PERSPECTIVES
psycho, and perv on the internet.” Herrick’s lawsuit was
first dismissed on the grounds of Section 230 in January
2018; this March, an appeals court upheld that dismissal.
The bad news arrived on the morning of Goldberg’s
“Bitch Day.” Once a month, she and her best friend, an-
other lawyer, schedule beauty appointments, turn off
their phones, and talk about their businesses. “It’s this
sacrosanct day,” Goldberg says. When she received word
of the Grindr decision, she was in transit and her phone
was still on. She scrolled through the court filing, texted
“Fuck Grindr” to a colleague, and put her phone away.
Goldberg’s loathing of Section 230 has pitted her
against a somewhat unexpected enemy: free speech
advocates. The digital civil rights nonprofit Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF) called her lawsuit against
Grindr “dangerous.” The EFF believes Section 230 is a
crucial protector of free expression; if internet compa-
nies were to be held legally responsible for their users’
content—like a defamatory Facebook comment, Reddit
post, or Instagram photo—the EFF fears they’d start cen-
soring them. These platforms wouldn’t be “open forums
for speech” anymore, the group said last year when it
filed a legal brief in support of Grindr.
Even before the EFF weighed in on this case, Gold-
berg was no fan of the organization, castigating it on Twit-
ter at various times for being “big tech lobbyists” who are
“sculpting the internet dystopia of today” and writing,
“Nobody is more responsible for protecting hell on the
internet (harassment, revenge porn, stalking) than u.”
“It’s easy to point the finger at one party or one law,”
says EFF staff attorney Jamie Williams in response to
the criticism. But blaming Section 230 is an “oversim-
plification of the very complicated problems that we’re
facing online right now.”
“The internet we have today has been shaped from
Section 230,” Williams continues. “Acting like we all
haven’t enjoyed that or benefited from that is ridiculous
and dangerous.”
Yet to Goldberg, that’s the problem. She believes
the internet we have today is a bad place. “Almost every
one of our clients’ stories starts with ‘I met him on the
internet,’” she says. She recognizes that some people
have great experiences with dating apps, even meeting
their future spouses. But it’s how she met her abusers.
She’ll never online-date again—not that she’ll need to.
This past February, Goldberg became engaged to her
co-counsel in Herrick’s case, Tor Ekeland, an attorney
well known for defending hackers. In 2015, Wired called
him “the troll’s lawyer.” Goldberg is more of a troll hunt-
er. They make it work.ecently, someone at an event turned
to Goldberg and said, “You’re like
the Gloria Allred of Brooklyn,” re-
ferring to the attorney famous for
representing women in the highest
of high-profile abuse cases. Goldberg
was annoyed at the comparison.
“I see why, because I’m, like, a ‘lady lawyer,’” she says.
“But I don’t agree with her methods”—namely, holding
nationally televised press conferences as a matter of
course. “I think it’s cruel to clients. She always does itreally early on in a case, when she doesn’t really know the client and hasn’t established
the trust.” Yet Goldberg has faced style-over-substance criticism herself. Scott H.
Greenfield, a criminal defense attorney and prolific legal blogger, has been skeptical
since she started her firm, calling Goldberg a “baby lawyer” in 2014 and sticking with
that position, referring to her rhetoric in 2018 as “hyperbolic and disingenuous” and
calling her notoriety “undeserved.”
Last year, a similar argument was made to 32-year-old Michelle Hadley, who was
firing her attorney—an older man—in order to hire Goldberg. He told Hadley that
Goldberg “looks like a millennial and she’s good at marketing, but does she know how
to handle a case like this?” Hadley wasn’t fazed. In 2016, she spent 88 days in jail after
being framed for threatening her ex’s new wife. Before her exoneration, the media
crowned her the “craziest of crazy ex-girlfriends.” Hadley knew what it was like to be
discounted for being young and female; she could recognize when it was happening to
other women. Goldberg is now representing Hadley in a lawsuit against the police who
arrested her, her ex-boyfriend, and his then wife.
“I feel like I have a feminist guardian angel,” Hadley says. “She is unlike any attorney
I have ever met.”
This is undeniably true. Goldberg is a spectacle; her signature look is huge glasses,
voluminous hair, and high, high heels. She adopted the style while working as a non-
profit attorney in housing court early in her career, trying to make herself memorable
to judges and other lawyers while going up against more established (and drab) slum-
lords’ attorneys.
“Housing court was a very weird, sexist place,” says Goldberg’s friend and former
coworker Rebecca Symes, standing in the kitchen of Goldberg’s downtown Brooklyn
high-rise condo, where her bookcases are stuffed with art books and walls are lined
with whiteboards keeping track of her and Ekeland’s schedules. “Carrie was the most
glamorous person I’d ever met.”
Now, on an average day at work, Goldberg skips heels. But people still call her
glamorous. This has less to do with her statement accessories and more to do with the
provocative spirit underneath it all, a persona that peaks when Goldberg is tweeting or
composing “spicy” cease-and-desist letters. Writing from behind a screen has always
come easier to Goldberg than doing anything in public—a quality she incidentally shares
with trolls. When she was growing up, Goldberg’s confidence was smothered by a
speech impediment that prevented her from pronouncing her own name correctly. “I
was so shy as a kid,” she says.
This, however, isn’t what her childhood friends remember—at all. Lindsay Lunnum,
who bonded with Goldberg in junior high over their matching orthodontic head-
gear, remembers a Goldberg who was always inordinately bold. She wore jewelryR
ATTORNEY CARRIE GOLDBERG SPEAKS TO THE PRESS AS HARVEY WEINSTEIN
LEAVES CRIMINAL COURT ON OCTOBER 11, 2018, IN NEW YORK CITY.GOLDBERG: JOHN LAMPARSKI/GETTY IMAGES.