#METOO Backlash at Peña & Kahn PLLC

Is this why Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential elections?

During the spring semester of 2011, while I was in my fourth year of law school and my second year of research for my thesis at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD), it dawned on me that to properly flesh out the arguments in my thesis, I would need access to a good law library in the United States (US). The subject of my thesis was a comparative study of the development and underdevelopment of the rule of law in the US and in the Dominican Republic (DR). To substantiate my arguments, I needed more factual information than what was available in Spanish at any of the libraries I had consulted in Santo Domingo.

All of my professors in law school at the UASD had made it abundantly clear that we had never had rule of law in the DR. The DR runs not on the rule of law but on the rule of money and power. Whosoever has political power or connections or has enough money to bribe politicians, lawyers, or judges can get away with murder, literally. In our Comparative Law class with Professor Henry Blanco, it also became quite obvious that the US founding fathers had done a phenomenal job of creating a form of government that allowed for the birth and growth of a solid legal system based on the rule of law. To ascertain this fact, we needed to look no further than the various amendments on individual and collective rights to the US Constitution and Supreme Court rulings like Brown vs. Board of Education.

In the last week of April, I bought a plane ticket to New York City. I had a place to stay rent-free for the whole summer break. I had lived in NYC in the late nineties and early 2000s and had worked for a couple of legal translation agencies. I emailed them to let them know I was going to be in the city and open to taking assignments. They emailed me back saying that they looked forward to having me on again.

I arrived in NYC on a Friday, and the following Tuesday I was working my first deposition as a Spanish-English interpreter on a personal injury case at a Brooklyn law firm. After I finished that assignment, I did the first thing I always do when I arrive in NYC: I had a well-toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese. Thereafter I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot and headed uptown via Broadway to visit the law library at New York University (NYU).

Yes, you can use the library as a non-NYU student, the law library secretary told me. You have to pay 20 dollars per day. That was a lot of money. Way beyond my budget. I asked her if there was a discount for monthly access. She said yes, but it wasn’t that great of a discount.

I have to think about it, I told her. I’ll come back. As I turned to walk out, she said, What do you want to use the library for? I told her I was writing my thesis on constitutional law, basically a comparative study on how forms of government articulated in a written constitution can hinder or promote the birth and growth of rule of law. She asked why I didn't use the law library at my school. I told her, with a bit of embarrassment, that my university in Santo Domingo didn’t have a law library per se and that I had visited half a dozen university libraries in the capital, but they didn’t have any of the books I needed to better understand the creation of the US Constitution.

Do you have your student ID on you? She asked. Yes, I said, and took it out of my wallet and handed it to her. She asked me to hold on a minute and got up from her chair and went through a brown door. She came back two minutes later and handed me a form to fill out. She said it would take 24 hours to process my permit and that I would be granted a summer-long access pass free of charge. I thanked her and exited the building.

I walked across the street to Washington Square Park and sat on a bench. I began to think about all the things I was grateful for. I had been doing this for years. There were times, times like this, when I was particularly inclined to sit down and enumerate all the things I was grateful for.

The following week I took an interpreting assignment for a slip and fall deposition at one of those court reporting agencies near the courthouses in Queens. During that deposition I noticed that the attorney for the plaintiff, Samantha Brooks, was accompanied by two young ladies much too young to be lawyers. They’re first-year law students doing an internship at our firm, Miss Brooks told me. That’s very cool, I told them. The two young ladies smiled. We were on a break from the questions and answers. I asked them what school they went to. I told them that I was attending law school, but at the UASD, in Santo Domingo. They asked me what it was like. I told them it was very different from the US. The most striking difference is that at the UASD the law program was 5 years, and we learned about the origin and evolution of legal systems from Mesopotamia until the present! We take Roman Law over one whole year and also have to take two semesters of French and legal translation. One of them said, Waooo.

I said, Yeah, it’s not a walk in the park. But I love waking up at 5am and going to bed early, and I’m a bookworm, so I don’t mind having no social life at all. The only thing I found tough to handle was living alone because I had to do my own laundry and cook my own meals, and there were times at the end of the semester, during finals, that I ended up wearing the same pair of jeans for five days in a row because I had no time to do laundry. They said they could relate to that.

We started talking about their internship. They said they had just started that week and that, in fact, this was their very first activity outside the office. Long story short, by the end of the deposition, Samantha Brooks asked me to email her my resume and have the agency contact her about taking me on as an intern. The following week I started to intern at Sciretta & Venterina in Park Slope, Brooklyn, along with the two young ladies, under the guidance of Miss Brooks.

Sciretta & Venterina was a small firm, and they didn’t have anyone on the staff who was bilingual in Spanish. So, I was able to assist with all the Spanish-speaking clients they had and participated in all the intern training activities, including doing legal research using LexisNexis and Westlaw. Miss Brooks took all three of us interns out for lunch on the third week. She asked us about our plans and listened to our silly responses. She explained the difference between different types of law firms and mentioned other opportunities within the legal system. Her boyfriend, she told us, was also a lawyer, and he worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

That summer was one of the top 5 summers of my life. One week Miss Brooks took me to court with her in downtown Manhattan. It was a pre trial hearing before the judge for an issue regarding the evidence that would be allowed during trial. I had ironed a nice light blue shirt and wore my best formal tie and was standing next to Miss Brooks while she presented her arguments.

At one point the judge looked at me and asked Miss Brooks if I was one of her interns. She said yes. The judge asked my name, and then he asked what type of law I was planning to practice after law school. I told him that I loved employment law. He made a joke about personal injury law and told me I had made a great choice. I was high on life. I could already see my future as a lawyer, and the sky was the limit.

At the end of the summer, the attorney from Sciretta & Venterina I had assisted with interpretation on a medical malpractice case for a young American girl of Guatemalan descent offered me a job I could do over the phone, from Santo Domingo, translating for him with other Spanish-speaking clients. I was very flattered, but I turned it down. I knew that was going to be very difficult to do since I already had a negative balance of time with my job as an ESL teacher and a few other extracurricular activities like moot court competitions and stuff like that.

Barely out of law school, I took on my first client. It was a young lady, Laura Mariel Peralta Baez, who had being repeatedly sexually harassed by her boss, Manuel Abreu Alvarez, at the lottery were she worked. She and I had met freshman year at a book club I had organized for freshmen from all types of majors. Miss Peralta Baez was a communication student, but she worked at the lottery as a model pulling out the white balls with the numbers from the spinning transparent sphere.

We sued her boss, the lottery, LEIDSA, and CARIOM, the subcontractor that had hired her. After a short trip to hell and back, we won the case. Miss Peralta Baez was awarded over one million pesos for damages and back pay. The cherry on the cake was the fact that this was the very first successful sexual harassment employment lawsuit in the history of the Dominican Republic.

After a few more cases, I realized I wasn’t cut out to be a full-time lawyer. At least not within such a corrupt system as the one we have in the DR.

Towards the end of 2021, I decided to move to NYC and seek employment at a law firm as a paralegal. I figured that the least I could do was take advantage of my experience and make lots of money and create a nice piggy bank for my retirement.

I moved to NYC a few months later, and in the same week of my arrival, I created an Upwork account and hired a young lady from Bangladesh to draft a sharp, presentable resume. I started looking at job offers posted on Indeed and LinkedIn. On Thursday of that first week, I saw a job offer with a firm in the Bronx, Peña & Kahn, PLLC. They were looking for legal assistants with Spanish language skills. The advertised pay was $35,000.00 dollars a year. That was $15,000.00 dollars less than what I was willing to accept. Nevertheless, I figured it would be an opportunity to start polishing my interviewing skills. The young lady from Bangladesh sent me the first draft. It had a few errors, but it looked good enough for a Bronx personal injury firm. I sent it, and lo and behold, they called me that same day. We scheduled an interview for the following week.

When the chief operating officer, Allan Torres, went over my resume, he asked how much I wanted to make a year. Fifty-two thousand to start, I said. He said that amount was way over his budget. I told him I understood, but as he could tell from my resume, I was worth more than $52,000.00 a year. He agreed and told me to wait in his office while he went and spoke with Stephen Kahn, the head of the firm.

He came back with Mr. Kahn, and they interviewed me for about 30 minutes. Then Mr. Torres left again and came back with another senior partner, Jonathan Michaels, the lead attorney for the labor law department. After a lot of back and forth, they offered me a starting salary of $48,700.00 a year. Is there any room for overtime? I asked. Yes, Mr. Torres said, after three months you’d be allowed up to 30 hours of overtime per week on a need basis. I had nothing to lose, so I took the offer. If I did get a better offer elsewhere, I would quit at the drop of a hat. I was there for the money.

Mr. Michaels excused himself and left. Mr. Torres called Mr. Gabriel and introduced us. Gabriel, Mr. Torres informed me, is the team leader of the paralegals in the motor vehicles personal injury department. This time the conversation was relaxed and casual. Mr. Gabriel looked at my resume and asked why I had dropped out of Syracuse University after 7 semesters! I told him that in my late teens and early twenties I wasn’t interested in a college degree. I attended Syracuse University because I wanted to get as far away from Washington Heights as possible and be totally free from parental supervision. I also told him that you don’t need a college degree to make decent money in the US. I like this guy, Mr. Gabriel said to Mr. Torres. Later on, Mr. Gabriel and I realized we had lots in common.

Mr. Torres asked Mr. Gabriel to introduce me to Mr. Donahue (not his real name), the lead attorney of the motor vehicles personal injury department. I thanked Mr. Torres, and we got up and headed to Mr. Donahue’s office.

I liked Mr. Donahue from the start. He was a likable guy, even though later his attitude towards the summer intern became a major disappointment. This is why I decided to use an alias instead of his real name. Years ago one of my cousins on my father’s side of the family told me she couldn’t understand why on earth her mom was my favorite aunt. She said her mom was a bitch and evil and blah, blah, blah. I told her straight up, I cannot relate to or think of others based on your relationship with them. You have your own relationship with her as your mom. I have a different relationship from the one you have with her; she’s my aunt, and I’m her nephew.

The same holds true for Mr. Donahue. He was nothing but forthcoming, generous, and understanding with me from day one. In fact, besides a few of my professors in law school, Mr. Donahue was the one lawyer from whom I learned the most about the law and legal ethics during the three and a half months I was at Peña & Kahn. By the time I quit the firm, he had patiently taught me how to draft every type of legal document. It was thanks to him that a week before I quit, I had deposited my first summons and complaint with the Supreme Court in the Bronx.

The disappointment with Mr. Donahue started at the beginning of my third month at the firm. One day a message popped up on the collective group chat of our team. Mr. Donahue informed us that Peña & Kahn had accepted a summer intern. The intern had been assigned to our team. That was everything he said. The following day the intern arrived at the firm, and Mr. Donahue assigned her a cubicle on the row adjacent to ours. Mr. Donahue didn’t bother to introduce her to any of us paralegals, which I found odd.

The next day I went over to the next row and introduced myself. My name’s Bianca Devaney, she said. Miss Devaney told me she had just completed her L1 and this was her first internship. She had a slightly Mediterranean phenotype and a friendly smile. She was attending law school down in Florida. I can’t remember whether it was Florida State University or the University of Florida, but it was one of those two. She said she wasn’t sure what type of law she wanted to practice. I have two more years to find out, she said, and I also want to intern next year at a larger firm. That first exchange lasted maybe five minutes. I told her if she needed any help or had any questions not to hesitate to ask.

If my memory doesn’t fail me, Miss Devaney came to the firm once or maybe twice a week. The following week she came over to my cubicle and asked me to help her with the case management system. She complained that Mr. Donahue didn’t explain anything to her. I went over to her cubicle and explained how to locate the files and docs she wanted. She thanked me, and I went back to my pile of work. Later that morning Mr. Donahue came over and told her he wanted to introduce her to one of the attorneys on the team.

As I mentioned earlier, I had lived in New York City in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006 I moved to Europe, and after six months and a phenomenal experience in North Africa, I decided to return to the DR and attend law school. In 2016/2017 I visited NYC again, and at that time the “Me Too” movement was starting to draw attention to the problem of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. Right around the time I left NYC, in October of 2017, there was a lot of media coverage of multiple sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein. That made the hashtag #metoo go viral, and the rest is history.

In 2018, one woman’s account of her date with Aziz Ansari and writer Zinzi Clemmons's confrontation of Junot Diaz at a book festival in Australia redefined the breadth and scope of possible accusations beyond what most sane people would consider harassment or abuse. The label “witch hunt” gained ground, and to this day there are ongoing debates about the legitimacy of some of the allegations that were made public following legitimate and indisputable cases of abuse of power by perverted men in positions of authority.

As usual, less than three years later, articles began to pop up in national publications with titles like Forbes’s: The Latest Consequence Of #MeToo: Not Hiring Women. In that article, senior contributor Kim Elsesser wrote the following: “The unintended consequences of #MeToo just seem to get worse and worse. Initially, there was evidence that men were shying away from one-on-one interactions with women at work, including mentoring, one-on-one work meetings, and socializing. Now, new research reveals women may be less likely to be hired for jobs where they are required to interact with men.”

It’s one thing to read about a social issue on the internet. It’s a totally different thing to witness it at your place of work. Miss Elsesser is on point when she writes that “men were shying away from one-on-one interactions with women at work, including mentoring.”

I was privy to this backlash in the case of the lead attorney, Mr. Donahue, and Miss Devaney, the intern. Right around lunch time on that second week of her internship, Mr. Donahue came over to my desk to hand me the corrected version of a legal document I had left on his desk for him to review. After he explained the required changes, he started to walk away, and I got up from my chair and asked him, in front of the whole staff, Did you take Bianca out to lunch already? He slowed down, took a step back towards me, and in a hushed tone of voice said, My friend, things have changed; those days of having lunch with women are gone.

Anyone who was ever an intern at a decent law firm can attest to the fact that “the lunch” with the lead attorney who is mentoring you is one of the most important things that will take place during the internship. Why? Because that’s when you get to ask questions that can’t be properly addressed when you are performing tasks at the office. That’s also the golden opportunity to either hint at your interest in joining the firm after you graduate or, at the very least, to get a good referral for another internship or even a job at a bigger firm.

Mr. Donahue walked away, but something gnawed at his conscience because less than ten seconds later he came back and told me, Listen, this is what we’re going to do: let’s all take her out to lunch together. I looked him in the eyes and said, That’s more like it!

We never did take her to lunch. As a matter of fact, the rest of the time she was there, Mr. Donahue said hi to her when she got there, gave her a tepid assignment, and forgot about her. Another attorney did her worst. He told her that in a few minutes he was going to come get her to have her participate in a negotiation, and then he never came back. Bianca was furious. She came to my cubicle and complained about the fact that with one exception the other attorneys were out right ignoring her.

One morning Miss Devaney came to my cubicle, looking desolate and frustrated, and asked me to help her with some research. I went over to her station and explained the process twice, the first time as I did it, and she took notes; the second time with her doing it herself. She told me I was a better teacher than all the attorneys there. I told her that I had been a teacher for years before I went to law school. This time I stayed there for a few minutes to watch her repeat the research process, and in that time span Mr. Donahue showed up and barked at me. What are you doing here?! He said. I stayed silent. Bianca jumped in and said, I asked him to come and help me.

By that time I understood that Peña & Kahn PLLC was more like an 1800s slave plantation than a modern-day business, let alone a law firm. A few minutes after our interaction, Mr. Donahue texted me privately on the work chat and wrote, I appreciate your efforts in helping Bianca, but it is not your concern regarding her assignments. If you have ideas, please feel free to share. We have a lot of work, and she will be kept busy and at the same time be given good experiences.

That was BS on so many levels. It’s incredible how the technology of texting has made people better manipulators of reality. The very first week of Bianca’s internship, I had shared three different ideas of assignments with him. Assignments that I had been given a decade before at Sciretta and Venterina. Assignments that were well-rounded, fun, and fantastic learning experiences. Mr. Donahue had turned them all down, including one where, in a few hours, Bianca and a young man named Robert Musial, who worked at the firm and was studying for the LSAT, would go through the process of a negotiation and a moot court trial. There’s no doubt in my mind that today, July of 2025, three years after her internship, if we asked Bianca what her experience as an intern was like at Peña & Kahn, she would give it a zero out of ten. And I am being generous.