‘Out There Alone’: Rita Glavin Rallies To Cuomo’s Defense

Law360 (November 9, 2021, 8:44 PM EST) — For years, Andrew Cuomo was protected by a cadre of bulldog advisers known for their uncompromising loyalty. Now, as the disgraced former New York governor potentially faces criminal charges that he groped an aide, he is down to one of his last remaining stalwarts: Rita Glavin, an exacting former prosecutor waging a lonely battle to clear his name in the courts of law and public opinion.

Glavin, who left Seward & Kissel LLP to start her own practice in March, is a good fit for a client as demanding as Cuomo, her colleagues and former clients told Law360. Like the former governor, Glavin keeps a relentless schedule, skipping meals and barely sleeping during trials. She is not known to mince words or concede points easily. Although new to performing for the press on this scale, she doesn’t shy away from publicity, and she has brought courtroom intensity to marathon media briefings where she serves as Cuomo’s stand-in.

“I think she relishes that,” said Elkan Abramowitz, a white collar partner at Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello PC who has co-counseled with Glavin. “I don’t think she minds being out there alone.”

Glavin, who declined interview requests, is working alongside several associates from her firm, Glavin PLLC, which took on then-Gov. Cuomo as a client in March 2021. Publicly, she has taken on an outsize role as a surrogate for Cuomo, whose public support and deep bench of operatives largely evaporated in August, when New York Attorney General Letitia James unveiled a sweeping report detailing sexual harassment allegations against him. Within days, Glavin was on air dissecting the 168 page document in granular detail. It wasn’t riveting viewing, but it was classic Rita Glavin, say those who know her well.

“She commands facts like no one else can,” said Stephen DiCarmine, a former Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP executive who was acquitted of fraud charges under Glavin’s representation in 2017. “That granularity wins. That methodical approach wins.”

The Dewey case made Glavin’s name in the New York City white collar bar, where she has a reputation for tirelessly investigating leads and building clever arguments. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff described Glavin as a “superb trial lawyer” and one of the best he has seen in his court.

“She is a very creative attorney,” Judge Rakoff told Law360. “She will find ways to overcome obstacles that would defeat attorneys who are not as good as she is.”

Investigators in Albany have already given Glavin a leg up in the criminal case against Cuomo. The Albany County Sheriff’s Office filed a complaint last month alleging Cuomo groped former staffer Brittany Commisso, but in a bizarre breach of protocol, law enforcement officials didn’t coordinate beforehand with the district attorney’s office. In a letter to the court Thursday, prosecutors said the complaint was “potentially defective” and asked to delay Cuomo’s arraignment while they sort out the issues, including omissions of potentially exculpatory evidence and misstatements of the law.

Glavin opened another line of attack on Monday, accusing Albany County Sheriff Craig D. Apple of leaking secret grand jury information to the press. In a letter to the attorney general’s office, Glavin called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Apple, citing James’ purported conflicts of interest, including her recently announced run for governor. James has denied having conflicts of interest and said the Cuomo investigation was independent and unbiased.

If the case is prosecuted and goes to trial, the sweeping allegations in the attorney general’s report could be largely kept out of play. That would allow Glavin to do what colleagues say she does best: drill down on the evidence — or supposed lack thereof — with precision, eschewing the narrativizing that many other lawyers are fond of.

“She doesn’t go out and present the big picture in the way that other lawyers do,” DiCarmine said. “She understands that what the jury is looking for is commonsense facts and evidence. They don’t want to be told something. They want to come to their own conclusion.”

The Dewey case was Glavin’s biggest on the defense side since her 2010 departure from the U.S. Department of Justice, where she served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan and briefly ran the Criminal Division at the DOJ in Washington, D.C., as acting chief. Glavin led DiCarmine’s defense in the five-month trial — in which another Dewey executive was convicted — and delivered a four-and-a-half hour closing argument, complete with an elaborate PowerPoint detailing “12 reasons to doubt” the government’s case.

There are echoes of that pitch in Glavin’s briefings on the Cuomo report, which feature dense slide decks mapping out its
purported errors, omissions and distortions.

“Every inference was going to be drawn against the executive chamber and Gov. Cuomo,” Glavin said shortly before Cuomo resigned. “The report got key facts wrong. It omitted key evidence, and it failed to include witnesses whose testimony did not support the narrative that was clear that this investigation was going to weave from day one.”

The presentations had little discernible impact on public opinion, but they did inflame critics, who say Glavin is seeking to tar the credibility of Cuomo’s accusers with innuendo and inference.

Charlotte Bennett, who accused Cuomo of making inappropriate comments and “grooming” her for sex while she worked for him in the governor’s office, was called out for particular scrutiny. During an August briefing, Glavin said she had “new information” related to Bennett’s credibility and would be submitting it to the attorney general’s office.

After the press conference, Debra Katz of Katz Marshall & Banks LLP, who represents Bennett, slammed Glavin’s “rank insinuation” that her client was a liar.

Jessica L. Westerman, a Katz Marshall attorney who also represents Bennett, told Law360, “Pointing out inconsistencies in a complainant’s allegations is a standard tactic, and she wouldn’t be doing her job well if she didn’t do that. But there’s a way to do that without smearing someone.”

The criticism came as Glavin was leading the contentious criminal contempt prosecution of Chevron foe Steven Donziger. Chevron Corp. accused the now-disbarred human rights lawyer of fraudulently obtaining a $9.5 billion pollution judgment against the oil giant in Ecuador. Donziger refused to hand over his electronic devices during discovery in a civil suit launched by Chevron. In an unusual move, after the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the case, a Manhattan federal judge tapped Glavin to pursue the criminal contempt charges as a special prosecutor.

Donziger was held on house arrest for more than two years as the case dragged on, drawing condemnation from legal and human rights groups. The case also turned acrimonious after Donziger accused Glavin of concealing a conflict of interest at her then-firm, Seward & Kissel, which had previously done legal work for Chevron.

Glavin said she never personally did legal work for Chevron, and Seward & Kissel told the court that its business with Chevron had totaled roughly $30,000. U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska found that this was a trivial sum, calling Donziger’s claims about a conflict of interest “absurd.”

Donziger was convicted in July after what he described as a show trial before Judge Preska, who later sentenced him to six months in prison. Throughout the case, Glavin kept her arguments narrowly focused on procedural facts: Donziger had refused to comply with court orders, and his allegations of a conspiracy between Chevron and the court were both unsupported and irrelevant, she said.

Although Glavin drew flak from legal and environmental advocacy groups for prosecuting Donziger, the case showed her unique versatility as a trial lawyer, according to Abramowitz of Morvillo Abramowitz.

“There are too many defense lawyers who couldn’t even conceive of prosecuting, and there are too many prosecutors who could never conceive of defending because they’re too ideologically wed to their positions,” he said.

Glavin alleges that the Cuomo report — based on an independent investigation by attorneys from Vladeck Raskin & Clark PC and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP — was politically motivated and intentionally misleading, claims she detailed in a 153-page response to the attorney general’s office. James has not released the underlying investigative materials to Cuomo’s legal team, which Glavin says denied him the due process right to scrutinize and challenge the evidence against him. Taking a wider view, she argues the investigation set a dangerous precedent for probes that bypass the safeguards of court supervision.

Some legal observers are skeptical of Glavin’s argument, saying the report makes an open-and-shut case for employment law violations and possible criminal offenses. In addition to the Albany case, at least four other local prosecutors have opened criminal investigations into Cuomo.

But Glavin’s argument is not mere crafty lawyering, according to colleagues and friends, who say she believes Cuomo is the victim of a political takedown.

“The principle she’s standing up for is fairness and credibility,” Abramowitz said. “Whether you’re a man or a woman, she’s applying standards of credibility that are gender neutral … You would raise them for any complainant.”

A spokesman for James defended the credibility of Cuomo’s accusers in a statement following Glavin’s first press conference.

“There are 11 women whose accounts have been corroborated by a mountain of evidence,” spokesman Fabien Levy said. “Any suggestion that attempts to undermine the credibility of these women or this investigation is unfortunate.”

Glavin believed DiCarmine, and the former Dewey executive says that’s why he’s a free man. His first trial ended with a hung jury in 2015, and he met with Glavin first when shopping for new counsel. DiCarmine, a former BigLaw executive, was used to seeing top partners at work alone in plush offices, with underlings delivering them papers. Glavin worked in a “war room,” elbow to elbow with associate attorneys. DiCarmine didn’t take any other meetings.

“Hiring her was the best decision I’ve ever made,” he said.

–By Jack Queen. Editing by Jill Coffey.