The Los Angeles Times was shocked, shocked, that Gloria Allred had nothing to say.
Allred, a women’s rights attorney who tries many of her cases in the court of public opinion, had gone silent.
And so had her client, Rachel Uchitel, one of a growing number of women alleged to have had affairs with golfer Tiger Woods.
Gloria Allred
Uchitel’s news conference last week was called off due to “unforeseen circumstances,” circumstances Allred did not explain.
Not to worry. Allred’s daughter, CBS legal analyst Lisa Bloom, filled the information gap.
Bloom reported that Woods’ attorneys had purchased Uchitel’s silence. Bloom estimated the amount to be “well in excess of a million dollars.”
If that’s the case, chalk up an out-of-court victory for Allred, who has made a career out of high-profile cases, many of them involving women, including herself.
In 1987, Allred, the first female member of the Friars Club of Beverly Hills, successfully sued the all-male Friars Club of New York for discrimination.
She filed the suit after she was refused permission to eat at the New York club even though the Beverly Hills members were supposed to be welcome there.
Later, Allred represented the family of Nicole Brown Simpson, the murdered wife of O.J. Simpson.
She was the lawyer for actress Hunter Tylo, who was awarded $4.8 million from the producer of the television program Melrose Place after she sued him for firing her for being pregnant.
Allred also represented a California high school teacher who was awarded $4.3 million by a jury after suing her school district for not stopping an underground student newspaper from depicting her as a porn star.
Allred’s lengthy client list also includes Patricia Masten, a prosecution witness in the trial of sports announcer Marv Albert on charges of forcible sodomy and Amber Frey, a lover of Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his wife, Laci.
Allred also drew attention by filing a brief on behalf of Paula Jones, after Jones’s sexual harassment case against Bill Clinton was dismissed.
In all of these cases, Allred has made ample use of the press conference, the television appearance and the newspaper interview.
This attention-grabbing style has generated criticism, but Allred doesn’t seem to care.
“There are some people who still feel threatened by strong women,” Allred told CBS News in 2005. “That’s their problem. It’s not mine.”
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