{alltv} Judge Pirro roots for the undergo in court, on TV

1 month FREE when join ChristianSingles.com

When Jeanine Pirro was the District Attorney of Westchester, N.Y., her then five year-old son, Alex, came running to her with something important to say. " 'Mom, I know what I want to be,'"Pirro says he told her. "I'm thinking Ninja Turtle, Power Ranger," recalls Pirro. "Then he gets a perplexed look on his face and says, 'I want to be a District Attorney. But mom, can boys' be District Attorney?'" Then Pirro, who was the first female DA in Westchester, said to herself, "Jeanine, you did good."

Flash forward sixteen years and that little boy is in college and on the day we spoke her daughter, Cristi, was taking the New York State Bar exam. And Pirro? After 12 years as DA and then several years devoted to undertaking potential political campaigns as a Republican from New York for the Senate and then for State Attorney General, she's found herself far away from politics but somewhere she says she can still affect change: Television.

"To me it's about the underdog," says Pirro, whose Emmy-nominated Judge Pirro syndicated courtroom series begins its second season Monday. This year, she'll use her national platform to empower women (and men) to get out of abusive relationships with a series of episodes and Public Service Announcements in conjunction with the National Domestic Violence Hotline .

"I started one of the first domestic violence units in the nation in 1978," says Pirro, 59. And while,she says, "we have come a long way but (then) I start to get comfortable (and) then I realize (like) with the Chris and Rihanna case there was a statistic (from a survey by the Boston Public Health Commission) that said nearly half of the Boston youth surveyed felt she was 'responsible' for what happened and 52% said they both were to blame. So here, we go. And now with this Oksana and Mel Gibson, everyone suspects that she's done something...you can't even allege everything yet and we want to place blame."

Did something in Pirro's past drive her passion on this issue? "The truth is that my mom loved my dad and my dad loved my mom and I grew up in small town America (Elmira, N.Y.) where all was good," she says, "so it was kind of this shock when I started in the DA's office. ...One of the first cases I handled was a guy who hired a guy to kill the mother of his two kids and I remember pulling out autopsy pictures and looking at this beautiful woman and I was astonished. Obviously, to go to law school in 1972, I had to be someone who believed in equal rights and equal justice for women. For me justice was always personal. That's the beginning, it was very simple it was me being stunned at the idea that this abuse occurred."

In addition to getting her personal causes into the national spotlight, Pirro likes that she can show a lighter side of herself in the televised courtroom. Of course, she knows, the cases she tries on TV are not the serious felonies she handled long ago but she still considers them important. "It's about speaking to contemporary, relevant issues [identity theft, foreclosure, child custody] and doing it in a way where we educate the public."

Like her own son, Pirro also knew what she wanted to do since she was young. "I knew I was going to be a lawyer when I was 6 years-old," she says. "Everything in my life was focused toward that. I remember watching Perry Mason and then there was (the lawyer who served as the basis for Mason), Jake Ehrlich and for my 16th birthday when everybody else was painting their nails ... I wanted him to sign his book, Beyond A Reasonable Doubt and send me a picture and he did and I still have the picture."

And while she did come of age in an era when people thought wanting to be a mommy and wanting to be a lawyer "were mutually exclusive," Pirro says that with her parents' encouragement, she believed she could be both. "They gave me the motivation," says Pirro. "My mom is still my backbone."

It's no surprise then that is was her own children that Pirro stayed strong for during her difficult times — which included her husband's highly publicized extra-marital affairs (they are separated now), his fathering another woman's child and his conviction and imprisonment for tax evasion. "What I always tried to convey was that there is a double standard for women," she says. "Focus on me. I have a record, a record that I'm proud of. I can go to toe to toe with anybody and if this is how you think your going to break me down, it's not going to happen."

When asked if she misses politics, Pirro lets out a big laugh and says, "That's my answer." Getting more serious, she says, "I'm a believer that one person can make a difference... In this courtroom, certainly we resolve conflict and make people accountable and responsible," says Pirro. "But we have to do it in record time and I think we can do it with a little sense of humor and a little hair and makeup to boot."