What Lawyer Would You Hire If You Were Totally Screwed?
Harvey Weinstein is lawyering up with a stable of superstars... is it the right stable of superstars?
If you perused the entertainment news this morning while you fought your way to the office for another day of unbridled rainmaking, you might have noticed film producer Harvey Weinstein lawyering up. Apparently, we’re just a few days away from not one, but two — from the New York Times and the New Yorker — massive exposés diving into workplace sexual allegations against Weinstein, and he’s decided to get ahead of it.
That’s probably prudent considering actress Rose McGowan is quoted in the Slate article for a Tweet last year that said she didn’t report her rape because “because my ex sold our movie to my rapist for distribution” — which certainly sounds like the Weinstein-distributed Planet Terror directed by McGowan’s ex — suggesting the allegations are likely to be quite severe.
Weinstein has retained sexual harassment specialist Lisa Bloom. Slate reporter Matthew Dessem is a little befuddled given Bloom’s track record — indeed, her whole brand identity — as an attorney representing women against powerful men, but actually this makes a lot of sense. Who do you think was going to show up across the table once women feel free to pursue legal action against Weinstein? He’s taken a critical potential adversarial advocate off the table. Why would Bloom take a case that goes against brand? That’s a whole other can of worms.
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Charles Harder is there too? Does Peter Thiel hate the New Yorker, too? All kidding aside, Weinstein’s clearly looking to dish out some pain on the journalists digging into this, and if you’re looking for a lawyer to bring a publication to its knees, Harder’s the leader in the clubhouse.
And apparently the legal response team may not be complete:
This seems like the kind of story that might require a bigger crisis team, which might be why Variety reports that Weinstein is trying to bring Lanny Davis on board. But even if Weinstein succeeds in bagging Davis, that’s not necessarily a good sign: As Tim Marchman observed at Deadspin back when Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder hired Davis to defend the team’s name, “A man so badly fucked that he’ll hire Lanny Davis is a man who’s finished.”
Well, Marchman wrote that back in 2013, and Dan Snyder is still doing the public service of driving that repugnant Washington franchise into the ground, so maybe it was premature to think he was finished. But the point remains that Lanny Davis is a bargain basement Olivia Pope who hasn’t even had sex in the Oval Office.
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So we assume.
Oh, and Weinstein’s go-to attorney is David Boies, so let’s just add him to this list too.
The decision to bring on hardcore plaintiff attorney Bloom, media gladiator Harder, and the plan to add preeminent fixer Davis got us thinking: what lawyer(s) would you hire if you were totally screwed? Obviously the nature of the hypothetical allegations matters — you probably aren’t looking to Bloom if you’ve been pinched for running a multistate, underaged squirrel-fighting ring. Nonetheless, in any given scenario where money is no object, who are you calling?
Send us an email at [email protected], and tell us who you’re hiring and why. Maybe we’ll (anonymously, of course) discuss the best ones in a future piece.
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Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
