Honestly, I was not expecting to learn that two attorneys _ one a well-known champion of women, the other a pillar of the establishment _ would turn out to be the bad guys in the new book "She Said," by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the New York Times investigative reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein sex harassment and assault scandal in October 2017.
We already knew so much about the disgusting behavior that Weinstein inflicted on his employees, and on actresses who wanted to work for him, that the depraved details came as no surprise: the hotel room meetings, the bathrobes, the pleas for naked massages, the cajoling, the brute force, the threats of retaliation, the actual retaliation, the alleged rapes.
All of that is familiar territory now, nearly two years after the #MeToo movement was ignited by spectacular investigative journalism at a number of outlets, including the Los Angeles Times.
What did come as a shock is the way that attorneys Lisa Bloom, a champion of women's rights, and David Boies, who famously argued in favor of gay marriage, among other things, took up Weinstein's cause in brutal, compromising ways.
Was it only coincidence that Bloom's book on the Trayvon Martin case was going to be made into a miniseries by the Weinstein Co.? Or that Boies, according to Kantor and Twohey, was angling for a role in a Weinstein film for his actor daughter, Mary Regency?
I won't focus much on Boies, who, while representing the New York Times in legal cases, was simultaneously working to undermine the Times' investigation of Weinstein. (The New York Times fired him.)
But how can Bloom, who, like her mother, Gloria Allred, has carved a place in the legal world exacting justice for women who have been abused, harassed and discriminated against, have thrown herself off such a precipitous moral cliff?
A contrite Bloom, who declined my interview request, has tweeted her regret and described her involvement with Weinstein as "a colossal mistake."
Oh, Ms. Bloom, it wasn't just a mistake. It was a total, humiliating sellout.
