To Try to Balance the Scales of Justice

In the mid-1970s, when Martha McBrayer was 13, she spent a day with her friend Emily, an exchange student from South Africa, riding their bikes around St. Louis. At one point they wound up on a quiet, smooth road that happened to be on the grounds of a country club. Suddenly a man ran toward them, waving his arms. “You guys gotta get outta here!” he shouted. He gestured back toward the club. “They’re gonna call the cops!”

Martha was bewildered. “Why?” 

The answer humiliated and outraged her: No Black people were allowed there. They pedaled away, and the equanimity with which Emily dealt with it saddened McBrayer. “She was used to it—she grew up in apartheid South Africa,” McBrayer says. “Meanwhile, St. Louis was basically apartheid as well.”

Emily went on to have a career as a top executive for Coca-Cola in Africa, while McBrayer became an employee plaintiff’s attorney, working sexual harassment and discrimination cases. “I always try to select clients I believe, who are credible, intelligent and people I want to work with,” says McBrayer. “I’m fortunate in that I’ve been able to be pretty selective about that.”

She also took on racial matters. A history major, she did her thesis on white supremacy in the United States, comparing the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence in the 1980s to its peak in the 1920s. “I thought it counterintuitive that a hate group would become so popular during periods of economic prosperity,” she says.

In the summer of 1984, she got a paid internship with the Southern Poverty Law Center to go undercover with the KKK and other racist hate groups. She attended rallies and meetings across the South that included hate speeches, cross burnings, paramilitary drills and survivalist training. 

“Sometimes I was introduced to them by a guy who was working undercover. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but he was undercover for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League,” McBrayer remembers. “A couple times I met people who then invited me to other stuff. … Every once in a while there would be someone very suspicious of me, but normally they were just flattered that someone was interviewing them. I think they thought I might be a reporter. It appealed to their ego to be talking to somebody. I would say I went to Yale, but they’d never heard of Yale so it didn’t mean anything to them.”

Some aspects of the rallies were mundane (she was given a KKK pocket knife), or humorous (the wind repeatedly blowing out the fire on a burning cross), but it was never not disturbing. The scariest moment came during a rally in southern Missouri when an Aryan Nations leader announced, while seeming to point in her direction, “I know there’s an FBI whore here! I spit on her!”

“I pretended I didn’t think he was talking about me,” McBrayer says. “This is where I learned how to act fearless during fearful situations.”

That summer she interviewed 26 people from the KKK, Aryan Nations and other extremist groups for the SPLC—and for her Yale thesis. “My conclusion was that conservative political and religious rhetoric, as much as economic despair, encouraged the growth of right-wing domestic terrorism,” she says. She adds, “If you’re not seeing a parallel to what’s going on in the United States now, you’re not paying attention.”

After getting her J.D. from Georgetown, she clerked for U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver, then joined Lane Powell in Seattle.

“I realized pretty soon it wasn’t for me,” she says. Her epiphany came when a corporate defendant was being sued by a railroad worker who got cancer after years of handling creosote, a tar-like treatment used on rail ties and a probable carcinogen. Her research allowed the corporation to settle “for not a lot of money,” she remembers. While the firm celebrated, she felt awful. She soon left.

In the early ’90s, she landed at the California firm run by legendary plaintiff attorney Melvin Belli, known as the “King of Torts” to his admirers and “Melvin Bellicose” to his critics. His office building was topped by a statue of the scales of justice balancing on a middle finger extended toward the Transamerica Pyramid, and one of the requirements for new associates was to read Belli’s own autobiography. The copy Belli gave McBrayer had been marked up by him with a highlighter.

It was a fast-moving workplace. It wasn’t unusual for McBrayer to find Belli chatting with Oprah Winfrey, commiserating with F. Lee Bailey over the O.J. Simpson case, or posing for a National Enquirer photographer with a squirrel on his head. “You never knew what you were going to come in to,” she says. During her stint, McBrayer represented Zsa Zsa Gabor and considered a case for Evel Knievel. The famed daredevil wanted to sue a newspaper for reporting that he had been arrested for domestic violence; McBrayer declined after learning that Knievel had in fact been arrested for domestic violence.

She also repped a number of everyday people who came to Belli to fight back against banks, insurance companies and other corporations. 

Those cases typically involved matters of catastrophic personal injury, medical malpractice and sexual harassment. “It changed the trajectory of my career,” she says. “This was why I became a lawyer—to represent individuals and hold corporations accountable. To try to balance the scales of justice.’”

When Belli died in 1996, McBrayer returned to New York, eventually joining a firm focused on plaintiff personal injury; she headed their employment department. It fit her own history. When she was young, her father was let go as an executive at a Fortune 500 company, possibly because of age discrimination. He lost a subsequent job when he got cancer.

In 2015, McBrayer hung a shingle. She estimates her caseload as 10% personal injury, 40% sexual harassment or assault, and 50% gender, age, or race discrimination. The challenge of the majority of her work, she says, is “distinguishing between actionable discriminatory conduct and harassment, and the everyday drudge of being an employee.”

What makes her most effective, she feels, is a willingness to listen. “One of the most fulfilling aspects of my job is the moment when we reach a settlement and I can see a flood of relief on my client’s face,” McBrayer says. “You can see that they have been empowered.”