When the cameras left, so did Gloria.
At least that’s what one of Gloria Allred‘s former clients, too-hot-for-work banker Debrahlee Lorenzana, said of the high-profile celebrity litigator.
Lorenzana, a buxom beauty who was axed from her job at Citigroup in 2010, said she fought the bank by herself in arbitration after Allred dropped her as a client.
“If I could turn back time, I would have not chosen Gloria Allred as my lawyer,” she said.
The 35-year-old knockout sued her former employer for allegedly canning her over her killer curves.
Lorenzana said she sympathizes with Lauren Odes, the latest pink-slipped stunner to retain Allred. Odes says that her employer tried to get her to “tape her breasts down” and wear a bathrobe at work because her outfits showed too much skin.
“Nobody should be fired because of their physical appearance,” Lorenzana said. “I feel sorry for the girl.”
But Odes could be in for a rude awakening, Lorenzana said, charging that Allred worked her case more like a photo-op than a lawsuit — a charge the big-name attorney disputed.
“The only times I saw her (Allred) was when the media was there,” she said.
Lorenzana said that Allred dumped her after the celebrity lawyer pushed for a settlement, but she wanted to press on.
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“I thought because she was a woman that she would really fight for me,” she said.
Allred said in a statement that she and a co-counsel in New York “put in hundreds of hours fighting for her (Lorenzana’s) rights.”
“Due to our legal obligations as attorneys we were required to withdraw,” her statement read, noting that “ethical obligations” bar her from dishing about why lawyer and client parted ways.
“However, suffice it to say that we and our New York co-counsel felt that we had no choice other than to withdraw,” she added.
“We did everything that we could to help her, and the many boxes of documents containing our work product and the evidence that we worked to obtain prove that we did everything that we could.”
Lorenzana also referenced boxes filled with legal papers — the result of her own work after she was forced to learn the law on the fly after the split.
“I ended up fighting Citibank on my own,” she said. “It was torture.”
Lorenzana declined to discuss the specifics of the arbitration session, but said she spent many sleepless nights rifling through documents to prove her case, which is now closed.
“I learned my lesson,” she said.
But a former client of Allred’s from Florida, who sued her employer in December 2010 over comments that were made about her large breasts, rushed to the lawyer’s defense.
“While I know that the cameras love Gloria, and that if she calls a press conference it’s a big event, I know that Gloria’s main interest is helping people whose civil rights are violated,” Amy Blakely, a former executive at the Devereux Foundation, a mental health services non-profit, told the Daily News.
Now living in Orlando, Blakely sued Devereux in federal court alleging she was asked to hide her breasts because they were a distraction — and told she was “too sensual” for any major promotions.
She took a private settlement offer in July 2011.
“We went through eight months of litigation, and Gloria was very much a supporter, very much by my side,” the 44-year-old said.
“She’s passionate and relentless. She will not back down. And she’s been wonderful. She’s still a friend today.”
idejohn@nydailynews.com
