Lisa Bloom in the United States

Lisa Bloom and Gloria Allred

By Dashka Slater, who is the author of five books, for both children and adults.(2012)

Lisa Bloom is Gloria Allred’s daughter.

Sheila Broussard volunteered with Bloom for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1980, and she’s interested to see how Bloom, now 50, is holding up.

“She’s a teeny thing,” Broussard observes admiringly. “She looks good. She looks really good. I’m impressed.”

The fact that looking good, rather than thinking well, is what impresses American women is exactly what Bloom takes issue with in her book, which is subtitled “Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World.” Her argument – that our culture pays too much attention to celebrity scandals and matters of appearance and not enough to important issues such as genocide, gender equality, and climate change – is bolstered by the cringe-inducing statistics she cites, like “Twenty-five percent of young American women would rather win America’s Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize.”

American shallowness is not exactly earth-shattering news, but Bloom’s appearance at The Grove, in the midst of Tinseltown’s hall of mirrors, illustrates how deftly she manages to be both a critic of celebrity culture and a purveyor of it. She is a legal analyst on television who reckons that 95 percent of the time producers call they ask her to discuss tabloid cases. Bloom is also a practicing attorney whose clients include Michael Lohan (father of Lindsay) and the White House-party-crashing Salahis. And, of course, her mother is the renowned Gloria Allred, who, while she prefers to be called a “feminist” rather than a “celebrity” attorney, has represented the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, the mistresses and ex-girlfriends of Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen, Scott Peterson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Eddie Murphy, as well as the recipients of sexy text messages from actor David Boreanaz and Congressman Anthony Weiner, and the former employees of Meg Whitman and Mark Hurd.

Like her mom, Bloom also bridles at being called a “celebrity attorney.” “People who [say] that generally don’t know my work or my record,” she explains. But in her more candid moments, she’s willing to admit that her relationship to the great, glittering maw of tabloid culture is complex, to say the least. “Listen, do I wish I talked less about celebrities?” she asks. “Yes. And that’s one reason I wrote this book.”

The book, which came out last summer from Vanguard Press, is partly a rant about how narcissistic and uninformed Americans have become (“Every time we watch The Hills or Real Housewives or Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a clump of our brain cells resign [sic] in defeat”) and partly a self-help book for those who say they’d be more intellectual and involved if only they weren’t so busy (“Become intimately acquainted with the prewashed, precut section in produce,” she advises in a section on simplifying dinner preparation). Bloom was inspired to write it when she noticed a change in the topics she got to cover as a TV legal analyst. Whereas she once covered juvenile justice, the death penalty, and Saddam Hussein’s war crimes trial, with a little celebrity coverage mixed in for spice, she now finds herself talking about celebrities to the exclusion of everything else. The reason, she says, is that news directors have told her that women aren’t interested in hard news. “They said women, who are the core viewership for the shows I was on, only want stories about plastic surgery, fashion, and celebrities,” she says. “And I said, ‘I don’t believe that. I don’t think that’s true.’ But at least I want women to know this is how news directors see us.”

Bloom, who is vegan, tells me this story over dinner at the Veggie Grill, a Southern California chain that features dishes such as meatless “chickin” and kale salad. She has laryngitis, which has reduced her voice to a squeaky croak, so she orders the tortilla soup hoping it will revive her larynx in time for that night’s appearance at Barnes & Noble with Allred. “This happens to me every two or three years,” she says. “So I know what to do: I have to shut up. But this does not come naturally.”

In fact, she has been talking pretty much all day, first delivering a commencement address at L.A. City College and then doing the Extra! appearance with Allred, in which the two of them debated the hot topic of the day – the sext-ing scandal involving New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Bloom argued that Weiner’s private texts were nobody’s business but his own, and that the case was a distraction from more important topics. Allred argued that the texts became the public’s business the moment Weiner lied about them. As the two women debated, Extra! correspondent Jerry Penacoli kept shooting amused glances at the camera, as if the sight of the mother-daughter pair sparring over ideas was sort of cool, sort of cute, and sort of unsettling – like a video of wrestling pandas.

But Bloom says it’s nothing new, as intellectual debates were part and parcel of her upbringing. “It was always a household filled with ideas and arguments, and playing devil’s advocate, and making sure you had all the facts,” she says.

Bloom and her mother are extremely close, and their mutual adoration is obvious, not just from the fact that they say “I love you!” whenever they part, but also because of the way their life stories are intertwined. In many ways, they grew up together. Allred (then Gloria Bloom) was a 20-year-old college junior when her daughter was born, having met Lisa’s father, Peyton Bray, as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania and married him as a sophomore. Bray, though handsome and funny, was both bipolar and emotionally abusive. Allred divorced him her senior year, raising Lisa with the help of her parents until she was out of school. (Bray committed suicide in 2003.) In 1968 she married aerospace entrepreneur William Allred, who adopted Bloom. (They divorced in 1987, after William Allred was convicted of defrauding the federal government by selling counterfeit airplane parts. Lisa Bloom took her mother’s maiden name around the same time.)

Growing up, Bloom watched her mother invent and reinvent herself, first as a school teacher in Watts and then, when Bloom was in middle school, as a lawyer. One of Bloom’s early memories is of walking the picket line with her mother during a teachers’ strike – Allred was active with the L.A. teachers’ union – and learning why it was important for teachers to have a decent standard of living.

“I loved that she was fighting for things,” Bloom says. “She raised me with a lot of ideas and talked to me about things that were important. I have always liked that.” While Bloom is able to see the humor in having a mother who spent “back-to-school night” for parents leafing through classroom textbooks and asking why they said nothing about the contributions of women, she insists she didn’t feel embarrassed by her mother’s feminist zeal.

“I wouldn’t say my mother embarrassed me, because she actually impressed me,” Bloom says. “So part of me was a normal teenager thinking, ‘Aw Mom, leave it alone.’ But on the other hand, I thought, ‘She’s right. Why aren’t there more women?’ ”

Bray was an influence on Bloom as well. A long-haired, pot-smoking iconoclast who loved jazz, hated politicians, and taught her to question established notions, he once got on her case for going to see the Dalai Lama. “Theo-cracy is theocracy, whether it’s the Taliban or the Dalai Lama,” he told her. On her twelfth birthday he gave Bloom a copy of The Wretched of the Earth by anticolonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, inscribed with the words “Dear Lisa, smash the state!”

Bloom was a shy, bookish kid, and both mother and daughter remember many times when Allred tried – mostly unsuccessfully – to get the girl to lift her nose out of a book and glance at the world around her. Once, on a trip to Palm Springs at age eight or nine, Bloom stared in astonishment at the kids sitting in deck chairs in the sun around the pool. “Mom, look at these kids. How can they be here without a book?”Allred recalls her saying. “She just thought it was one of the strangest things she’d ever seen.”

In college, Bloom was an English major. “I found out you could read novels and plays and poetry for four years, and they gave you a degree,” she says. “It’s not considered a waste of time.” But she was also a national collegiate debating champion, and her mother encouraged her to go to law school. Bloom was on the fence about that – she wanted to do something for abused children and wasn’t sure being a lawyer was the way to do it. But Allred persuaded her to at least apply. “What my mother told me was, ‘If you want to help abused children, you can do a lot more as an attorney than as a social worker,’ says Bloom. “The next thing I knew, I was going to Yale and I really liked it.”

Many lawyers who want to help abused children go to work in a district attorney’s office, or take on dependency cases. But Bloom went to work at her mother’s firm – Allred, Maroko & Goldberg – handling the employment-discrimination cases that were its bread and butter, and developing a little niche of her own suing accused child abusers. One of the first cases she worked on, in 1992, was Howland v. Howland, in which a young psychiatrist named Rebekah Howland sued her father for damages after undergoing therapy and recovering repressed memories of sexual abuse. A jury awarded the daughter half a million dollars, and Bloom became the go-to gal for women with “recovered” memories of abuse, eventually handling more than 50 such cases.

The recovered-memory phenomenon has since been largely discredited, but in those days the media took to it like kittens to catnip. San Francisco appellate attorney Ephraim Margolin, who won an appeal of a recovered memory case against Bloom (Ramona v. Superior Court, 57 Cal. App. 4th 107 (1997)), cautions, “When lawyers jump into cases like that, they owe it to [the client to] have very careful discussion, very careful balancing of what it will do to the person, what it will do to the family.” He also notes that in some cases “an innocent person has to spend countless amounts of money defending themselves.”

Bloom’s poise in front of the camera led to her being asked to comment on other trials, and then to make regular television appearances on national shows such as Fox’s Power of Attorney, where she was part of a revolving cast that included Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, and Allred.

“I was sort of the Ally McBeal character,” she says. “I mean, I was myself, but they wanted me to wear a little shorter skirts and tighter blouses.”

In 2001 she was offered the chance to leave private practice and host her own show on Court TV in New York. Open Court ran for two hours every weekday for eight years, and focused on headline-grabbing cases such as the murder trials of Scott Peterson and Robert Blake, O. J. Simpson’s road-rage incident, and Martha Stewart’s tax-evasion case. But Bloom, who calls her time hosting Open Court “the best job I’ve ever had,” insists that it wasn’t all celebrities and sensationalism. She also discussed Saddam Hussein’s war crimes tribunal, U.S. Supreme Court nomination hearings, the death penalty, and the folly of sentencing juvenile offenders to long prison terms.
“For eight years on Court TV I was talking about serious legal issues,” she says. “Yes, we covered Michael Jackson, but to my mind that was a very serious child sexual-abuse case.”

Still, all things must come to an end, and in 2009 – with her daughter in college and her son about to start – Bloom decided to pull up stakes and head back to California. A major draw was her then-boyfriend, now fiancé Braden Pollock, the owner of Legal Brand Marketing, which provides marketing and advertising support to the DUI defense bar. Pollock, who is ten years Bloom’s junior, is more than just a romantic partner – he also runs the business end of Bloom’s law office, The Bloom Firm, while Bloom runs the legal side.

Bloom opened her law office in Woodland Hills shortly after moving back to California. She chose to hang out her own shingle rather than return to Allred, Maroko & Goldberg in part because she wanted to branch out beyond employment law and in part because she wanted to experience the joys and tribulations of having her own firm.

Although she’s best known for her celebrity cases, she does most of her work out of the public eye, representing people who actively shun publicity. “A lot of what I do is representing high-net-worth, high-profile people – not celebrity high-profile, but business leaders – as general counsel,” she explains. “So they can call me when they have an issue, and I give them advice and guidance. If it’s beyond my area of expertise, I’ll recommend a specialist and oversee the specialist, pretty much like a general practitioner doctor would.”

This kind of work fell into her lap, she says, partly as a result of her on-air criticism of how other lawyers conduct themselves.

Meanwhile, Bloom continues to regularly do legal commentary for CBS and CNN, most of it on tabloid cases, while at the same time honing her new persona as an anti-tabloid crusader. Her Twitter posts reflect the dichotomy, careening seamlessly from feminist observations (“Thailand gets first female premier. Will we be the last industrialized nation to have a female head of state?”) to Casey Anthony analysis (“If you want to understand Casey Anthony, read The Sociopath Next Door. People utterly without conscience walk amongst us”). Yet Bloom seems to see no conflict between those two aspects of her career. “The purpose of the book wasn’t to change the media,” she says. “It was to change consumers.”

In fact, Bloom unabashedly loves being on TV. “I’ve been doing it for ten years on all these different networks, and I am still excited when CNN or CBS calls me,” she says. Those calls sometimes come in the middle of the night – CBS’s The Early Show airs at 7 a.m. on the East Coast, which is 4 a.m. in California. Often she has just an hour or two to research the legal issues involved: Nevada drug laws if the topic is Paris Hilton’s cocaine bust; extradition rules if Survivor producer Bruce Ainsley Beresford-Redman is accused of murdering his wife in Cancún; the Italian legal system if the topic is Amanda Knox, the American student convicted (and then acquitted) of helping to murder Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy. The frenetic rush to get her facts in line takes her back to her time as a college debating champ – right down to the last-minute curveballs. “Sometimes I prepare the topic, decide what I want to say, and show up at the studio and discover that we’re talking about something else because there’s breaking news,” she says. “To me, that’s fun.”

An analyst’s job, as Bloom sees it, is to educate nonlawyers about the justice system. Mostly, she’s asked to comment on areas she knows well – criminal, family, or employment law – and to explain fairly basic legal concepts such as standards of proof, or presumption of innocence, in brief segments of three to five minutes. She might also offer commentary on legal strategy, or her opinion on the conduct of the lawyers. Though she won’t comment on some of her mother’s cases, few other topics are off limits. She admits she got tired of the Casey Anthony case at times, and almost always turned down invitations to talk about it. “You can say, Why is everybody talking about this one case, this one woman and her child, when there are lots of similar cases that don’t get any attention – I talked about that on air and on Twitter,” she says. “But I do also like to feel when I talk about these cases that I have something broader and more important to say.” For example, by talking about the “junk science” used by the prosecution, or about the jury’s refusal to be swayed by the media’s appetite for conviction, she says, “We can raise these discussions to the level of something that’s educational.”

Bloom’s determination to educate the tabloid TV consumer continues with her new book Swagger: 10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness, and Thug Culture, which will be released next month. Envisioned as a companion volume to Think, Swagger was inspired by questions she heard from parents of boys who didn’t think the culture was any kinder to them than it is to women. Although she was initially skeptical, she says, she found plenty of evidence that they were right. “So many boys [are] dropping out of high school, or graduating illiterate,” she says. “We put up so many stumbling blocks to our boys’ success.”

Later on that evening in June, Bloom and Allred sit side by side at a podium at The Grove’s Barnes & Noble. Allred is wearing a hot pink jacket, black pants, and ankle boots – her frosted hair immaculately gelled and coiffed as she poses questions to her daughter.

“Lisa,” she asks, “a common complaint is that people are very, very busy, and they just don’t have time to get smarter. How do you make time to use the brain God gave you, which I think is the title of one of your chapters?”
This is a lead-in to one of Bloom’s applause lines, which she now delivers. “Some things are nonnegotiable,” she says. “You have to go to work. You have to spend time with your kids. But there is one big thing you can eliminate, and that’s housework.”

“Yay!” Allred says. “Let’s hear it!”. “Housework is not your job,” Bloom says boldly. “Say it with me: Housework is not my job!”

The audience joins in. Apparently there are no women in attendance for whom housework actually is a job – no paid domestics like Allred’s former client Nicky Diaz Santillan, the onetime housekeeper for Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman.

“Ideally, this is a job you’re going to farm out,” Bloom continues. “It’s a lot cheaper than you think. You can eat out less. You can buy fewer shoes.” “Now wait a minute,” Allred responds with mock concern.

Bloom is smart enough to know that tips about shoes and hiring housekeepers are fundamentally beside the point. The median income for a fully employed American woman is just under $36,000 – hardly enough to cover basic expenses, never mind meals out or fancy shoes, and the economic forces requiring Americans to work more hours for less pay can’t be mitigated by outsourcing household duties. But she also knows that a generation reared on beauty tips, plastic surgery, and “Brangelina” wants painless, easy-to-digest solutions to even the most complicated problems. If there’s any irony in dispensing housekeeping and cooking advice as a path to greater intellectual engagement, it’s an irony she can live with.

At the end of the evening, sitting in a nearby armchair, Allred watches her daughter signing books with the practiced eye of one who has long known how to sell high ideals using the lowest common denominator. “This is why the book is so successful,” she observes. “You’ve got a nice-looking, blond, relatively young woman saying, ‘You know what, thinking matters.’ You also have all these women on television talking about how to lose weight. Who but Lisa is talking about getting smarter?”