Inside Marissa Roy's Bollywood-bumping, group-project bid to become L.A.'s city attorney
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Set us as preferred It was less than a month before the Nov.3 election when Los Angeles city attorney front-runner Marissa Roy realized she’d missed her lucky manicure.
A deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice, she had scarcely slept since her team clinched its historic $17-billion settlement with Meta in August.She’d been canvassing hundreds of voters and sounding out scores of deputy city attorneys in her bid to transform the troubled office where she’d launched her career in 2017 into the “largest public interest law firm” in L.A.
Between filming TikTok spots and prepping for formal debates, Roy has been fine-tuning her plans to avenge exploited tenants and claw back stolen wages, tame runaway civil liability, protect victims of child abuse and domestic violence, and join other elected attorneys in lawsuits against the Trump administration.Nails didn’t make the cut.
“There’s just been too much to do,” Roy said of the chrome gel ritual she inaugurated as a volunteer for Eunisses Hernandez in 2022.Seen one way, Roy’s talismanic manicure is an object lesson for her fiercest critics: all flash and no substance, evidence the 34-year-old lacks the “gravitas” to be among the state’s most powerful elected lawyers.
But like the iridescent glitter in her campaign-matched chrome polish, the meaning shifts with the viewer’s perspective.To supporters on the city’s restive left and the clique of California city attorneys eager to add Roy to their group chat, it’s a winking show of solidarity burnished through years of knocking on doors for fellow up-and-coming progressives.
It was metallic blue for Hernandez, silver for Ysabel Jurado and ultraviolet for her own historic primary upset in June.Her backers see in her fierce loyalty and admire her eternal hunt for wage thieves to...