Name: Allie Samuelson
Social Justice Group: Street and Workplace Harassment
Date of Fieldwork: February 21, 2022
Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Gloria Allred (lawyer and/or attorney)
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?
On Monday, February 21st, our group had the honor of interviewing Gloria Allred. Gloria Allred is an attorney known for the large part for taking notable and a lot of the time controversial cases. Gloria currently lives in California, so we had to Zoom with her.
Before our interview, we watched a documentary made about Gloria, called “Seeing Allred.” It gave us a lot of interesting information about Gloria Allred, and about our topic in general. The movie was about Gloria’s experience representing a majority of the women in the Bill Cosby case. Basically, this case is about a former television star who was convicted of sexual assault. Cosby was accused of rape, drug facilitated sexual assault, child sexual assault, and a few other charges by approximately 60 women. Gloria Allred represented 33 of the 60 alleged victims.The movie was interesting because I realized that Gloria actually empowered women and gave them a voice. Before these women met Gloria Allred, they were in professional relationship with Bill Cosby which he abused and turned into a sexual relationship. These women were stripped away from their sense of self, and Gloria helped them gain the sense of self again by helping them tell their stories. Although it was really interesting and informative, I do kind of regret watching it because during the interview it felt like we were just hearing what we already knew from the documentary. Despite this, I still really enjoyed and appreciated the interview.
In our interview, Gloria was very nice, you could tell she cares about her job and is very professional. it felt to me like her goal in life is to help women stand up agains abusers or sexual assaulters Interviewing Gloria Allred was an absolutely incredible opportunity. I am so thankful we got to do it because she is such an amazing woman who I now kind of look up to. In addition to her stylish pantsuit, she was such a cool person to talk to and I am so grateful!
