‘Seeing’ Gloria Allred
Doc explores the life of women’s rights icon.
Gloria Allred is a legal powerhouse and a feminist icon.
She’s also the subject of a new Netflix documentary, Seeing Allred (streaming Friday), that premiered last month at the Sundance Film Festival. It tracks the fierce women’s rights attorney’s lifelong crusade for justice, taking on high-profile sexual misconduct cases against Bill Cosby, Herman Cain and Donald Trump and going to bat for women in the O.J. Simpson and Scott Peterson trials.
Key takeaways from the film:
She bravely speaks about her own experience with sexual assault.
In one of the film’s most candid interviews, Allred explains that “it’s always personal to me if a woman has been a victim of injustice and has been hurt. My commitment to women comes from my own life experience.”
She details a traumatic vacation she took to Mexico in her 20s, when she met a doctor who raped her at gunpoint. She learned that she was pregnant and sought out a back-alley abortion, which almost killed her.
“That was the worst,” Allred says. “That, and a nurse saying, ‘This will teach you a lesson.’ ”
At first, she was reluctant to take on Cosby.
Allred represented 33 women who accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting them over the course of four decades. But she allows she initially had reservations “because there was no legal option for many of these women” because of the statute of limitations. “But then I realized they really do need a voice, (and) they deserve a voice.”
She has never hesitated to stand up for women.
Only a few minutes of Seeing are spent on Allred’s upbringing. But footage of her younger years shows she always has been outspoken.
On the Dinah! show in the ’70s, she balks at the suggestion that women should be quiet and have dinner prepared when their husbands get home. “I think we have a uterus and a brain, and they both work, and I think it’s very insulting to women,” Allred says in the segment, earning cheers.
She was instrumental in humanizing Nicole Simpson.
Although Marcia Clark was the star prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Allred played a pivotal role repre- senting his slain wife’s family. With the media frenzy surrounding the case and the advent of cameras inside the courtroom, “she saw that she could use the TV to really fight for her clients” and for the “benefit of the family,” trial attorney Greta Van Susteren says.
Her impassioned diatribes against O.J. Simpson were controversial. But Denise Brown credits Allred for changing the party-girl image many had of her sister: “If it wouldn’t have been for Gloria, Nicole never would’ve been a human being.”
The Me Too movement has only made her fight harder.
The documentary culminates in a somewhat somber scene showing the lawyer in a tearful news conference with one of Trump’s accusers, The Appren
tice contestant Summer Zervos, after the presidential election.
The final minute is interspersed with news clips of Harvey Weinstein and Me Too movement activists as Allred is asked whether she thinks we’ve reached a tipping point: “The fight has just begun.”