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Gloria Allred
By Anne KeehnPhoto By Piper Ferguson
When Gloria Allred opened her law firm with her partners Michael Maroko and Nathan Goldberg, the offices were housed in a low-rent area of Hollywood. Thirty years later, the firm has won millions of dollars on behalf of its clients—many of them represented pro bono—and is considered one of the foremost civil rights firms in the country. TIME magazine called Allred “one of the nation’s most effective advocates of family rights and feminist causes.”
Today, Allred’s firm operates from a slick building on the corner of Wilshire and Crescent Heights Boulevard. The firm’s offices are an expanse of white with accents of dark wood. When Allred makes her entrance, she matches the décor perfectly, encased in a soft white suit, her lips swathed in blood-red lipstick, her eyes lined in black. When a strand of hair falls over her eyes, she scoops it away with a delicate, bejeweled hand. “People are always surprised. They say I seem softer in person,” she says as she places her petite frame in a chair. Up close, the Joan-of-Arc-meetsstate- senator look she has cultivated seems so much like armor—which is exactly what it is.
“I live in a war zone every single day,” Allred declares. “For women and minorities, it absolutely is a war zone. We are fighting powerful forces. Believe me, it is a David and Goliath—or Davida and Goliath—type of battle. That’s why I take fire, and I give fire—because I’m not a philosopher; I’m a warrior.”
Early in her legal career, Allred presided over her first press conference on behalf of the National Organization for Women. Since then, she has become one of the most media-savvy lawyers in the world. She speaks in sound bites and illustrates her arguments with visual cues. When Senator John Schmitz tried to make abortion illegal in 1981, Allred challenged Schmitz’s proposal at a public hearing in Los Angeles. She punctuated her testimony by walking over to him and handing him a chastity belt. Cameras rolled as Allred said, “We’re not going back to the Middle Ages.” When the senator countered her public attack with a press release that insulted women and Jews, Allred released a “plague” of frogs at one of Sen. Schmitz’s press conferences. In 1987, Allred became the first woman to become a full-fledged member of the exclusive Friars Club. To commemorate, she blasted into the formerly all-male Friars Club sauna in swimwear, wielding a tape measure and singing Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is.”
A frequent pundit on cable news channels, Allred hosted the now-defunct daily radio show “Allred & Taylor” on KABC radio, and received multiple Emmy nominations for her commentary on KABC-TV’s Eyewitness News in Los Angeles. She has had a presence in virtually every high-profile murder trial in recent memory: when Sondra Kerr Blake was subpoenaed during her ex-husband Robert Blake’s murder trial, Allred was her lawyer; during Scott Peterson’s murder trial, his mistress, Amber Frey, retained Allred as her personal attorney; and Allred represented the bereaved family of Nicole Brown Simpson during the O.J. Simpson civil trial. Critics call her a publicity hound, but Allred, who began her career as an inner-city schoolteacher, says she uses media attention to make examples out of her clients and cases.
“In a way, I’m still a teacher as well as an attorney,” Allred says. “We can’t sue every corporation, every business, every harasser, every rapist, every batterer. But we can send a message, so that wrongdoers will see that there are many people who will stand up and fight back. You will not be able to operate with impunity any more.
“A reporter could dwell on frogs being released, but that will ignore what is really important. What’s really important is that we have fought back and we have won.” Allred pauses for a moment and blinks her thick-lashed eyes. “It’s all me. All of it,” she says, in reference her publicity stunts. “But I think what counts is winning rights; winning change.”
Allred grew up in a working-class neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia. Her father was a doorto- door salesman, her mother a homemaker; neither had gone to high school. She attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls, a prestigious public school. “A lot of the girls there were from upper-class families,” she recalls. “Their parents were very successful leaders in Philadelphia. They could go home and their parents could help them with their homework, but mine couldn’t. But Girls’ High was really there for somebody like me, it turns out.”
After high school, Allred attended the University of Pennsylvania. She married her first husband during her sophomore year, gave birth to her daughter during her junior year, and was divorced by her senior year. After graduating, Allred struggled to collect child support, and worked at jobs where she was paid a fraction of what her male peers earned. While on vacation in Acapulco, Allred was raped at gunpoint and became pregnant. This was 1966; Roe v. Wade was seven years away. Allred underwent a dangerous, illegal abortion that nearly killed her.
“Most of us who were leaders in the women’s movement have this passion because—I have this passion for justice because of my own life experience,” Allred says. “Not because of a class I took in law school. In fact, in law school I might have read about the Equal Rights Amendment in a footnote once. That was it.”
Over the years, Allred has endured countless insults. Senator Schmitz called her a bull-dyke and a “slick, butch lawyeress.” Comedian Henny Youngman called her a “well-dressed blood test” for her bright-colored power suits. “Verbal missiles are totally unsuccessful with me, to the great dismay of those who would like to have them hit their target,” Allred proclaims. “Why should they be? All one has to do is look at herstory, and see what verbal missiles were hurled at the suffragists – far worse than any that have ever been hurled at me. They persevered, and as a result I enjoy the right to vote. It takes far less courage for me to do what I do. Why would I be deterred when there’s so much at stake? It makes no sense.
“It’s been many years since I thought about any fear,” she continues. “My biggest fear was, Would I be able to survive as a single parent, taking care of my daughter, doing the best for her, and also become the person I wanted to be? I think I’ve conquered that. I did it. Fear is the weapon that is used to keep women in their place; when they break out of it, it’s wonderful. I literally have women come in my office with a little baby voice, and after they know what their rights are and decide they’re going to do something about it, their voice drops. Literally, you hear an adult voice coming out that they may not have ever heard in themselves, or maybe never used. They really have become a woman. It’s very exciting, and it’s very empowering, and it’s very contagious.”