Cravath
He’s baack! Roy Den Hollander, “a Manhattan lawyer and a self-described antifeminist,” who in the past year has sued nightclubs for favoring women by offering ladies’ night discounts and has sued the federal government over a law that protects women from violence, is now targeting Columbia University. According to recent reports, Den Hollander filed a federal class-action lawsuit on Monday against the university not only for offering women’s studies courses, which he “sees as discriminatory toward men,” but also for “using government aid to preach a ‘religionist belief system called feminism.’”
The lawsuit is far from new territory for Den Hollander, a former associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, who now devotes much of his private practice to representing men in, as he puts it on his MySpace page, “battl[ing] the infringement of Men’s Rights by the feminists and their allies.” Den Hollander has explained that part what “helped tweak his anger toward feminists and laws he sees as favoring women” was repeatedly being turned away from nightclubs like Lotus and China Club for not having enough cash to pay the higher guys-only cover charge when he started to “get back in the social life” after being dumped within months by a woman he brought over from Russia and married.
Aw, now we feel bad. We were all geared up to call out Den Hollander as nothing more than a self-styled Gloria Steinem for the repressed douchebag meathead set, but we guess if we were an over-the-hill Big Firm reject who couldn’t even afford the cover charge at some bridge-and-tunnel club that hasn’t been popular since 1991—no less convince a Russian mail-order bride to stick around for a couple of months—we’d hold a bit of grudge against the ladies, too. [WSJ Law Blog]
Former Cravath superlawyer and convicted sex perv James Colliton is now suing American Express for millions of dollars for revealing his location to authorities in 2006 while he was hiding and on the run from charges that he paid a woman to have sex with her 13- and 15-year-old daughters. In his suit, the so-called “Lolita Lawyer” claims that Canadian authorities would never have “falsely arrested” or “unlawfully detained” him if American Express hadn’t revealed that he had used his credit card to check into a hotel in Ontario.
In his own defense, the former associate at the world’s most prestigious law firm explained that he “wasn’t running from the law” and had traveled to Canada “only to attend some harness races,” pointing out that “you’re not a fugitive if you sign into a major chain hotel using your driver’s license and your American Express card.”
While Colliton’s reasoning has yet to win over the authorities, legal analysts have been quick to note that you’ve really gotta hand it to the training at Cravath. Here we have a publicly reviled fugitive, nailed dead to rights on both rape and prostitution-related charges, who thinks nothing of checking into a hotel with his own Amex card while he’s on the lam, and then turns around and sues Amex when they help police catch him. Clearly a man trained outside the esteemed Cravath System wouldn’t have had the legal chutzpah to go that extra mile. If he weren’t such a repugnant, delusional pervert cretin, we’d almost have to tip our hat to him. [NY Daily News]
