She was sexually assaulted eight years ago, she says, but the memory of that horrific ordeal remains clear to Melissa Rogozinski.
“It just happened so fast,” she recalls.
At the time, she was living in Birmingham, Ala., eight years into running her company, ESI Roundtable. Her company offered professional education for the legal industry and specialized in tech, data privacy and data security.
Rogozinski is not an attorney but has worked in the legal industry, a field valued in the U.S. at an estimated $372.61 billion in 2022, for nearly her entire career. She found a niche with legal tech, offering trainings for lawyers.
On Feb. 3, 2016, she had worked yet another long day and needed to get out.
Rogozinski, who goes by her nickname, “Rogo,” walked to a bar and restaurant called Paramount, near her apartment.
She entered and scanned for a free seat, gauging what spot would be best for a single woman out alone. The place was packed, “so I chose the place that I felt was most central, most well lit and what I thought was going to be the safest place for me,” she says.
She sat down and next to her was an older man who greeted her and introduced himself as well-known plaintiff’s attorney Robert Childs, co-founder of Wiggins, Childs, Pantazis, Fisher, & Goldfarb.
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