“The Fixer”
Toronto Life
To the media’s dismay, her client is nowhere in sight. Ever since Ghomeshi pleaded not guilty to seven counts of sexual assault and one of choking, Henein has put a gag on his dulcet public tones. As one of the most respected and feared criminal lawyers in the country, she has become not only his voice but his last best hope against the possibility of a life sentence in prison.
For the lead role in this drama, no casting director could have made a better match. In looks, age and background, Ghomeshi and Henein share eerie similarities, and, within legal circles, her star power is at least equal to his. But while Ghomeshi’s on-air charm may have carried him to the loftiest reaches of the CBC only to be exposed as a sham—an artful mask concealing an alleged mean streak—Henein seems to have gone out of her way to cultivate a forbidding persona. Even one of her most grateful clients, former attorney general Michael Bryant, has described her as someone who “seemed to channel Hannibal Lecter,” and another, one-time minor league hockey coach Dave Frost, dubbed her “my shark.”
At 50, she looks a decade younger, a vision in black chic perched on $1,500 leopard-patterned Louis Vuitton pumps. They turn out to be just one pair from a collection so notorious that Ontario’s former chief justice Warren Winkler once ribbed her, “So are you going to buy a car or a new pair of shoes?” Even with the benefit of those four-inch heels, Henein seems tinier than she did in the courtroom, her hourglass figure whittled away by twice-weekly weight training sessions, her boyish bob and kohl-rimmed eyes lending her the air of a gamine. A diamond-encrusted serpent ring is her only jewellery, slithering up one ornately manicured finger, each opaline nail inscribed with a delicate black deco design. Despite the obvious time and attention she has devoted to that artful presentation, she waves off questions about her designer wardrobe. Male lawyers, she protests, never get queried about their clothes. “If I dress this way, it’s because it amuses me,” she shrugs.
While most legal firms opt for the reassuring patina of wood panelling and landscapes, Henein’s stark private office features a giant photo of a voodoo doctor named Baron Samedi strutting gleefully through a New Orleans cemetery in top hat and skull mask. Every object in these spare quarters has been edited by the same exacting eye that she brings to each case—all part of a controversial exercise in building her own edgy legal brand.