The Reckoning with Gloria Allred

Strong Feelings

Buckle up, friends. Today’s episode is a wild ride. We sat down with famed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred to talk about her four-decade career fighting discrimination and sexual violence, and her new induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame...during the same week some messy details emerged about her role in the Harvey Weinstein saga.

Whew. When we sat down with Gloria earlier this month, we knew she was a powerhouse lawyer—from representing more than 30 women in the Bill Cosby case to fighting California’s gay marriage ban in the state supreme court in 2004 to advocating for abortion rights and against gender discrimination since the 1970s, she’s seen and done a lot.

But just before we got her on the phone, a new book came out that complicates things: She Said — written by two New York Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke open the Harvey Weinstein story in 2017. In it, they detail how Gloria’s daughter Lisa Bloom, also a feminist attorney, went to work for Weinstein, promising to plant stories painting accusers like Rose McGowan as unstable in the press. The memos were pretty damning. And then, Kantor and Twohey took aim at Gloria herself—because back in the early aughts, her firm represented a client who signed a secret settlement with Weinstein—and that client now feels burned.

So in this episode, we share an inspiring, powerful interview with Gloria—and remind ourselves that all our faves are problematic.

Fighting injustice is very good for the health… Take that rage and anger, which is a source of energy for you, and move it outward into constructive action to win change.
—Gloria Allred, 2019 inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame

We talk about:

• The power and limitations of lawsuits as a form of justice
• Prison abolition versus locking up rapists, and why carceral feminism won’t save us
• How Gloria went from a childhood in Southwest Philly to public school teacher to labor organizer to celebrity attorney
• Why fighting injustice is good for the health

Links:

• Gloria’s website and legal firm
• Seeing Allred, the Netflix documentary on Gloria’s life
• She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement
• The New York Times Daily podcast episode about Lisa Bloom and episode about Gloria Allred
• Gloria’s op ed in the LA Times, defending private settlements