Gloria Allred

Born in 1941, Gloria Allred grew up in Philadelphia as a part of a blue-collar family. As she grew older, she aspired to triumph beyond her working-class upbringing and wound up attending the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1950s. She furthered her education after graduation, eventually earning a graduate degree from New York University and becoming a teacher in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. By the end of the 1960s, Allred started to study law. She co-founded her own law firm in 1976 and within a few years, she was taking on high-profile civil rights cases, primarily for women. One of her first major wins was in 1987 when she forced the legendary Friars Club to have to include women. In the 1990s, her profile got even larger, as she represented Nicole Brown Simpson's family in the O.J. Simpson trial as well as leading cases involving the Boy Scouts of America and Princess Diana. Throughout the next decade, she became much more involved in entertainment-related cases, including representing young boys Michael Jackson was accused of abusing, in addition to notable cases in the world of sports. The majority of Allred's cases were all on the side of the underrepresented, as she routinely represented women and transgender victims. She parlayed her experience in the entertainment industry into a TV show of her own, with "We the People With Gloria Allred" (2011- ), a syndicated court show. As CBS began developing a TV show inspired by Allred's career, she was slated to represent the numerous women who accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault and harassment.