What do Donald Trump, rapper Cardi B and basketball player Shaquille O’Neal have in common? All three hired attorney Drew Findling to defend them. Slicked back hair, sunglasses and colorful suits, this 63-year-old criminal lawyer stands out in the army of lawyers responsible for representing the former American president in court in his multiple charges.
A lawyer since the 1980s, Drew Findling is a regular in criminal cases. First feat of arms, he obtains as an official clerk the acquittal of a battered woman who doused her husband with gasoline before setting him on fire. He then founded his own firm, The Findling Law Firm, and worked on murder and corruption cases.
rappers lawyer
But his notoriety only took off in 2013, when he defended rapper Gucci Mane, a drug addict and former criminal accused of assault and illegal possession of firearms. He risks at least ten years in prison, but Drew Findling manages to negotiate an arrangement with the prosecutor. His client only gets three years behind bars, then even benefits from an early release. The lawyer helps him get his life back together and becomes the go-to person for all rappers and hip-hop artists. Sacred “Billion Dollar Lawyer“, a title that he gladly takes up on his Instagram account with 240,000 subscribers, Drew Findling is also known by defending the flamboyant singer Cardi B, accused of having attacked two barmaids in front of a New York strip club. An atmosphere quite far from the American political universe.
Recruited last year, Drew Findling was however not an obvious choice. Self-proclaimed “leftist”, this father of three children, raised in a modest environment by a single mother, has positions diametrically opposed to those of the ex-president. He supports the movement Black Lives Matter and the right to abortion, claims as role models the famous judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the civil rights defender Thurgood Marshall, and has trained pro bono lawyers in the defense of illegal immigrants. Not to mention his financial contributions to the electoral campaigns of several Democrats, including that of Joe Biden in 2020 or, ironically, that of Fani Willis, elected prosecutor of Atlanta… and his future opponent during the trial of Donald Trump.
“Racist, cruel and anti-American”
On several occasions in recent years, Drew Findling has not minced his words towards the former tenant of the White House. When he fired the Manhattan prosecutor in 2017, lawyer tweets it’s a ‘sign of fear’ that the magistrate investigate his “foul smell”. Shortly after, Drew Findling calls Donald Trump “racist, cruel, evil, unforgivable and un-American” about his position in the case of Central Park Fivethese five young black men wrongly convicted of the rape of a white woman in New York in 1989. Donald Trump had called for the death penalty against them and never retracted.
To the critics who reproach him for sitting on his convictions by defending a president whom he seems to abhor, Drew Findling quotes John Adams. Before becoming one of the founding fathers of the United States and the second head of state of the country, he had been the lawyer of British soldiers accused of having murdered Americans during the “Boston massacre” in 1770. Anti-English sentiment was then very strong, but John Adams risked his reputation to defend them, convinced that in a democracy, everyone deserves a lawyer and a fair trial. “I don’t believe we choose our clients on the basis of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, political beliefs or the underlying issues behind the crime,” says Drew Findling at New York Times. “We have our private lives and our political views, and I make no apologies for my political views.”
In Georgia, Donald Trump is accused of wanting to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election to achieve victory in this state. One piece of evidence is particularly embarrassing to him: recording of a telephone conversation where the former president puts pressure on the Secretary of State of Georgia, responsible for organizing the ballot. “I just need to find 11,780 ballots,” Trump says. Before threatening him: “You know, it’s a crime. You can’t let that happen. It’s a big risk for you”. To defend his client, Drew Findling draws a surprising parallel with rappers he has defended and recalls the importance of context. “Someone listens to a rap track that’s four minutes and eleven seconds long, takes a verse out of it, and tries to make some sort of criminal case out of it.” Donald Trump is famous for not listening to the advice of his lawyers, who end up quitting. Perhaps this iconoclastic figure will stand the test of time.