​A New York City Native Fighting for You in the Capital

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I grew up in Manhattan Valley in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s — a neighborhood with more grit than glamour, in a city that hadn't been polished yet. You learn two things growing up in a place like that. You learn what people can build when someone gives them a shot. And you learn how fast institutions decide who matters and who doesn't — usually from a distance, usually from paper, usually without meeting anyone.

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I never forgot either lesson.

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The fight over who gets heard

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A state-school degree took me to law school in downtown Manhattan — I started just as the city was rebuilding from September 11th, a season that teaches you how quickly certainty can collapse, and how much it matters who shows up afterward. From there I went to Washington, into the fights over media and technology policy at their core: who gets access, and who gets a voice — net neutrality, broadband access, privacy, and media ownership.

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For most of broadcast history, a handful of companies controlled what the country saw and heard. I spent years in the fights to break that grip — the open-internet and ownership battles that helped make it possible for anyone, from any background, to start a platform and reach an audience. Every podcast and independent channel you scroll past today exists downstream of those fights. I also fought for ownership rules that would make American media look like America. Some of those fights we won. Some — I'll tell you honestly — we lost, and I carry them still.

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Along the way I built my own platform: a nonprofit technology-policy think tank, and the nation's first technology-policy podcast — 300 episodes interviewing the people who shape the rules we all live under. The work took me from Capitol Hill briefing rooms to the pages of official FCC filings, and earned a seat at tables I was never supposed to reach.

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Why I walked into a criminal courtroom

 

Policy fights are decades long. You can spend twenty years pushing and never hear a verdict. I wanted a fight with a person's name on it — where the outcome arrives in weeks, where the work lands on one human life, and where showing up prepared actually changes what happens next.

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And here's what two decades in Washington taught me that serves my clients every day: I know exactly how institutions size people up. By pedigree. By zip code. By the version of you that exists on paper. I've watched it done in rooms most people never see inside. I don't accept it when it's done to the people I represent — because a charge is a story the government tells about you, and the law says they have to prove every word of it. My job is to make sure they do.

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The toolkit came with me: the strategic planning, the project management, the data fluency, the habit of reading a record more carefully than the people who wrote it. Since entering criminal practice I've handled more than 140 cases in DC Superior Court — assaults, domestic violence, DUI, theft, drug possession, and more — for clients who almost always have something specific to protect: a clearance, a license, a status, a family.

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Twenty years fighting for people the gatekeepers overlooked. Now I do it one client at a time.