Gloria Allred profiled in 'Los Angeles'

The Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations (and the Anthony Weiner frolics some months earlier) provide fresh material for the January profile on lawyer Gloria Allred in Los Angeles magazine. (The piece is not online.) But really, writer Ed Leibowitz has got so much good stuff to work with. Allred, now 70, has been at her game for a long time now, and almost everyone has an opinion of her. The reality might be different than you think.

The binders devoted to the 1980s show her at the peak of activism. She forced the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department to abandon its practice of shackling women prisoners in hospitals as they went through labor. She chipped away at L.A. district attorney Ira Reiner’s intransigence until he endorsed a program to collect from deadbeat dads. She and another of her law partners, Michael Maroko, won a settlement against Holocaust deniers on behalf of a survivor of Auschwitz. She argued for people with AIDS who’d been let go from jobs or discriminated against in the marketplace.

In February 1984, Allred sued the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Her client, Rita Milla, had been sexually molested by seven priests when she was 16 years old and later impregnated by one. She brought the case all the way to the California Supreme Court; though the justices rejected it, Allred went on to establish paternity by one of the priests, got another to admit the archdiocese had told him to stay in the Philippines to avoid possible prosecution, and persisted until the state changed its laws to address rampant priest abuse. In 2007, when Milla’s daughter turned 25, Allred reached a settlement for $500,000.

Of course, the enigma of Gloria Allred lies in the ease with which she ricochets from the substantive to the seemingly trivial. It was also during the 1980s that she cemented her reputation as a lawyer with an affinity for cases that are headline rich and content poor. She went after the Elysium Fields nudist colony for charging men more for lovemaking classes than it did women. She confronted the Yellow Balloon children’s salon on behalf of a three-year-old who was charged $2 more for a haircut than her brother was for his. She waged a publicity campaign against Madonna, demanding she record a pro-choice song to make amends for what Allred had determined was the anti-abortion message of the hit “Papa Don’t Preach.”

This piece should be a talker in a lot of offices and courthouses. Couple of tidbits: Allred is "a millionaire many times over," and her daughter is CNN legal commentator Lisa Bloom.