Above The Law 'Celebrities': Where Are They Now?

Find out what happened to the stars of ten of Above the Law's biggest stories.

1010RFLast month, Above the Law celebrated its tenth anniversary. You are all invited to our birthday party next week (details and RSVP here).

We are marking our tenth anniversary with “10 for 10,” a series of ten articles looking at how lawyers, the legal profession, and Above the Law have evolved over the past decade. In this story, which we previously requested nominees for, we will update you on the current whereabouts of ten ATL “celebrities” — the judges, lawyers, and law students featured in our biggest stories over the years. Think of it as the ATL version of that dearly departed VH1 show, “Where Are They Now?”

Before we plunge into the list, a few caveats:

1. This list is admittedly idiosyncratic. People have strong views of who is or should be a “celebrity,” as well as whether they love or hate a particular celeb. We didn’t take a very formal approach to selecting these individuals. We started off by reviewing our biggest posts of all time, ranked by pageviews, and pulled some stars from those stories. But then we mixed in a few other figures who might not have appeared in a chart-topping individual story but served as recurring subjects of coverage.

2. This list excludes anonymous/pseudonymous people. It’s hard to determine what someone is up to when you don’t know their true identity. So you won’t see appearances here from Loyola 2L, our 2007 Lawyer of the Year; Partner Emeritus, one of our most famous (or infamous) commenters, before we removed comments; or “Ms. X,” the Biglaw mother with a notoriously demanding schedule.

3. This list focuses on people who have at least somewhat interesting story arcs. There’s a reason you won’t see any of our Lawyer of the Year winners on this list. If you look up the past LOTY honorees, you’ll see that almost all are doing what they were doing at the time that we honored them.

4. This list might contain errors or omissions. We tried our best to track people down, but we didn’t go to the ends of the earth (or even hire a private investigator), so some of the information below might be incorrect or incomplete. But we will rely upon a method that has stood Above the Law in good stead over the past decade: crowdsourcing. If you have an addition or correction to any of the info below, please email us or text us (646-820-8477), including the words “where are they now” somewhere in your message. We will then update accordingly.

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And now, on to our ten celebrities — actually more than ten, because we have some couples — and where they are now. We present them in no particular order.

1. Judge Wade McCree. We have covered many judicial scandals over the years, but this 2014 story about then-Judge McCree is the most widely read of them all (thanks in large part to a link from the Drudge Report). You might recall McCree for his penchant for posing for shirtless selfies, or the affair he was having with the complaining witness in a felony child support case that was before him.

What’s the latest on Wade McCree? He’s no longer “Judge” McCree; the Michigan Supreme Court tossed him from office in 2014. He’s not even a practicing lawyer; in February of this year, the State of Michigan Attorney Discipline Board suspended his law license for two years. But let’s look on the bright side: the Sixth Circuit held that the doctrine of judicial immunity protected McCree from a suit filed by the father in that child support case, and last year the Supreme Court denied certiorari. Congratulations?

2. Justice Lori Douglas. Justice Douglas is the retired Canadian jurist who became an international news story — and one of our most-read posts — after pornographic photos of her became public. It was covered as a scandal, and investigated as one too — to the tune of more than $3 million in taxpayer money.

But with the benefit of hindsight, I’d say this is a story that we (and many others) got wrong, at least in our initial, breathless coverage. We later learned that Justice Douglas was more victim than vixen: it turned out that her (now deceased) husband, Jack King, shared the photos with others without Justice Douglas’s knowledge or consent.

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The good news is that Justice Douglas made it through this controversy and is doing just fine today. The ethics investigation concluded with a settlement that ended the inquiry and allowed her to resign from the bench in May 2015 — an important date, because it allowed her to receive retirement benefits based on 10 years of judicial service.

Douglas is now back to practicing family law and hoping to do some teaching too. As she told the Canadian Lawyer earlier this year, “I feel fine. I haven’t been so well now for five years.”

3. Reema Bajaj. Sticking to the subject of “lawyers and sex,” this Illinois attorney made headlines after she was accused of moonlighting as a prostitute. In June 2012, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of prostitution. As of December 2013, she was working in an office in a managerial capacity and “moving on with her life,” as her lawyer put it.

In March 2014, Bajaj was suspended from the practice of law for three years and until further order of the Illinois Supreme Court. But March 2017 is just around the corner. Might the legal profession see a return of Reema? I hope that she’s allowed to return to practice (if she so desires); everyone deserves a second chance.

4. Stephanie Grace. This very bright young lawyer, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, generated nationwide controversy after an unfortunate email of hers that some saw as racist got dug up and disseminated (possibly by a friend turned enemy).

Fortunately for Grace, some impressive employers looked past the controversy. Grace clerked for one of the most highly regarded judges in the country, Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit, and today works for Latham & Watkins in San Diego, where she handles complex litigation (plus pro bono work too).

5. Johnathan Perkins. This is another race-related story, but of a very different type. While he was a student at UVA Law School, Perkins admitted to fabricating a story about being harassed by UVA police on account of his race (he is African-American). His justification: “I wrote the article to bring attention to the topic of police misconduct.”

(Please don’t misconstrue this as a defense of his (clearly unacceptable) actions, but let me toss something out there: in the wake of Black Lives Matter movement and the widespread mistreatment of African-Americans by police that it has highlighted, doesn’t Perkins seem oddly prescient?)

Furious fellow UVA students argued that Perkins shouldn’t be allowed to graduate, citing UVA’s strict honor code. But a jury of his peers acquitted him in those proceedings, and he did receive his law degree.

Like Stephanie Grace, Johnathan Perkins has been able to put the unpleasantness behind him and enjoy a successful legal career. He was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar and today is an associate in the Philadelphia office of Montgomery McCracken. He has taken lemons and made lemonade: he focuses on “representing universities and corporations with respect to claims of discrimination,” and he lists “higher education” as one of his practice areas as well.

UPDATE (10/3/2017): We now know much more about what happened to Johnathan Perkins back in 2011 than we did at the time, and it majorly changes how he and the situation should be viewed. See this new story, Was UVA Law Alum Johnathan Perkins Pressured By The FBI Into Recanting His Account Of Racial Profiling?

(Flip to the next page to read about Aaron Charney, Alexandra Marchuk, and other Above the Law mini-celebrities.)