Before representing five of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the lawyer advised the producer on how to discredit his accusers. Does she have any regrets?

The night before I meet Lisa Bloom, the BBC screens its interview with Virginia Giuffre, the woman who has accused Prince Andrew of having sex with her after she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. It is a bombshell of an interview, with Giuffre giving a detailed account of her alleged encounters with the prince. It is also classic Bloom territory: for the past decade, the American lawyer’s name has been synonymous with high-profile cases in which a woman accuses a powerful man of sexual misconduct, often played out in the glare of camera lights. With her signature mix of legal aggression and media friendliness, Bloom has represented women against both Bill Cosby and Fox News host Bill O’Reilly – and won. In the O’Reilly case, she forced the Fox network to engage by filming her client calling the company’s sexual harassment hotline, and posting the video on Twitter. More accusers came forward, advertisers fled, and O’Reilly was done. Bloom handles publicity the way a samurai wields a sword.

Bloom is not representing Giuffre. But she is representing five other women who claim Epstein abused them, as well as two others who say they remember seeing Giuffre with Prince Andrew at the London nightclub Tramp in 2001, on the night at the centre of the allegations. (The prince has insisted this encounter was “impossible”, his unforgettable alibi being that he was at Pizza Express in Woking at the time. He has also denied having sex with Giuffre.)

Bloom has flown from her home in Los Angeles to London ahead of the Giuffre interview, because ITV have asked for her take on it. “A lot of other networks wanted me to come on to discuss this as well,” she tells me. As every transatlantic TV station knows, if you’ve got an item on a case about sexual misconduct, there are only two lawyers to call: one is Bloom, and the other is the even more famous and fearsome Gloria Allred, Bloom’s mother.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Harvey Weinstein, October 2017. Photograph: LRNYC/MEGA

At 58, Bloom is bright-eyed and chipper, seemingly unaffected by jet lag, which she puts down to her vegan diet. She has the kind of blow dried, honey-coloured hair that suggests a monthly maintenance allowance that exceeds most people’s rent. Even though I was up three times the night before with a crying baby, Bloom can’t tell me often enough how terrific and young I look (I’m 41). “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!” she says when we meet in a photographer’s studio in London. She radiates a synthetic warmth.

As well as doing the media rounds, Bloom has also spent this trip helping her sixth client, who lives in London, prepare her story. “My client came to me about a week ago, to say, I was there and it was very memorable because somebody said, ‘Look it’s Prince Andrew!’ She thought, ‘Wow! A royal!’ She also saw Virginia looking very serious, not having a good time, whereas Andrew was having a good time, smiling a lot. So I’m gathering the evidence that she has, and will take her to Scotland Yard if they’re interested, which they should be. The FBI says they’re investigating. I haven’t seen any evidence of it, so they must be doing it privately,” she says dryly.

Of Bloom’s five other clients on the Epstein case, four live in the US, and one in Japan. Only one, a model known as Kiki, has given up her anonymity, recently appearing on a US talkshow with Bloom by her side. Dozens of lawyers are now involved in the case, including, inevitably, Allred, who is representing other women. While each suit is unique and handled by an individual lawyer, the attorneys are also working together with Epstein’s estate to establish a victims’ compensation fund. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell last August, apparently having killed himself, so compensation rather than litigation is the primary focus now.

Bloom has practised law all her adult life, save for a decade when she worked as a legal analyst on TV, and says even she has been stunned by the scale of the Epstein case. I ask her what she thinks of the conspiracy theories that surround it – for instance, the speculation that he was killed in prison, by powerful people who feared guilt by association. “I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist, but in this case there are so many shocking things that we know happened, such as Prince Andrew going to visit him for four days after he was convicted. This is a guy who was getting three girls a day trafficked to him, according to some witnesses. Really, anything’s possible at this point,” Bloom says.

This should be a triumphant moment in Bloom’s career. During the 2016 election, she represented two women, Jill Harth and Lisa Boyne, who accused Trump of sexual misconduct, and though the cases never went to trial, Bloom was considered to be working at the forefront of the #MeToo movement. But in 2017, her reputation was completely upended when it emerged that she had been working for Harvey Weinstein. At the time, Bloom insisted she had been merely working as an “adviser”, telling an interviewer that, “My job was to educate him about… what is appropriate and not appropriate in the workplace, including his tone.” When asked if she had been trying to dig up dirt on the actress Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s accusers, Bloom replied, “I was not.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With an Epstein client this year, on The Dr Oz Show. Photograph: Sony Pictures Television

But in September this year, two books came out that cast serious doubt on Bloom’s claims. The New York Times reporters who first broke the Weinstein story, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, published their book about the case, She Said. Ronan Farrow, who reported on Weinstein for the New Yorker, then published his account, Catch And Kill. Both books describe Bloom’s relationship with Weinstein in jaw-droppingly damning detail. In She Said, Twohey finds a memo from Bloom to Weinstein written in December 2016, when the film producer first retained her. Also copied into the memo were two private investigators, Jack Palladino and Sara Ness. Bloom shared her thoughts about McGowan, who, in 1997, had received a $100,000 settlement from Weinstein, and in 2016 tweeted that she’d been raped by “a studio head”.

“Harvey,” Bloom wrote. “It was a treat to speak with you today, though yes, we’d all prefer better circumstances. I’ve spent the rest of the day reading Jack and Sara’s thorough reports about Rose, who truly comes across as a disturbed, pathological liar, and also your former assistant… who seems to be less of a concern…

“I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them. They start out as impressive, bold women, but the more one presses for evidence, the weaknesses and lies are revealed… Clearly she must be stopped in her ridiculous, defamatory attacks on you.”

Bloom went on to spell out how McGowan could be stopped. Her suggestions included: cleaning up Weinstein’s Google search with a reputation management company, in order “to prevent negative pieces from ranking well on Google”; Weinstein and Bloom doing an interview together about his “evolving” views on women’s issues; and this: “We can place an article re [Rose] becoming increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she is discredited.” According to Kantor and Twohey, Bloom’s accounts show she worked with private investigators to collect information on multiple women and smear them on Weinstein’s behalf.

There seems to be a contradiction between your public and private statements about the relationship with Weinstein, I say.

Bloom looks down for a beat. When she speaks, her voice is more hesitant.

“All I can tell you, in regards to that memo, is virtually none of those things happened,” she says, as though the fact her suggestions weren’t taken up is even close to the point. “There is so much I would love to say about this, and unfortunately I have got strict instructions in writing from Weinstein’s current attorneys that I may not speak about the case. So if I seem like I’m being careful, that’s why. I don’t feel I can even confirm or deny that I wrote that memo. Also Rose McGowan is suing me, so that’s another reason why I really can’t talk about it.

“But everything in that memo, if I did say it, I certainly don’t believe now. I was talking about one person – Rose McGowan, not women in general. At the time that I signed on to help Harvey Weinstein, which was in 2016, not a single woman had gone on the record with credible claims against him. Rose McGowan had hinted at it, and that was the concern.” As far as Bloom knew, she says, the allegations against Weinstein were solely about sexual harassment, not sexual assault.

But this doesn’t ring true, I tell her. In 2015, the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez had filed a police report complaining that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her, and recorded him attempting to grope her.

“OK, so Ambra, yes. But with Ambra, the Manhattan district attorney had investigated her claim and decided not to pursue it. So at the time I thought, OK, she’s been deemed not to be credible, so I just sort of put it to one side,” Bloom says. “The Dalai Lama said, ‘When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.’ That’s something I’ve always tried to live by. So what’s the lesson? Someone can be lacking in credibility and still also be telling the truth. That was not obvious to me at the time – it is obvious to me now. Also, if multiple women are making claims, even if they’re discounted, surely this is something that has to be taken very seriously.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The Dalai Lama said, “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.”’ Photograph: David Vintiner/The Guardian. Hair and makeup: Sadaf Ahmad

I find it hard to believe that someone with Bloom’s experience in this area would not know that predators often deliberately go after women who are lacking in credibility, precisely because their complaints will not be believed. And did it really take her until her mid-50s to learn that multiple allegations are a warning sign?

Part of the problem, Bloom thinks, was that as an attorney she had learned to compartmentalise allegations, as a way of ascertaining their legal gravity. She was too focused on the details to see the human whole. “So I thought, OK, it’s not anybody who’s his direct employee who’s accusing him, it’s not direct assault.”

This would be more credible if she didn’t reference allegations from Weinstein’s “former assistant” in her original memo. Moreover, two former employees, Emily Nestor and Lauren O’Connor, had already provided written accounts of Weinstein’s assaults and harassment, which were widely known within the company.

“Well, I was not aware of that,” Bloom says. She insists that she carefully vetted Weinstein before agreeing to be part of his team. “I researched and read every single thing that was publicly available and that I could get my hands on. I spoke to him at length in person and by phone, and spoke to folks who knew him and worked for him,” she says. But Weinstein’s tendency towards sexual predation was so well known within the industry that Tina Fey’s sitcom 30 Rock joked about it in 2012, and Courtney Love referenced it on the red carpet in 2005 (“If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party in the Four Seasons, don’t go.”). So perhaps Bloom needs to refine her vetting system. “Am I perfect at doing this? No,” she agrees.

Even some Weinstein company board members criticised Bloom for defending him too aggressively. In October 2017, Twohey and Kantor revealed in the New York Times that they had seen emails from Bloom to the board in which she outlined a plan to defend Weinstein that involved “photos of several of the accusers in very friendly poses with Harvey after his alleged misconduct”. Board member Lance Maerov wrote that “publishing pictures of victims in friendly poses with Harvey will backfire as it suggests they are exculpatory”, and told Bloom she was “fanning the flames and compounding the problem”. Maerov also pointed out a conflict of interest: the Weinstein Company was planning to make a TV series of Bloom’s book, Suspicion Nation, about the Trayvon Martin case. (Bloom was not involved in the case, but writes about it like the legal pundit she once was, explaining the trial and criticising the prosecution.) “How can you possibly provide impartial advice to Harvey or address this group with any credibility?” Maerov wrote.

Bob Weinstein added: “It is my opinion, that u are giving your client poor counsel. Perhaps Harvey as he stated in the NY Times, to the world, should get professional help for a problem that really exists.”

When I bring this up, Bloom looks more irritated than pained, and if her previous tactic was warmth and approachability, it now switches into the more common lawyerly pose of slipperiness and hair-splitting. I ask about her suggestion of finding photos of Weinstein with his accusers in “friendly poses”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With her mother, women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred, in 2014: ‘We don’t always see eye to eye.’ Photograph: WireImage

“I didn’t suggest finding photos. There are photos that are out there. So I don’t know what that means about finding them,” she says sharply.

It presumably means placing them in the press.

“Well, there were newspapers that had them. I think what I said was, ‘There are photos that are going to run.’”

I start to read her the New York Times article but she talks over me: “Listen, people are so taken with this issue, but when taking a case, you have to look at all of the evidence, including photos. I don’t think I ever suggested that one photo tells the entire story – but it is always part of the story.”

In other words, Bloom is saying that the photos were just a way of educating herself about Weinstein. She has also used this argument in relation to Farrow. In Catch And Kill, Farrow writes that he first contacted Bloom because she had previously supported his sister, Dylan, who has long accused their father, Woody Allen, of molesting her as a child – an allegation he denies. (Bloom had also appeared on Farrow’s TV show, talking about how the rich and powerful protect themselves. “The first thing they do is go on the attack against the victim, try to dredge up anything from her life they can find to embarrass her,” Bloom said.) Once Farrow began investigating Weinstein, he asked her for advice, and to keep it confidential. “You have my word,” she replied.

According to Farrow, Bloom then suggested that he meet with Weinstein, saying she knew the producer “a little”. Farrow declined, but his book is punctuated with subsequent calls from Bloom (“‘Hey!’ she said brightly…”), in which she asked what further information he had on the case. In the summer of 2017, Farrow expressed his astonishment that she had – as he had learned – been passing on information to Weinstein’s people.

“Ronan,” she replied. “I am his people.’”

Did she misrepresent her relationship with Weinstein in their initial conversations?

“Absolutely false,” she says before I finish the question. “First of all, it was public knowledge that I had a book deal with Weinstein – I tweeted about it [in April 2016] but I guess Ronan didn’t see that. So there’s no secret, right? We were working together. But Ronan didn’t want to speak to me. I told him Harvey wanted to speak to him – he didn’t want to speak to him. That’s his choice.”

He believes you were calling him to find out what he knew, in order to relay that to Weinstein.

“I don’t think it’s fair to assume,” she says with a laugh.

By the time I got emotionally healthy and strong enough to report my abuser, the statute of limitations had expired

Bloom stepped down from the Weinstein case in October 2017, shortly after the full allegations were published in the New York Times. On The View a month later, she tearfully conceded that she had been “so excited” about her book deal that “it clouded my judgment”. In our conversation, it is also clear that she was starstruck. “I thought, ‘What a great opportunity to work with this film producer who the Obamas love,’” she says, also citing Weinstein’s friendships with Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore and Gloria Steinem. “So I thought, ‘OK, this is a good guy,’” she says. The money, presumably, was another inducement: according to She Said, Bloom was charging Weinstein $895 an hour, plus a $50,000 retainer.

***

Lisa Bloom was born in Philadelphia and largely raised in Los Angeles, the only child of a single mother. Allred was only 20 when her daughter was born, and her marriage to Bloom’s father, Peyton Bray, was short and fraught: she left him when his mental illness tipped over into physical violence. Bray, who was diagnosed as bipolar, later killed himself. Shortly afterwards, Allred went on holiday with a girlfriend and was raped at gunpoint. She never went to the police, assuming she wouldn’t be believed. But when she decided to become a lawyer a few years later, her experience undoubtedly played a part in her decision to focus on female victims of domestic and sexual violence.

The personal has also played a part in Bloom’s professional life. She went into law to defend abused children, because she was once one herself. Between the ages of 11 and 15, she was, she tells me, abused by a close relative.

Did she ever take legal steps against him?

“I never reported him to the police. I was an emotional wreck and suicidal as a teen and into my 20s, because of the years of unrelenting abuse. I was in no position to take legal action. By the time I got emotionally healthy and strong enough to do it in my late 20s, the statute of limitations, every paedophile’s get-out-of-jail-free card, had expired,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With client Janice Dickinson. Photograph: Getty Images

She told her mother about the abuse when she was 18. How did Allred react? There is a pause. “I don’t like to talk about my mother in this story, because I feel she’s the best person to talk about her experience,” Bloom says.

Today, she lives about half an hour away from her mother: Allred is down on the beach in Malibu and Bloom lives with her second husband up in the hills. They are, she says, with only the slightest hesitation, emotionally close. “I’m 100% behind what she does for a living, but we don’t always see eye to eye on a personal level. And I think that’s what happens when you have two strong-willed people. She just came to Thanksgiving at my house along with the rest of the family and we had a wonderful time. I’m proud she’s my mother.” Bloom has a daughter, Sarah, who now works as a lawyer at Bloom’s firm. Her son, Sammy, is the US national men’s pole dancing champion (“God knows where he gets it from”) and is now also training to be a lawyer. “Because you have no choice in our family,” Bloom laughs.

Bloom’s mother was once mocked for her numerous media appearances but is now revered as a feminist groundbreaker. Allred pioneered a new legal approach, using the media to defend women and minorities, often by acting as a kind of publicist for them. During the OJ Simpson trial, when Simpson’s lawyers tried to make the case about everything but the actual murders, Allred was hired by the family of Simpson’s wife, Nicole Brown. She became a ubiquitous TV presence, reminding the public of the victims: Brown and Ron Goldman. “If it hadn’t been for Gloria, Nicole would always have been just that person on a gurney,” Brown’s sister, Denise, says in Seeing Allred, the 2018 Netflix documentary.

Have she and her mother made up? 'We had a little rift, but we’re both tough people. It’s water under the bridge'

Bloom has largely followed in her mother’s footsteps, and her company, The Bloom Firm, has made a name for itself defending women and minorities. Hours before our interview, Bloom emails to urge me to look at her biography on her firm’s website. “My celebrity cases get a lot of attention, but most of my cases are on behalf of everyday people, and they are very important to me as well,” she writes. I ask if she has been stung by criticisms of her high-profile cases. After the comedian Kathy Griffin controversially posed with a Donald Trump mask mocked up to look like a severed head, she hired Bloom to help her deal with the public criticism. But the two women fell out and Griffin called her “a fame whore”. Bloom sighs: “People think all I do is what they see in the news, but 99% of my cases are not high-profile,” she says, citing the women she is representing against the Greek billionaire, Alki David, who in April was sued for sexual assault.

In the same online biography, Bloom emphasises repeatedly that she has rejected “Big Law’s big bucks” in order to fight for civil rights. But she is certainly earning a lot now, I say.

“People forget that I have a business. Let’s say that I have a case and we get $1m in the case, and let’s say that we get a third of that. That does not go into my pocket – it goes to the company to pay salaries. People will say, ‘Lisa Bloom took a third!’ But I believe that I should be paid for my work,” she says.

Meanwhile, Allred has not held back on criticising her daughter’s decision to defend Weinstein. “Had I been asked by Mr Weinstein to represent him, I would have declined, because I do not represent individuals accused of sex harassment. [But] I would consider representing anyone who accused Mr Weinstein of sexual harassment, even if it meant that my daughter was the opposing counsel,” she said in a public statement in 2017.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With comedian Kathy Griffin. Photograph: Getty Images

“I would have preferred a phone call,” Bloom says with a light laugh.

While her mother has tended to use publicity as a means to an end, Bloom appears more dazzled by celebrity, to the extent that in 2016, it became the end. In Seeing Allred, CNN’s Don Lemon, who has interviewed both women on his show, says, “Both of them have been advocates for victims’ rights, but Gloria had to do it in a much tougher time than Lisa is having to do it now. So it’s interesting to watch how they both deal with it, a generation apart.” Allred knows you can never give an inch, because then you lose everything. Bloom has given more than an inch.

I ask Bloom if she and her mother have made up since the criticism over Weinstein. She shrugs off the question as if it were as insignificant as a fly: “We had a little rift, but we’re both tough people. It’s water under the bridge,” she says.

***

After Bloom resigned from the Weinstein case, she flew to Houston to advise a victim of domestic violence. “And I asked her, ‘Is all the Harvey Weinstein coverage affecting you?’ And she said, ‘Harvey who?’” Bloom says.

She insists that she hasn’t lost any clients as a result of playing for the other side. On the contrary, she says, her firm has almost doubled in size since 2017. The revelations in She Said and Catch And Kill seemed career-ending, but Bloom is dealing with them like a lawyer: head on and with a certain amount of slipperiness. For now she is focused on the Epstein case and maybe, in time, if she does enough high-profile cases in the same area, they will drive down all the Google references to her alliance with Weinstein. She has vowed never again to defend anyone accused of sexual misconduct, focusing instead on the victims.

Two years since #MeToo gathered steam, I ask if she thinks we are seeing real systemic change, or merely a rearrangement of deckchairs. “I think we’re seeing some change, but not nearly enough. In every one of my cases I still get asked about the same myths: why didn’t she report it earlier? What about these inconsistent statements?” she says, with no apparent irony.

Bloom might have proved a figurehead of the #MeToo movement; instead, she is considered one of its villains. Of course, she says, she deeply regrets working for Weinstein. This “colossal mistake”, as she refers to it, has spiked all her achievements with accusations of cynicism and hypocrisy. It’s hard to be the change when you have worked to perpetuate the problem.

“I hope I treat all of my clients with compassion,” she says with emotion. And I’m sure she does, even if she occasionally thinks of them as “the Roses of the world”; presumably she can now reassure them that she has worked with “the Harveys of the world”. After all, David Boies, another high-profile lawyer who formerly worked for Weinstein, is now representing Virginia Giuffre. “Attorneys represent a lot of distasteful people, and attorneys and clients are different people,” says Bloom. In other words, what else did we expect?

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