Martin Garbus: Rebel lawyer with a cause

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1934, Garbus has battled in some of the toughest and most high-profile constitutional, criminal, copyright and intellectual property law cases. His fierce veracity in the courtroom gained him the reputation as “one of the world’s finest trial lawyers” in media outlets like The Guardian. 

Some of his notable clients include Nancy Regan, Nelson Mandela, Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford, Philip Roth, Al Pacino, Igor Stravinsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Lenny Bruce, Don Imus, Cesar Chavez, Sean Connery, The Metropolitan Opera, Random House, Penguin Books and The Sundance Film Festival, to name just a few. 

The author of six books and a number of articles for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and other publications, Garbus was honored in 2014 with the James Joyce Award from the University of Dublin for Excellence in Law and the Trinity College Award for defending First Amendment cases. His fight for freedom of speech is documented in the 2009 award winning HBO film, Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech, directed by Garbus’ daughter, Liz Garbus. 

A vehement defender of free speech, no matter how inflammatory or controversial, Garbus has become much more cautious in recent years due to the advent of the Internet. 

“The whole idea of the American government was built based on the idea that good ideas will defeat bad ideas,” he states. “I no longer believe that to be true, because of how the unregulated Internet can and has spread disinformation and lies… it’s clear to me that bad ideas will overcome good ideas, and that means that one has to reconsider one’s First Amendment commitment.” 

Garbus explains that he would not take on some of the more provocative cases he has defended in the past for these reasons, especially with the possibility of free speech online inciting violence and putting a burden on police.

Garbus is against criminal libel laws, where someone could go to jail for making a false statement. He believes holding people accountable for what they say is a civil legal matter, rather than a criminal one. 

“The idea of punishing people for speech is too great a risk. It spreads too far… I think it is terrible that you can destroy someone’s life with speech. You can destroy someone’s life with speech, maybe even worse than if you hit them over the head – and given today with the Internet, you say something in a small house somewhere, and that person is ruined in Australia and all over the world. There’s opinion and fact. So the question is, should it be punishable if it’s false? Clearly it should be punishable. I just don’t think it should be criminally punishable.”

IN 1994, Garbus put his professional career on the line to fight for justice in a libel case. He defended a 27-year-old Yale graduate and aspiring actress, “Jane Doe,” who had been raped in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Columnist Mike McAlary wrote an article for The New York Daily News brutally denouncing this woman’s claims by calling her a liar. Garbus sued McAlary and the newspaper for libel and described his client as being “raped twice” due to how egregiously she was treated in the press. 

“She had come out as a lesbian,” Garbus explains, “so the fact that she’s a black lesbian and wanted to go into theater was enough to make her untrustworthy. They also prosecuted that guy for the rapes of two white women. They didn’t connect the rapist, who was black, to the woman, so they’re saying that the black woman lied, and two white women were telling the truth.” 

Since then, two other women have come forward saying this same man raped them, and one reported that he attempted to rape her.

It was Garbus’s first libel case on behalf of a plaintiff, and he not only lost in court, his firm was also suspended from The Libel Resource Defense Center (LRDC) because insurance companies don’t look favorably on defense lawyers who side with a plaintiff. He lost most of his practice as a result of this.

In 2018, the New York Police Department (NYPD) issued a statement explaining they had made a mistake. Newly enhanced technology showed a match between the DNA of “Jane Doe” and the man who had raped her. Garbus remembers seeing his client fall apart in the courtroom. He still talks to her every month and describes her as still struggling. “You’re never ok… It’s a horrendous case showing deep-seated racism. It takes the police 24 years to apologize and we never sued for money. She didn’t want to go through it again, she had to put it behind her. She doesn’t want to start now, going through the whole thing again.” 

GARBUS HAS won landmark cases before the United States Supreme Court, many of which have resulted in pivotal changes to the law. In the 1968 case King v. Smith, Garbus defended Mrs. Sylvester Smith, a young black widow from Alabama with four children whose government entitlements had been cut off because she was having an affair with a married man deemed to be a “substitute father,” even though he had no financial means and was not related to her children. The Supreme Court decided that, when it came to Aid for Dependent Children (ADC) eligibility, a person could be considered a “parent” only if he was legally defined as such, for example, being the biological father or being married to the child’s mother. Garbus estimates this ruling “affected probably about 10 million kids.” It prevented the state from being able to discriminate against a person because of race, economic status and perceived moral standing.

Two years later, in 1970, Garbus filed another related poverty law case, Goldberg v. Kelly, while he was head of the Columbia Center on Social Welfare and Law. This case gave welfare recipients the right to a hearing before their government aid was discontinued, reasons for which could not be decided on arbitrarily or by hearsay. Garbus explains, “What the case basically said is, you had to bring the people in who made the allegations and let them be cross-examined… Justice William Brennan said it was the most important due process case of the 20th century.” 

Garbus has helped draft the constitutions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, he’s defended Sikh nationalists, represented the Rwandan government, jailed opponents of the Taiwanese regime, defended chief justices of the Indian Supreme Court while the country was in a state of emergency and fought for Chinese, Russian, Czechoslovakian, Indian, South African and Taiwanese dissidents. In 2012, he was honored with the William Fulbright Award for Global Leadership and International Human Rights.

GARBUS OVERCAME terrible adversity at a very young age. His mother, who lost everyone in her family except for her sister in the Holocaust, died in a tragic accident when Garbus was five years old and his brother just a baby. She put lighter fluid on a tie to get a stain out, and it caught on fire while she was ironing it. Garbus was in the room at the time. 

Garbus’s father remarried a kind woman named Doris to help raise his two young sons, and he later had a daughter with her. His father came to the United States from Poland in 1930 as an illegal immigrant. In 1943, when Garbus was 10 years old, he remembers his father receiving a phone call from someone who told him that his parents and six brothers and sister had all been gunned down by Nazis in a Polish massacre.

Starting at the age of 10, Garbus worked after school and on weekends at Sol’s, the tiny, cramped local candy store his father owned. Because they were Jewish, Garbus’s father made him conscious of always putting a liberal amount of ice cream on each cone, lest customers would complain they weren’t given enough because they were served by Jews. It was there where he befriended American film director and producer Garry Marshall, known for his work on TV shows like Happy Days and The Odd Couple. Marshall remembered Garbus’s perpetual scowl as he stood guard in the store and cast him wearing that same expression in an encounter with Al Pacino in the 1991 romantic comedy, Frankie and Johnny. 

Garbus’s memoir, The Candy Store, which will be released early next year, describes how the store quickly became his whole world, providing all of his needs. He writes, “The candy store was my invisible companion every day.” Somehow, despite all of the riveting cases he’s taken on and far-off countries he’s traveled to, Garbus still feels like the candy store is a part of him and he’s never left it. 

In 1951, Garbus graduated from Bronx High School of Science. His father told him he wasn’t smart, and unbelievably, he believed it. He wasn’t planning on attending a university, and only did so because Hunter College was nearby and started accepting men to meet their male quota to become co-ed. After he graduated from Hunter, Garbus trained at Fort Dix, a New Jersey army base where he taught classes and continually spoke out about highly controversial and politicized events, for which he was berated and court-martialed.

Outspoken and fearless, Garbus has inevitably landed in the center of controversy many times throughout his career. He was put in jail in California and Mississippi after defending protesters, sued by the South African government for publicly criticizing the country’s legalities and detained in Russia for trying to deliver a letter from a Russian dissident to President Carter. He states in his memoir, “I’m the guy who says no, it doesn’t have to be that way, and I don’t care what everybody else thinks, I’m not putting up with it. That attitude has been the through line of my legal career; I’m the fool who volunteers to do battle when wiser people step back.”

Garbus describes how he went to law school only because he was court martialed in the army. "They sat me at an empty desk in Queens for two years with nothing to do," he says. "NYU was the nearest place to me – it had an evening law school, so I went to law school at night."