In Spiro’s view, his advocacy for Megan and Musk aren’t disconnected. “My instincts are often to rally behind people who are under attack.”
Spiro grew up in the Boston suburbs and studied psychology at Tufts. After college, he remained in the area and briefly considered a career in medicine or science while working at a psychiatric unit for teenagers at McLean Hospital. He found it engaging and revealing but thought that he lacked the patience for medical school or lab work. An executive assistant for his mentor, psychiatrist Sherv Frazier, suggested he take the LSAT. “You like to sit in here and ask so many questions and argue so much,” Spiro remembered her saying. “You should go take this test.” He graduated from Harvard Law in 2008.
Spiro began his career in law as a prosecutor at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. By the time he switched to defense law a few years later, he was known as fast-moving and trial-hungry. Whatever one’s definition of celebrity lawyer, Ben Brafman, who has counted Diddy, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Martin Shkreli, Harvey Weinstein, Peter Gatien, and Sammy “The Bull” Gravano as clients, is inarguably one. Spiro went to work at Brafman’s firm in 2013. He found an easy affinity with musicians and athletes, and his early cases included Bobby Shmurda’s gun, drug, and murder conspiracy charges in 2014 and the former NBA player Thabo Sefolosha‘s wrongful arrest in 2015. (Shmurda pleaded guilty to conspiracy and gun charges and served six years in prison before his release in 2021. In 2017, New York City agreed to pay Sefolosha $4 million to settle a federal lawsuit he filed.)
Spiro and Charles Oakley met a few times in passing, but he didn’t get to know the former NBA player well until 2017. In February of