The Avenger

You know her as the lawyer who represented Tiger Woods' mistresses and the blond allegedly groped by presidential hopeful Herman Cain. But Gloria Allred has also done pioneering work for women's rights. Is it possible to be a righteous feminist advocate and a celebrity gun for hire?

















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"We taught a lesson today," Allred said after the two of us had returned to her office. We were sitting on a settee that had reliefs of women's faces carved into the wood. That lesson, she said, was "about being able to help others and how women are treated by men. These things don't get discussed too often, except in soap operas. But this is real life."

The cynical take on Allred would be to assume this kind of moralizing is, well, cynical: She squeezes a case for significance because significance is how you get attention, and attention means celebrity, and celebrity means money. This critique would at least give Allred some credit for being shrewd—which she undoubtedly is. At the same time, to call it entirely cynical would be to imply that she saw some irony in the situation, that she secretly believed the import of such a case was not as urgent as she insisted. And irony isn't something that interests Allred as much as it interests the journalists who write about her. She is animated by clarity, not ambiguity. "What you see is what you get with Gloria," Maroko said. "She doesn't say something that she doesn't believe in. That, I can tell you." In his estimation, she has remained remarkably consistent in the three dozen years that they've worked together. "I think she always felt more attached to the underdogs and taking up their cause, and she's that way now," he said. Even in her high-profile cases, even when her client might have a considerable amount of money or fame, "the party on the other side is generally powerful. She really feels for who she perceives to be the victim."

In 2004, she filed a lawsuit on behalf of Robin Tyler and Diane Olson, challenging the ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. Four years later, they became one of the first gay couples to marry in California. "I started to cry, because nobody else was going to bat for us," Tyler said, recalling when Allred agreed to take her case. Tyler has known Allred since the 1970s, an era when second-wave feminists such as Betty Friedan were trying to steer the women's movement away from lesbian advocacy. "She never had any hang-up about the gay issue," said Tyler. "I don't know where she got that consciousness."

Allred's parents weren't politically active, though she doesn't recall them ever succumbing to the biases endemic to the time of her childhood—the '40s and '50s. "There was a lot of racism, believe me," Allred said, "but never out of the mouths of my parents." Her father, Morris Bloom, was a door-to-door salesman in Philadelphia. "All he did was work. All. The. Time." Her mother, Stella, was a full-time homemaker. Stella had moved to the United States from England with only an eighth-grade education, "though she was always reading, always challenging ideas."

Allred got a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where she met Peyton Bray. "He was extremely bright. Handsome, I think, by anybody's measure. And came from a very good family." They married her sophomore year, and their only child, Lisa, was born when Allred was 19. Bray suffered from bipolar disorder, and soon she was making plans to leave him. "He would throw things," she recalled. "I never regretted leaving, that was the best choice I could have made." Bray committed suicide in 2003.

A young single mother, Allred moved back in with her parents after graduation and became one of the first female teachers at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philly's inner city. In 1966, she decided to move with another single mother to California and share a household. "I didn't see my life as going anywhere in Philadelphia, and I was tired of the weather," she said. "I thought of California as the land of opportunity." During that first year of living in Los Angeles, she met William Allred, who became her second husband. An aircraft accessories entrepreneur, he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government in 1987, and they divorced shortly thereafter. (About their marriage, she will say only that it ended "because I filed and asked for a divorce.") She was a member of the Los Angeles Teachers Association, and in 1971 she enrolled in law school to learn more about collective bargaining.

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Years before, while studying for her teaching degree at New York University, Allred had been talking in class about African Americans and civil rights when, she recalled, the professor asked, "'What about your rights as women?' I'd never heard anyone talk about women's rights, or the fact that we didn't have any." Still, she said, it took the cumulative effect of life experiences "such as not being able to collect child support, such as being discriminated against on my job, such as being raped, such as having an abortion when it was illegal" to understand her teacher's question. In 1966, while traveling in Acapulco, Allred had met a local physician who took her to dinner and then raped her at gunpoint. She discovered she was pregnant once she returned to the States; after her abortion, she started to hemorrhage, an ordeal she recounts in Fight Back and Win. She was admitted to the hospital with a 106-degree fever. She remembers a nurse telling her, "This will teach you a lesson."

Allred describes in her book how her experience as both a rape victim and, later, as a lawyer for them made her realize that women keep silent for fear that they won't be believed. She herself waited nearly two decades before speaking publicly about what happened to her. Kendall Coffey, a Florida lawyer and the author of Spinning the Law: Trying Cases in the Court of Public Opinion, credits Allred with shifting the public's focus to the injured party's perspective, which "was far less common before her work. Her career made that part of the landscape." And the attention she draws to herself in the process could be construed as part of the point: Rather than engage directly with distraught victims or their family members, Coffey says, the media is now expected to go through an advocate.

Which perhaps explains why Allred persists in casting her news conferences as empowerment sessions rather than the publicity stunts her critics allege. But the politics of speaking out are not what they were in the 1970s, before public suffering became a staple of talk shows and 24-hour news. Not to mention that some of Allred's clients have been victims in imbroglios that involved neither violence nor a criminal act. Was it empowering for the adult-film star Joslyn James to tell the world how "deeply hurt" she was by Tiger Woods' lies, including his promises that "she was the only one, other than his wife"? And what about Elin Nordegren, Woods' wife at the time? Already subject to her husband's infidelity, was she victimized by James' public announcement in 2010 or by the golf-themed pornographic film in which James eventually starred? (Called The 11th Hole, it depicts sexual reenactments of Woods' alleged text messages to James.) When the crime is one of feelings hurt—however intensely—can the offended party hold a news conference about being at the mercy of a duplicitous lover without stripping the word victim of its power and inadvertently stoking what the feminist scholar Alyson Cole has called "the cult of true victimhood," in which we make invidious distinctions between "real" and "bogus" victims? These are precisely the kinds of musings that make Allred impatient. "I have a case. Here are the issues in my case. This is what this case is about. Seek the result."

In March, Allred sent a letter to Florida prosecutors, urging them to investigate Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" after the Georgetown Law School student argued for mandatory contraception coverage in front of Democratic members of Congress. The statute Allred cited was a law from 1883 that makes it a crime to impute a woman's "want of chastity." Allred's missive was printed on letterhead that included a quote from the Equal Rights Amendment; had the ERA been ratified, the archaic law probably would have been thrown out. When I pointed out how the statute smacked of paternalism, Allred was ready. "That's your characterization," she said calmly. "I don't choose to characterize it. I choose to state what it is. It seems to squarely fit the facts. I'm not here to write a law-school review of whether that should be on the books, should not be on the books. I'm here to say there is a law in Florida that does seem to apply to Mr. Limbaugh, who resides in Florida, who broadcasts his show—from Florida—which is heard by millions of listeners. Now, the only question is, does [the state attorney] wish to prosecute or not?" Hers was a steady shot, but it was as if she'd trained her sights on the circus clown while the elephant ran loose. Limbaugh's boorishness had already succeeded in distracting the public from Fluke's message about women's access to affordable health care; Allred was engaging in Limbaugh's sideshow instead of the real issue.

At her office, Allred showed me her inscribed copy of Shoulder to Shoulder, Midge Mackenzie's history of the British suffragist movement. "Women who want to vote, arrested. By people in uniforms," Allred said, pointing to a photo. She gestured to a vintage British bobby uniform displayed on a dressmaker's form beside her settee, tarnished handcuffs and all.

As she flipped through the pages, I asked her about the moment in the news conference when she'd insisted that women were the ultimate beneficiaries of the judge's decision. "My view is that women are hurt more than men," she said. "That men, because they have more access to power and wealth, are more likely to use it to hurt women." Both might lie to each other, but "I think it's definitely more devastating to women, emotionally and financially. Women are socialized from birth to believe in men, to believe men will protect them." If she saw any dissonance between the deprivation that had motivated the suffragettes and the situation that faced Blitsch and Ryncarz, Allred wasn't showing it. "I'm never satisfied with the status and condition of women. Why would I be?"

She stopped at a page that read HUNGER-STRIKE. In 2010, Allred went on a 30-day fast of her own in support of the never-ratified Equal Rights Amendment, skipping 90 meals, for the 90 years that American women had the right to vote. "Look at this," she said to me, pointing to a photograph of a woman attended by a figure holding a long tube to her face. "They were forcibly fed through their nose. This is true courage. Beyond anything that we see today. I mean, really. Forcible feeding. Through the nose."

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The next morning, I met Allred at the Metropolitan Courthouse, where she was waiting for the arraignment of Mark Berndt, a former elementary school teacher who'd been charged with 23 counts of lewd acts on minors. He'd allegedly tied up several of his students and fed them his semen on a spoon. Allred, retained by the family of one of the alleged victims, sat for more than an hour in the windowless courtroom before Berndt was brought out. He pleaded not guilty. The arraignment took fewer than 15 minutes. As we waited for the elevator back to the ground floor,a gray-haired reporter approached Allred. "Don't see you in traffic court much," he said. He wanted to know whether she was going to bring a civil suit, and Allred did what she does whenever she doesn't want to reveal something to the press. She smiled and said nothing. Convincing Allred that I would be interested in learning about her less visible work took some cajoling. She told me that when she makes a case of hers available to the media, "there's always a reason." I wondered whether what she thought the press wanted—bad boys, pretty girls, lurid scandals—happened to be the same as what she thought it deserved. Allred's career has tracked with the proliferation of celebrity culture. Had she simply adapted to what that culture was telling her? And was she perpetuating its basest appetites in the process?

Lisa Bloom, Allred's daughter, is a lawyer and legal analyst who appears frequently on TV. She's also the author of Think, in which she offers a thoughtful critique of our tabloid world while questioning her own role in it. When I asked her about Allred, she defended her. "My mother does a lot of really important cases," Bloom said, mentioning a lawsuit on behalf of farmworkers and another involving a victim of gang rape. Those matters received "very little media attention. But if she had a case involving Tiger Woods, not only is it blown up in the media 24-7, but even years later, people are still talking about it. So, is my mother at fault? Or is the media at fault?" A creative lawyer could make the argument for either side.

"Hey there!" A heavyset woman stood on the sidewalk, grinning and waving as we paused on the courthouse steps. Her face was largely covered by wraparound sunglasses, and she was wearing a hoodie and knit hat despite 75-degree weather. She looked happy to see us.

"Do you know her?" I asked Allred. "No." The woman continued talking, shifting to the third person. "Does she take anything on contingency? I have a strong case," she said. Allred pulled one of her bifold business cards out of her purse, handing it over. She told me that people approach her like this all the time.

I recalled something she said when we first met. "Let me ask you this: Who would you suggest they call? If they said, 'We have a women's rights case. And if Gloria Allred can't do it, who would you suggest?'" Incessant exposure has made Allred recognizable in a way that other effective attorneys aren't. Getting on television functions as an informal advertising campaign, to be sure, one that has clearly brought her all kinds of social and financial benefits. And perhaps a not-insignificant number of people who approach her are looking for a windfall. But the publicity makes her accessible, and I suspect the presence of Gloria Allred at the negotiating table exerts a different order of pressure than that of an anonymous ambulance chaser with a full-page ad in the yellow pages.

Allred returned to the courtroom steps and was quiet for a moment. She was about to walk over to the DA's office; later in the afternoon, she'd comment on the musical collaboration between Rihanna and her abusive ex-boyfriend, Chris Brown, on CNN. A man carrying a large camera approached us and started taking pictures. He hadn't said anything, and she didn't seem to notice. The shutter on his camera continued clicking as I scribbled in my notebook. Allred was looking out toward the street, paying no attention to either one of us.

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