Lisa Bloom is under fire yet again as a disturbing and fawning memo she sent to former client Harvey Weinstein was made public in its entirety.
The attorney is facing calls for her to be disbarred after she wrote a lengthy letter to the disgraced movie producer as he hired her on his defense team.
After writing about how to plan an attack on actress Rose McGowan — whom she dubbed a “pathological liar” — Bloom wrote: “You should be the hero in your story — not the villain. This [is] very doable…” She ended the note by saying: “Really honored to be brought into this team.”
The memo is featured in full in the book “She Said” by reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who along with journalist Ronan Farrow, broke much of the reporting on Weinstein’s alleged offenses.
It details the lengths Bloom, the daughter of women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred, was willing to go to ruin McGowan and stop her claims. Writing in December 2016, Bloom allegedly Weinstein that she felt “equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them.” She said she could plant articles that painted McGowan as “increasingly unglued, so that when someone Googles her this is what pops up and she’s discredited.”
“They start out as impressive, bold women, but the more one presses for evidence, the weaknesses and lies are revealed. She doesn’t seem to have much going on these days except her rapidly escalating identity as a feminist warrior, which seems to be based entirely on her online rants.”
Bloom’s clients have included women who have accused Bill Cosby, former Fox News star Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump.
And talking to Weinstein, she also suggested launching a pre-emptive press strike where he talked about his “evolving on women’s issues”, prompted by the death of his mother, the President Trump and Billy Bush “p—y-gate tape” and “maybe nasty hurtful unfounded rumors about you,” saying it would be much the same as Charlie Sheen tackling his HIV diagnosis in TV interviews.
A furious McGowan tweeted: “The evil that was perpetrated on me and others was mind-bending and illegal. Lisa Bloom should be disbarred.” Bloom — now representing some accusers of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — worked for Weinstein up until Kantor and Twohey’s first bombshell about the producer in October 2017, which featured an alleged incident with McGowan. Nearly a year after the memo was sent, Bloom dropped Weinstein as a client and apologized for representing him. She said she was crossing sides to work for Weinstein to encourage him to apologize for his behavior. She later said that she “deeply regretted” representing him, calling it a “colossal mistake.”
Weinstein is facing a criminal trial in January in New York on charges of sexual assault and rape, and has denied ever having had nonconsensual sex. He has pleaded not guilty to five sex crimes.