Gloria Rachel Allred has devoted her legal career to fighting for women’s equality, handling high-profile cases of sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, and hate crimes. Born Gloria Bloom, Allred earned a master’s degree from NYU and moved to Los Angeles in 1966, where she worked as a high school teacher and developed an interest in civil rights. She earned her JD from Loyola Law School in 1975 and opened a law firm with two classmates in 1976. In 1986 Allred sued the all-male Friars Club for discrimination against women and won. She represented the family of Nicole Brown Simpson during the 1995 OJ Simpson trial, and in 1997 she won Hunter Tylo’s wrongful termination suit against Aaron Spelling, leading to the decision that actresses could not be fired because of pregnancy. In 2002 she represented the family of Gwen Araujo, a murdered transgender teen. In 2004 she filed the first lawsuit in California seeking to legalize same-sex marriage. In 2012 she advocated for Jenna Talackova, winner of the Miss Universe Canada Pageant, who was disqualified for being transgender. She represented 33 women who accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, until his conviction in 2018. Following the 2021 overturn of his criminal conviction, she represented Judy Huth during her successful civil trial against Cosby. She also represented Summer Zervos and two other women accusing Donald Trump of harassment and sexual misconduct before departing from Zervos’s case in March 2018. She is the founder and president (as of 2023) of the Women’s Equal Rights Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 2012 her television show We the People, with Gloria Allred was nominated for a Daytime Emmy award. She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from The National Trial Lawyers in 2014 and the National Organization for Women in 2018. That same year, Netflix released a biopic about her life, Seeing Allred. In 2023 she represented several plaintiffs seeking justice for their claims of sexual abuse against former University of Southern California gynecologist George Tyndall. Her daughter Lisa Bloom also became a woman’s rights lawyer.