Breaking news: lawyers represent "bad" people
Terry McAuliffe is bad because we don't like his old law firm's clients, or something.
Outrage about lawyers representing “bad” clients is kind of a running theme on this newsletter, and it comes from all directions. Left-wingers are angry that the likes Donald Trump and Kyle Rittenhouse have legal representation, while right-wingers are always on the lookout for the opportunity to smear political opponents if they did legal work for people they don’t like.
Today it’s The Daily Wire’s turn to attack a politician because he used to work for a law firm that, from all indications, did its job:
A law firm that employed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is being paid handsomely to fight victims of alleged sexual abuse in schools, on behalf of a school system that the girls say failed to protect them.
In one case the Hunton Andrews Kurth law firm, where McAuliffe served as a senior adviser from 2019 until recently, is battling a young woman who says that she was repeatedly raped on her Fairfax County middle school campus as a 12-year old and that she was slashed with a knife, burned with a lighter, anally penetrated, and gang raped.
The law firm and McAuliffe’s campaign did not return request for comment, but McAuliffe reported income apparently linked to the firm in 2021, after announcing his run for governor of Virginia on December 8, 2020. Later advertisements from the firm for McAuliffe fundraisers refer to him as a “former colleague.”
The girl in the middle school case said she was afraid of having her real name attached because one of her alleged tormentors had threatened to kill her if she came forward. The law firm is seeking to have the lawsuit thrown out because it was filed under a pseudonym, even though there is no dispute that the school system knows who she is. A judge rejected Hunton’s argument, but it filed an appeal on behalf of its client, the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS).
In a separate case, a girl alleged that after FCPS administrators were told of an unwanted sexual incident on a band trip, a school security officer told her there was no point in seeking criminal charges, and the school gave an award to her alleged abuser. Hunton told the court that the school system lost documentation showing its investigation of the allegations – which occurred in part because it was not using a sexual harassment allegation database that it had promised to use pursuant to a federal settlement in the other girl’s case. In both cases, a women’s rights group filed “amicus” briefs to express opposition to Hunton’s arguments.
[…]
In recent years, the nation’s tenth-largest school district, Fairfax County Public School, has paid Hunton more money than it has paid almost any other company. Hunton’s work for FCPS frequently took the form of fighting parents who alleged problems, and it had a reputation for doing so aggressively. Last month, it filed a lawsuit against the mother of a special-needs student for possessing records that the school district provided her under the Freedom of Information Act. The records included Hunton’s billing invoices; FCPS says it mistakenly forgot to redact as much information as it meant to, and it is holding the mom responsible for its mistake.
Its lawyers on school issues included attorneys like Reiko Koyama, whose career highlights include “Defend[ing] a major alcoholic beverage producer in a consumer class action alleging claims of false and misleading advertising.”
Eventually you live long enough to see Ben Shapiro’s outfit attacking lawyers for representing major corporations, and for questioning and defending against allegations of sexual assault. Things sure have changed a lot since the Kavanaugh hearings.
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