CAMPAIGN 2012

Cain Hires Lawyer to Troubled Stars

Atlanta attorney L. Lin Wood is a veteran of legal media circuses.

Updated: November 8, 2011 | 6:53 p.m.
November 8, 2011 | 6:52 p.m.

Herman Cain's attorney has represented former Rep. Gary Condit, Anna Nicole Smith's estate, and JonBenet Ramsey's family. (AP)

The attorney who introduced embattled Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain at his press conference on Tuesday to deny sexual harassment allegations has a long history in legal media circuses.

L. Lin Wood, an Atlanta-based libel specialist, has represented:

  • Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused of planting a bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Jewell, a college security guard who found the pipe bomb and told police, was considered a suspect but never charged. A decade later, he received an expression of public gratitude from Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue for saving lives at the Olympics.
  • The family of JonBenet Ramsey, the slain child beauty pageant contestant, in defamation cases when they were both plaintiffs and defendants.
  • Former Rep. Gary Condit in the abduction and murder case of Chandra Levy.
  • Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, whom Wood served as co-counsel in a federal civil-action rape case.
  • The estate of the late Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year whose battle over the fortune of her late husband, a man 62 years her senior, went all the way to the Supreme Court.
  • Beth Holloway, mother of Natalee Holloway, the teen whose disappearance while on vacation in Aruba drew international attention.
  • Jeff Greene, the Florida billionaire who lost a Senate bid last year.

At the Tuesday press conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., Wood spoke first to the press, saying Cain had been “falsely accused.”

“Now Herman Cain has to respond in the court of public opinion, not to admissible evidence,” Wood said, bemoaning that Cain had to “respond to hearsay.”

 

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