Sports Law, Spaw, Lorts: Dude Sounds Like A Lady Edition

I don’t know what Gloria Allred does, exactly. I know she’s nominally an attorney because it says so on her Wikipedia page and also under her head when her head appears on my television screen. It says, “Attorney.” But, despite three years of law school, I have no idea what service she provides her clients. It’s always some weirdo at the periphery of a scandal she’s representing. A woman who bedded Tiger Woods, for instance. Or it’s a minor scandal that in years past would have been relegated to the Odd Stories column in your local newspaper. Like the time Roger McDowell got his gay slur on in front of some baseball fans. What connects these things is their apparent distance from anything resembling a legal issue.

Gloria Allred holds press conferences, as far as I can tell. And she talks sternly and forcefully, admonishing those bad actors who did her clients wrong. And after the microphones are turned off and the cameramen have all fled… well, I don’t know what it is she does. You can do anything with a law degree!

Which brings me to the latest in the Manti Te’o saga. The man behind Lennay has lawyered up, which thankfully allows me to write about Manti’s man in this here column.

Let’s talk Scandal Law. Scaw, Landal…

JUST TWO DUDES ON THE PHONE, BEING DUDES

Yesterday, news broke that the man alleged to have been behind (nope, did not go there) the Manti Te’o hoax, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, had engaged in hours of phone conversations with Te’o. All the while, pretending to be a girl named Lennay. This story, which had previously been rejected years ago by Saved by the Bell writers as “too fantastical,” was fed to the press by Tuiasosopo’s attorney, a man named Milton Grimes. Grimey explained his client’s actions thusly:

Tuiasosopo, 22, has had dramatic training, plays in a Christian band and even auditioned last year for the television show “The Voice.”

“Come on, Hollywood does it all the time,” Grimes said of his client pretending to be a woman. “People can do that.”

Couric asked Te’o what he would say to Tuiasosopo.

“I would just say you hurt me,” Te’o said.

Grimes said that Tuiasosopo wasn’t trying to hurt Te’o.

“This wasn’t a prank to make fun,” Grimes said, according to the Daily News. “It was establishing a communication with someone. … It was a person with a troubled existence trying to reach out and communicate and have a relationship.”

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