Gloria Steinem meets Gloria Allred: ‘Donald Trump has made us woke’
The feminist activist and the US attorney trade notes on the president, Prince Andrew and abortion, then and now
Gloria Steinem, 85, is a feminist icon, in trademark black leather trousers and turtleneck top, hair streaked blond and back straight as a ballerina’s. Gloria Allred, sitting beside her on a green velvet couch, is, at 78, small and ferocious, one of the best-known attorneys in the world, with a four-decade history of defending women’s rights and an avowed “fangirl” of Steinem. We are in Steinem’s house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the women have convened to talk about recent high-profile cases brought by women – many of them represented by Allred – against Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Cosby, as well as the forthcoming US presidential election, attacks on abortion legislature, and the history of women’s rights in the US.
The women’s careers exist, to some degree, in tandem, with Steinem’s decades-long work as an activist changing public consciousness that Allred may then convert into victories in court. Hers has been a controversial career, defending victims of sexual harassment in class action suits, and going after powerful men in a way that has occasioned accusations of publicity-seeking. When a high-profile story breaks featuring allegations of sexual misconduct against celebrated men, Allred’s name is often not far behind. But she has also won victories in hundreds of unglamorous suits that represent the grunt-work of legal activism. In 2004, Allred successfully filed the first lawsuit in California challenging the state’s ban on same-sex marriage; in 2008, she secured a $15m payout for 200 women in an anti-age discrimination suit against a giant electronics chain. This month, she won a sexual harassment case against Alki David, a billionaire accused of harassing a former employee. And so it goes on.