When you walk into Gloria Allred's office to interview her, she hands you her book — "Fight Back and Win" — and suggests you read it. Immediately.RTWT.
"Would you mind?" she asks. "I think it will answer some questions."
Smiling, she leaves you in the firm's conference room, with its long, glossy table and panoramic view of Los Angeles. This is where Allred holds most of the news conferences that have made her both famous and infamous — sitting at the head of the table, jaw set, arm wrapped tightly around a weepy client as cameras zoom in.
This afternoon, it's a study hall for a lone reporter frantically skimming the book subtitled "My Thirty-Year Fight Against Injustice — and How You Can Win Your Own Battles."
Whether you see this command cram course as an exercise in vanity or efficiency won't matter to Allred. As she writes in the book, "Early in my career, I decided that if I intended to be a strong advocate for women I couldn't be deterred by my critics."
She has not been. Allred has escorted into the spotlight a parade of castoff women — the TV star fired for being too pregnant, the banker fired for being too sexy, the jilted mistresses and wronged girlfriends of famous philanderers and murderers.
With her latest client — the sad-eyed housekeeper Nicandra Diaz Santillan — she may have helped spoil the gubernatorial chances of billionaire candidate Meg Whitman. After the housekeeper said she had worked for Whitman for nine years and then been fired for being undocumented, Whitman's poll numbers dropped and Jerry Brown's lead widened.
It wasn't just the Diaz scandal, but if some Latinos were on the fence, the explosive allegations may have shifted quite a number of undecideds.
RELATED: "The Immigrant Vote in California."
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