Over the weekend, Casey Greenfield — Yale Law School graduate, Gibson Dunn litigatrix, and daughter of political pundit Jeff Greenfield — made a foray into film criticism. Greenfield published a review of the new Jennifer Lopez movie, The Back-Up Plan, in the Daily Beast.
Adrian Chen of Gawker breaks it down:
The mother of CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s purported love child has written an essay about being a single mom….
It has long been thought that married Jeffrey Toobin—CNN analyst and New Yorker contributor—impregnated Casey Greenfield…. Neither Toobin nor Greenfield has ever confirmed this, which probably means it’s true. This weekend, The Daily Beast published an essay Greenfield about raising the-baby-which-probably-belongs-to-Jeffrey-Toobin. (His name is Rory.)
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If litigating for Gibson Dunn (and against Jeffrey Toobin) doesn’t work out for Casey Greenfield, perhaps her “back-up plan” is a journalism career. As noted in her firm bio, “[p]rior to obtaining her law degree, Ms. Greenfield worked for magazines and newspapers in New York and Los Angeles.”
(Maybe she could even land a book deal for a memoir about her affair and subsequent experience as a single mom? That’s one book we’d definitely buy.)
So, what’s her Daily Beast essay like?
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Legal teams ask a practical question. If large language models are so capable, why does legal AI still depend on curated content, and why does surfacing that content matter so much?
Quite good, actually (even though it ruined The Back-Up Plan for us, by divulging the entire plot about four paragraphs in). It’s well-written and surprisingly funny, and for the gossip aficionados among us, she sprinkles in liberal helpings of her life as a well-known media figure’s baby mama a single mother:
When I chose to keep a pregnancy by a guy who wasn’t around, I thought that social approval, which Zoe seeks from her friends and family, was unlikely to appear. I’m happy to have been mostly wrong – my son, I say with no bias, is the joy of an ever-broadening community.
Indeed. On behalf of the “ever-broadening community” of Above the Law’s readership, Casey, we support your efforts to get your baby’s alleged father to pay up (whoever that father might be).
After summarizing (and panning) the movie’s predictable plot, Greenfield closes on a strong note:
Nothing in the details of raising a child or creating a family is magic. It’s not luck, it’s not written in cards, and it’s not found on heads-up pennies. You take life as you find it, you do your “custom work,” you get the stroller through the door. The magic comes later, when you walk in from the rain after a long day and a stupid movie, and you’ve come home, finally, to your little boy.
Aww…. Although it closes on a sentimental note, it’s an elegant, eloquent review. Read it in full — warning: movie spoilers galore! — at the Daily Beast.
What J. Lo’s Movie Gets Wrong [The Daily Beast]
CNN Analyst’s Rumored Baby Mama Writes About Raising His Rumored Baby [Gawker]