James Sexton: evaluation

Transcript context

…But the way he said it, it wasn’t lawyer advice. It’s good lawyer advice probably, but he said it from the heart, which I always like. I like seeing that, where he refuses even the drama, even the public nature of it to throwing jabs or- Well, Laura, his lawyer, is actually notorious for not speaking to the press about cases in an extended way and that’s smart move. I don’t speak about pending cases I’m involved in publicly and I discourage my clients from doing so. I can’t always stop them, but I discourage them from doing so. I don’t think there’s any good to come of it. There are lawyers who try to try things in the court of public opinion. To take it to the broader principle you just brought up, I think there is a lot of value in talking about your ex in a favorable way. I have to say when I first got divorced many years ago, I went out on a date with a young woman. It was one of my first dates as a divorced man. She was a divorced woman. She’s a beautiful woman. We were having dinner and it was going quite well. It was one of those things where I was like, “Oh, I definitely want to see this girl again.” I said something about, “Oh, there’s going to be this thing at this museum. We should go.” She’s like, “Oh yeah, that’d be a lot of fun.” I’m like, “Yeah, we should, definitely. Maybe that’ll be next thing we do together.” She was like, “Yeah, we should go next weekend. The kids are with the asshole so we can go.” It was like you could hear that record scratch. I just went, “Oh yeah. No, this isn’t good. You’re referring to the father of your kids as the asshole? I’m walking into something here that I don’t know that I want to be involved in.” Matthew McConaughey, before he was married, if you look at his history, he dated some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood in their prime, and none of them ever talked bad about him in the press. They all were like, ” Oh my god, he’s such a great guy. He’s such a great guy.” I always wondered how do you… He got out of all of those relationships without a scratch on him. When you’d watch an interview with him, they would say, “So you dated Penelope Cruz,” and he’d go, “Penelope, that’s just a special lady. What a special lady. She’s just a wonderful… What a wonderful woman. I’m just so blessed to have the time with her. What a beautiful, wonderful woman.” I would think to myself, I’m like, “You’re a genius.” He’s a genius because he never came off as petty, spiteful, bitter, any of that. He just came off as just dignified, strong, smart, self-assured. It left the viewer with the impression that when he was looking off and basically he’s probably just thinking about some wonderful time he had with her and you think to yourself like, “God, that guy. He just became cooler and cooler.” Whereas if he got into the whole, “Oh yeah, that was ugly and then this happened,” nobody wants to hear it. It’s awful. The funny thing about him just having interacted with him a bunch, I don’t think… He’s in the Rogan school of thought, I think, that I don’t see him ever having a fight. Now his parents were, as he’s spoken about a bunch, nonstop fighting. They got divorced and remarried and just insane.…

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