Courts

Before She Was RBG: Mel Wulf's 'Notorious' Protégé At The A.C.L.U.

Whatever became of the radical lawyer who brought RBG into the A.C.L.U.?

By Johanna Berkman  
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Mel Wulf (courtesy photo) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (original photo by Lynn Gilbert)

It’s a gloomy, rainy afternoon on Riverside Drive when 93-year-old Melvin Wulf wakes up from his nap to declare the recent Amy Coney Barrett hearings a “right-wing debacle,” and the would-be Justice a “crazed right winger.” But the man is no mere alte kakker.

Once upon a time, back in the 1960s and ‘70s, Wulf was the legal director of the A.C.L.U., and argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court, “more than 99 percent of the rest of the lawyers in this country,” as he is quick to point out. Nonetheless he knows the truth. To the extent he is well-known, it is not for his own accomplishments, but rather those of the young woman whom he brought in to join him at the A.C.L.U., 50 years ago this fall: Barrett’s predecessor — though it feels so wrong to call her that — Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Wulf first met Ginsburg back in the summer of 1944, when he was a 16-year-old waiter at Camp Che-Na-Wah, a Jewish girls’ camp in the Adirondacks, and she, then known as Kiki Bader, was the niece of the camp’s owners, and part of the group of 12-year-old girls whom he served.

Not that Wulf had the vaguest recollection of what she looked like back then, as he told me by phone from his pre-war apartment, “I was interested in the older girls. The girls my age.”

And yet, when he and Ginsburg next met up again, 26 years later, in 1970, it quickly became clear that Ginsburg not only remembered Wulf as her camp waiter, but also from his star turn as Richard Dauntless in Che-Na-Wah’s 1944 rendition of Ruddigore.

Writing to him just a few weeks later in a bid to get the A.C.L.U.’s backing for Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue — a case which, like many that Ginsburg would take on, involved sex discrimination against a man — she seamlessly invoked the language of Wulf’s character. Calling the lawsuit “as neat a craft as one could find to test sex-based discrimination against the Constitution,” she vowed that she and her husband Marty would not only take the case to federal court in Denver, but “if our achievement is not glorious there, we will make a valorous try at the Supreme Court.”

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The Gilbert and Sullivan flattery worked. Wulf gave Ginsburg the A.C.L.U.’s backing, and she not only went on to become co-founder of its Women’s Rights Project, but also the A.C.L.U.’s General Counsel, as well as a member of its board. (She also won Moritz.)

All of this pleased the dauntless Melvin until 1977, when he got caught on the wrong side of internal A.C.L.U. politics, and suddenly needed some institutional support of his own. “I asked her to come to my defense and she told me it was ‘not in her political interest,’” said Wulf. “She didn’t say why.” Perhaps he might have met with success if only he had instead sung her this line of Richard Dauntless: “‘Plead for him as though it was for your own father.’”

After the breach, the two never spoke again — case closed on their relationship, or so it seemed — and Wulf went on to private practice with an emphasis on First Amendment libel defense.

But then in 2017, a very strange thing happened. Wulf received a call from his nephew in L.A., reporting that he had just auditioned for a film in which his uncle was a character. That film would become the Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex, and in it, Wulf would be played for all of his aggressive bluster by a mustachioed Justin Theroux.

“That representation of me, my wife hates it,” said Wulf. “Remember there was a portrayal of moot court in preparation for arguing the Moritz case in which I was very harsh with [Ruth]? It never happened. There was never any such moot court,” at which point I could hear Wulf’s British wife in the background, practically begging him for a chance to speak.

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“I’m a bit more pissed off about the representation because I’m younger, and he’s older and more philosophical,” explained Deirdre Wulf, who told me that she would have preferred if Upper West Sider Mark Ruffalo had played her husband. “Luckily because Mel is very deaf and there were no closed captions, he couldn’t hear the dialogue. . . To this day I don’t want him to watch the movie on Netflix because they have closed captions and he would be able to read the dialogue and it would be demoralizing.”

“You’re telling her all the wrong things!” yelled Mel.

Nonetheless Deirdre continued. “Mel’s right,” she mused. “The past is the past and he’s had a wonderful and interesting and exciting career, and that was just a small part of it. He never ever looked back on it, or brought up her name, or bragged about the connection. Never.”

“Not true!” said Mel, taking back the phone. “That’s misinformation! I talked about my connection to Ruth frequently across the years and it was I who started her on her road to the Supreme Court. I did! People were amused.”

Now, watching as the Republicans begin to dismantle Ginsburg’s legacy via the all-but-assured installment of Barrett, Wulf is adamant about the need for political payback. The Republicans “deserve to get screwed royally by a packed court,” he says. “In a sense, they’re packing it right now.”

According to Wulf, Barrett may turn out to be “worse than Scalia, but that’s pretty hard to imagine that anybody is worse than Scalia. Scalia was the worst right-wing judge that ever sat on the Supreme Court.”

Given his dismal view of the Justice, I can’t help but ask Wulf what he made of the famously close, if unlikely, friendship between Scalia and Ginsburg. “I didn’t find it admirable, actually,” he tells me. “Just because they liked opera? I don’t know what was going through Ruth’s mind. Maybe she was just a lot more generous than I am.”

Now the afternoon is getting darker, and Wulf has a stack of reading that awaits: The New York Review, and The London Review, and some non-fiction political books that he has gotten from the recently reopened public library. Nonetheless Wulf is trying to remember the word he used to describe Barrett’s emotionless appearance when he and his wife watched her Senate confirmation hearings. “What’s the word when people just sit there and don’t move? D,” he calls. “How did I refer to the candidate what’s-her-name? I said ‘something-ic.’”

“Something like ‘robotic,’” ever faithful Deirdre promptly calls back.

“But no,” says Mel. “It was a very good word, actually.”

Five hours later I answer the phone and hear his voice: “The word is ‘catatonic.’”

Johanna Berkman’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, New York magazine, Air Mail, Lit Hub, Glamour, and many other publications. She is writing a book called “Color Wars and Campfires: The Cult and Culture of America’s Camps.” Her writing can be found at johannaberkman.com and you can find her on Twitter @johanna_berkman and on Instagram @johannaberkman.

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