Allred to the Rescue

Feminist lawyer Gloria Allred has represented women like Amber Frey, and more recently, "Octomom" Nadya Suleman.

Image: Allred Maroko & Goldberg

Prominent men who have been accused in sex scandals often hang their heads in shame, lay low for a few months, and reemerge as media darlings a la disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. But when women are caught in a similar situation, they don’t fade into the background.

They hire Gloria Allred.

So it’s no wonder that busty former Citibank banker Debrahlee Lorenzana decided to hire Allred as public opinion shifted toward ridiculing the woman who claims she was fired because she was too hot.

In the past week, the banker—now working for Chase, which reportedly is very unhappy about her loose lips—has been called a “man-hungry, plastic-surgery addicted, fame-whoring single mom who…makes me ashamed to be of the same species, let alone the same sex,” by the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser. Peyser’s column links to a video of Lorenzana appearing on an episode of Plastic Surgery New York Style on Discovery Health, and rips the woman’s antics as shallow, saying Lorenzana should have sued “her cute plastic surgeon,” rather than claiming “with a straight face, that her bosses deemed her too sexy to count clients’ money.”

Enter Allred, the founding partner at Allred Maroko & Goldberg, who has built her career by representing women who have been unwittingly thrust into the spotlight—like Amber Frey, the key witness in the Scott Peterson murder case, and Nicole Brown Simpson’s family against O.J. Simpson—and those who, once in the spotlight, wanted more. Women like Tiger Woods’ former lovers.

Allred’s firm also works with those of us who aren’t celebrities—real or aspiring. The firm touts its millions of dollars in verdicts and settlements (over $100 million in the past five years) won for the “everyday people whose rights have been violated in the workplace or elsewhere.”

And while the court of public opinion is now forced to extend its consideration of Lorenzana v. Citibank, it’s now up to Allred, and Lorenzana's New York-based attorney Mariann Meier Wang, to make a legitimate sexual-harassment case out of this circus.