Bari Weiss describes an arch-liberal dedicated public defender better than I did.
If you google “bleeding heart liberal,” Maud Maron might well turn up as the first hit. Every cause liberals are supposed to fight for, every group they are supposed to champion, every candidate they are supposed to support — well, that was Maron’s not so atypical life and career. Until recently.
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In short, Maron is exactly the kind of lawyer you’d imagine Legal Aid would put on the cover of its brochures. But today the public defender is filing suit in the Southern District of New York against the organization to which she has dedicated her career.
Maud did what one would hope a passionate liberal would do when she saw government heading in the wrong direction. She ran for New York City Council, and she expressed her positions in an op-ed in the NY Post. For that, she was brutally attacked by her fellow staff attorneys at the Legal Aid Society.
[T]he Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus put out a lengthy statement saying that “Maud Maron has no business having a career in public defense, and we’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.” It declared: “Maud is racist, and openly so,” and offered no evidence to back up the charge. It said that this veteran public defender was a “prominent opponent of equality” and a “classic example of what 21st century racism looks like.”
The statement said that Maron “is one of many charlatans who took this job not out of a desire to make a difference, but for purposes of self-imaging.” It claimed: “She pretends to favor integration while fighting against it and denying the existence of racism in education.”
The statement also accused Maron of being terrible at her job. “No public defender can legitimately claim to be a proponent of racial justice if they are lax in how they do the work,” it said, adding that “we know for a fact that Maud’s commitment to zealous representation of poor people of color is questionable at best.”
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because Maud isn’t the first uber-liberal Legal Aid attorney to become an Enemy of the Woke, with the shameless approval of Tina Luongo (They/Them), chief of the criminal defense practice.
As with other heretics at the Legal Aid Society, like Cynthia Taylor or our adored Appellate Squawk, the problem wasn’t that she wasn’t progressive, left of center, deeply sensitive to racism, the need for diversity and dedicated to equal opportunity for all. She was. She is. But what she refused to do is swear allegiance and devote her existence to the book “White Fragilty.”
The issue wasn’t Maud’s skills as a lawyer. She was exceptional. And here’s the real irony, the issue wasn’t that her refusal to spew the most inane ideologically pure self-loathing wasn’t shared by her supervisors and other experienced lawyers at Legal Aid.
“It was becoming intolerable,” Chubsinky said of the intolerance that had taken root at Legal Aid. “We talked about all of this behind closed doors. Because you can’t talk about this with the doors open. It’s a really oppressive environment for anyone who isn’t radical, including, by the way, those attorneys of color who don’t share these lunatic views like abolishing the police or saying that it’s necessarily racist to arrest people for misdemeanor crimes.”
The issue was that a loud, empowered and shameless cohort of young lawyers and older zealots for whom lying, smearing, destroying their own who didn’t feign obsequious purity to the cause was intolerable. The issue is that Luongo and the rest of management either embraces their cause of destroying those liberals who fail to bend to their progressive masters or fears their own mob so much that they will acquiesce to their shrieks. The issue is that anyone who wants to remain a public defender at LAS can’t challenge these zealots or they, too, will be destroyed.
“I was embarrassed that I didn’t stand up for her. But I was scared. Everybody is scared of that label,” a former colleague told me
Bari Weiss writes about the same things happening inside LAS that I’ve seen, supervisors and experienced lawyers who are afraid of the mod, afraid of management, afraid of the union, and won’t make themselves a target of this mob by challenging it.
Maud, who is on sabbatical from Legal Aid (which is a nice way of saying they can’t quite fire her outright for being inadequately self-loathing, but they won’t let her come back), was left with two choices. She could walk away from being a public defender, the only legal job she ever wanted and the only legal position she’s ever held, or fight. Being of the public defender spirit, Maud chose to fight.
COUNT I
HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT AGAINST LAS
Represented by Marc Randazza and Jay Wolman, Maud is fighting for the soul of public defense, fighting against that cohort of ideologues for whom destroying their colleagues with outrageous lies means nothing. Not because of the lawyering. Indeed, one of the most consistent things I hear from the supervisors and experienced public defenders is that the zealots are mediocre lawyers at best, and downright incompetent in many instances, absolute in their certainty that they know everything and can’t be told what to do by those who dwarf them in skill and experience.
And Legal Aid’s response to Maud’s suit is pitch perfect.
“We believe this lawsuit is a frivolous and misguided attempt to use litigation to harass a non-profit employer and its employees who have spent their careers advancing social justice causes,” a Legal Aid spokesperson said.
Public defenders don’t “advance social justice causes.” They defend the indigent accused of crimes. The Legal Aid Society, once the foremost public defense organization in the nation, has lost its way. Whether Maud’s suit will serve to return LAS to its mission is uncertain, although there are many within the organization that are praying that she succeeds, that the outrage mob will be broken and management will remember why it exists, but it can’t go on as it is now, a cesspool of hatred, fear and incompetent woke lawyers.
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I can’t wait for them to learn what Murum Aries Attigit means. Go get em, Marc and Jay!
Not that it matters, but Maud is an attractive person.
That’s gotta be some kind of “privilege,” which they probably expect her to be ashamed of as well.
One of the big problems with hats on poles is once people are bowing to them, the nutcase, would-be dictators just keep putting up more poles, with goofier hats.
A career at legal aid, taking all comers. The working poor caught between qualifying for a PD and our fee, she’s the lawyer. Rent dispute over the 600 square foot NYC dump, she’s the lawyer. Not a dilitant. Not a short-timer putting a line on the resume. She’s a real lawyer, representing the people we blow-off on the phone. That’s not really accurate: someone working for us does the blowing. I’m pretty good at lawerin’, but I don’t deserve her shadow.
A racist can’t have Maron’s career without redefinition of the word.
Having recently retired from irritating students at a public university (I tell them not to talk to cops without a lawyer and show them those excellent videos), I am noticing several of my very liberal former colleagues being aghast at such developments. What did they expect? Some slopes are indeed slippery, and this kind of Leftism has a history.
anyway, I’m getting the feeling that a reckoning is coming, and that no one on any ‘side’ is likely to welcome the results.
Some say progressives hate conservatives most, but the reality is that the real enemy of progressives are liberals.
You nailed it SHG. Legal Aid has lost its way. Without a doubt its become cesspool of anti-semitism and misogyny. The mob seeks the blood of easier targets: Jews and white women. There are many more who have gone quietly away or were paid off to do so. The focus is no longer stellar representation of clients. The work is now political. Management is afraid. They have to be. Why else would they write that insane op-Ed. They have to appease the mob or be crushed by them. Pandora’s box is open . LAS can’t contain it. I applaud Maud. She is stronger than I. I barely survived. I hope she kicks their asses. Maybe then the organization can be a place where every attorney is free to speak and and can do what they are called to do: serve the people who need it most regardless of race, gender, and religion.
Good to see you back. I hope you’re doing better.
I’m doing well! But reading the complaint did conjure up some mild PTSD. It appears emails have now been banned so they have taken to Twitter and print to hunt and kill their own.
Maud sounds like the kind of defense attorney I always hoped represented the people I arrested. It made me be sure I had my ducks in a row and it made me a better officer. I hated going to court and be up against an attorney just going through the motions.
Alas, the diversity ‘n’ inclusion Pod People have taken over. Academia, education, public defense, and soon the bench. We’re rooting for Maud.
I’m slow to the take on this, but I was surprised to see Marc Randazza, of all people, claiming defamation on so many statements that are plainly statements of opinion. Of the 13 supposedly defamatory statements, only 2 come close to passing muster, and that’s only because they imply personal knowledge of misdeeds. A few others flirt with the line, but taken in the context of the anti-racist modus operandi of “this is what you really mean”, they should fall within the realm of protected, albeit absurd, opinion. Seriously, some of those claims were on par with “my client is not, in fact, excrement.”
Having said that, bringing up her race to attack her was beyond stupid, not that we are shocked by that from the anti-racist zealots at this point. That’s going to make for some interesting arguments at trial, if it makes it that far.
This will not be an easy case. LAS will get the large firms to defend it pro Bono and they will throw all resources at it. Regardless of the outcome, it’s important that the discriminatory culture of the largest government funded non-profit law firm in the country be exposed. I have heard that it’s just as bad or worse at LAS’ sister organization and federally funded Legal Services Corp. Any publicity that threatens funding is the only matter management will pay attention to. The fact that employees are being terrorized means nothing to them.
Bryan’s assessment, right or wrong, misses the tactical point of including all damning statements, even if some are later dismissed as opinion. If there was no basis for defamation, that would be one thing, but as long as there is a well-grounded complaint, there’s no reason not to include all the bad things uttered so as to make the context as clear as possible.