Maron said it was not easy to find a lawyer to take her case: Challenging activists who claim the mantle of antiracism carries tremendous professional risks these days. “Part of me would have loved to walk away from the whole thing,” she said. “But these ideologues have tried to ruin my name and my career and they are going after other good people.”

If you google “bleeding heart liberal,” Maud Maron might well turn up as the first hit. Every cause liberals are supposed to fight for, every group they are supposed to champion, every candidate they are supposed to support — well, that was Maron’s not so atypical life and career. Until recently.

A New York City native, Maron lived her early years in subsidized housing when her father walked out on her mother, who was a pediatric nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. Her mother remarried, the family moved to Pennsylvania, and Maron returned to the city for college. While a student at Barnard, Maron was a clinic escort for Planned Parenthood. Later, she went to Cardozo Law School knowing she wanted to be a public defender. There, she was a student of Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther who was then a visiting professor. (Cleaver calls Maron her “excellent research assistant” on the first page of this published paper about Mumia Abu-Jamal.)

After Maron graduated from Cardozo in 1998, she joined the Legal Aid Society, where she represented the most disadvantaged people in Manhattan. She left in 2006, after the birth of her first child, and then rejoined the nonprofit in 2017, working in the Bronx. “I had always intended to go back. It just took longer than I thought because I wound up having four children over a decade. But when my youngest was 18 months I went back to work,” Maron told me over the weekend. “For me, being a public defender is more than a job. It’s who I am.”

Maron and her husband, an Argentine immigrant, chose to send all of their children to public schools. In 2017 and, again, in 2019 she was elected to the local Community Education Council — the equivalent of a school board. Then, two years ago, she decided to run as a Democrat for City Council in lower Manhattan. Maron had always been politically involved: she was a poll watcher for John Kerry in Pennsylvania during 2004 and contributed many times to Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016.

In short, Maron is exactly the kind of lawyer you’d imagine Legal Aid would put on the cover of its brochures. But today the public defender is filing suit in the Southern District of New York against the organization to which she has dedicated her career.

The suit, which you can read here, claims that Maron was “discriminated against on the basis of race” by her employer, Legal Aid Society, and her union, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. It claims that both defendants “published knowingly false statements in furtherance of ideological and political motives divorced from the core functions of Ms. Maron’s employment.” In other words: it says she was forced out of her job because of her political views and her race, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

“None of this would have happened if I just said I loved books like White Fragility, and I’m a fan of Bill de Blasio’s proposals for changing New York City public schools, and I planned to vote for Maya Wiley for mayor. The reason they went after me is because I have a different point of view,” she said.

That difference came out most starkly in education, and in Maron’s role on the school board and as a candidate for city council she was outspoken in her views.

“I am very open about what I stand for. I am pro-integration. I am pro-diversity. And also I reject the narrative that white parents are to blame for the failures of our school system. I object to the mayor’s proposal to get rid of specialized admissions tests to schools like Stuyvesant. And I believe that racial essentialism is racist and should not be taught in school,” she told me.

This apparently didn’t sit well with some of her colleagues.

The trouble began in late 2019, when Maron’s boss, Tina Luongo, informed her she was being investigated following a complaint from members of the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus and Attorneys of Color of Legal Aid. “I knew the accusations were baseless,” Maron said. “It had everything to do with them deeming me an enemy of their politics and trying to go after me at work.”

A former colleague of Maron’s said: “It was McCarthyism. That is the only word to describe it.” Like several others I spoke to, this lawyer requested anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions.

After an investigation that entailed reviewing all her case files and interviewing her direct supervisors, which the lawsuit details, Maron was cleared in January 2020. If she were someone else—a little more politically astute, a little less principled—maybe she would have understood the episode as a warning to shut up. But on July 23, 2020, Maron published an Op-Ed in the New York Post under the headline “Racial obsessions make it impossible for NYC schools to treat parents, kids as people.”

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