called the California Men’s Center, which he hoped would become a shelter for men. When he learned that the coalition’s president was seeking a successor, Crouch raised his hand and turned the California Men’s Center into NCFM’S headquarters.
From there he oversees its website, which lists 29 chapters in cities around America and in Israel, Canada and Kenya, and its social-media feeds. NCFM is a registered 501(c)(3) with assets of $115,182, according to Guidestar.
Swag includes bracelets that say, “Save the Males.”
Allison, a divorced father of three, was drawn to the movement after observing that popular culture can diminish the importance of men in families and society. He found a T-mobile ad that ran during Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 particularly galling. In it, comedian Sarah Silverman hands a couple their newborn baby and says, “Sorry, it’s a boy.”
“If you took the flip side and said, ‘Sorry, it’s a girl,’” Candelore said, “we’d be up in arms.”
Candelore works for his father’s law firm, Men’s Legal Center, in the same building as the NCFM office. It largely represents men in divorce, custody and paternity cases. (The firm has female clients as well, Candelore said, including paternal grandmothers fighting for visitation rights.)
He is also an active plaintiff, who won a ruling in a case against Tinder for age discrimination and is pursuing another case against Facebook for its ethnically selective advertising practices, even after the company suspended them. In a statement, Tinder said it intended to fight on; Facebook did not comment.
A fellow plaintiff on the Facebook matter, Bert Riddick, 59, came to the men’s rights movement after being involved in a paternity fraud case. For years, Riddick’s paycheck was docked $800 a month for child support, although DNA tests revealed the child was not his. He successfully argued to have $168,000 in additional child support debt erased but was not able to recover the money he had paid.
Testing the ‘man tax’
The coalition members have become known around town as men who want to know when a bar or club is offering a discount on admissions or drinks only to women.
“I get feedback from people saying, ‘Hey, look, someone’s having this event,’” Allison said. “Or I get something from a promoter, telling me, ‘Hey, they’re trying to do this’ or ‘This business is doing this thing, we’re being honest, and then these other guys are being underhanded by letting women in free to a place.’”
Then Allison and his associates will “test out” the place, meaning they will go to an establishment or event and seek the special access or price being offered to women, sometimes with a cover story.
After being turned away or charged more, the plaintiffs work with a lawyer and decide whether to sue. “I have never filed a case that has been frivolous or anything like that,” Allison said.
He did not want to discuss the specifics of any actions, but here is a sampling:
— In 2010, Allison was a plaintiff on a class action civil-rights lawsuit filed against heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch, House of Blues and Live Nation after he, Crouch, Candelore and Jackie Durazo, who was then an in-law of Candelore’s, went to the band’s “Chicks for Free” concert and the men were charged $27 for admission but Durazo was not. “They ambulance chase these events and make a little money for themselves,” said Allen Kovac, now the manager of the band. “This sort of thing is a stain on laws that are meant to level the playing field.”
— In 2013 Allison, along with Crouch, Candelore and another plaintiff named Jeff Perwein, sued Maderas Country Club, in Poway, Calif., as well as a company called Women on Course, for hosting a recurring networking event for women called Clinic & Cocktail.
— A few months later, the same group and Carolyn Bell, the NCFM membership coordinator, sued El Mundo Del Tango, a restaurant and bar in San Diego, after the men were required to pay a cover charge. Bell was not.
All of these cases were settled, and the defendants wouldn’t comment.
In a more recent case, Allison sued Poway Weapons & Gear Inc. for providing, once a month, free use of its shooting range to female patrons, as well as a lounge and raffle.
“I emphatically deny the allegations, and it will be easily proven in court,” said John Phillips, the owner of Poway. “We have pictures of men in the so-called women’s lounges, and we actually have had complaints from women that men were winning too many of the raffles.”
Allison, Candelore and Crouch all say that their court actions benefit women’s rights because special-drink offers and differences in cover charges, in particular, are often intended to draw female customers as a bait for men.
“If you’re giving preferential treatment to women, you’re discriminating against them as well,” Crouch said. “That’s funny, but you are. You’re exploiting them.”
When Allison, Crouch or other wouldbe plaintiffs go to establishments to test them, they on occasion bring Bell, 51, because they need a woman, she said, to prove different treatment.
She had tested establishments five or six times before she made the case to the men that she should be included as a plaintiff so she could share in the financial rewards.
Bell said she received about $1,500 from the El Mundo Del Tango lawsuit. “I didn’t get equal pay,” she said. “I kept joking that I should sue them.”
A defendant speaks
Last September, Allison sued Ladies Get Paid, a career-development company for women, after he was turned away from one of its gatherings at a bar in San Diego. (Allison also sued the bar and bar’s owner.)
Founded in 2016 by Claire Wasserman, a former marketing director, Ladies Get Paid was intended as a “safe zone,” she said, where women could speak openly about money and issues contributing to pay disparities and “uncomfortable gender dynamics at work.” Events of different sizes have cost from $15 to $60 and have featured professional coaches and other speakers.
A second lawsuit against Ladies Get Paid was also filed, on behalf of a man named George St. George, who, the complaint said, was turned away from an event in Los Angeles.
Wasserman was stunned to find herself on the wrong side of discrimination lawsuits. “At first I felt really guilty and just thought, ‘How could I have been so stupid for starting something that keeps some people out?’”
“Then I got over my guilt,” she said. “Then I got mad.”
California law provides that if the court finds there has been a civil-rights violation, the defendant is subject to a fine and must pay the prevailing plaintiff’s legal fees and costs. Wasserman’s company is new and self-funded; she took her lawyer’s advice, which was to settle the cases. She has changed her company’s policy, and it now welcomes men at events.
“We don’t have the money to fight it,” Wasserman said. “These guys are winning. We are rolling over and funding them.”
The lawyer
Behind almost all of this litigation is a lawyer named Alfred Rava, 62. Formerly a secretary of NCFM, he has filed some 300 Unruh cases. For the last three years, he has filed at a rate of about one per month. Citing a disability, he declined to meet in person for an interview or to speak on the phone but was a willing email correspondent.
Rava wrote that his desire to hold companies accountable for differential treatment came from growing up in the anthracite fields of northeastern Pennsylvania, where he saw “how the wealthy mine owners mistreated the poor Polish, Italian and Irish immigrant coal miners, such as my grandfathers, uncles and father.”
He said that his work has benefited women as well as men. He pointed to a class-action settlement of $370,000 after a drinks-special lawsuit Rava filed against the parent company of Tony Roma’s, with Riddick as the plaintiff.
Rava also noted that he served as consultant to the lawyer representing a woman who in 2009 filed a lawsuit against Mastercuts, a chain of hair salons, for offering coupon discounts only to men.
Rava graduated from Penn State with a degree in environmental science and helped design wastewater treatment equipment and other environmental products in Houston. He sued two former employers for nonpayment of commissions and won a jury verdict against an insurance company after it denied a $6,500 claim on a damaged car.
Motivated, he said, to “help other people who got screwed,” he enrolled at California Western School of Law, in San Diego.
Not all of the businesses Rava sues concede. In 2011, a client took on the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., claiming that it discriminated against men by offering female golfers a 25 percent discount and partial donation of their greens fees to research during Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
A judge agreed with Trump Organization lawyers that the case Rava filed should be dismissed, a decision an appellate court upheld.
In the past year or so, nearly all of Rava’s Unruh discrimination complaints — a December 2017 lawsuit against the Pendry Hotel in San Diego, among other defendants; a June 6 filing against a strip club that hosted a “Lesbian Night” — have begun with a quote from “Animal Farm” by George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
‘Just one of the girls’
Rava has a new client: Lawrence Pollister, known as Abe, a self-described “liberal, pro-gender equality feminist.”
In May, Rava filed a class action Unruh lawsuit on behalf of Pollister, 29, after a November 2017 comedy show for a female-only audience performed by Iliza Shlesinger at a theater in Los Angeles. Shlesinger; a production company and its owner; and United Talent Agency, which booked the gig, are cited as defendants.
Pollister said in an email interview that he bought tickets to Shlesinger’s “No Boys Allowed” performance after having seen her do stand-up a few weeks earlier. He assumed “No Boys Allowed” was the name of her show, like Beyoncé’s “Formation.”
But when he and a female friend showed up at the club and went to the willcall booth to retrieve their tickets, Pollister was denied entry by a club employee, he said, because he is a man.
“Oh no, honey, I’m just one of the girls! I’m gay,” he told her.
The employee told him, he said, that Shlesinger explicitly wasn’t allowing men into the show.
Pollister, who moved to California from New Mexico to escape what he called “an oppressive Republican rural community who ostracized and tortured me for being an effeminate gay man,” was humiliated and upset to be excluded, he said.
“What Iliza did that night was an attack on gender equality,” said Pollister, who in a subsequent email alluded to the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop, which had refused to create a cake for a gay wedding.
“My motivations are purely political. I don’t want someone to say, ‘I won’t bake a cake for you because you’re gay,’” Pollister wrote. “How is that different from saying, ‘I won’t let you in this theater because you’re a man?’”