When Paul Henreid's mother died of pancreatic cancer, he was a student at St. John Vianney High School in Kirkwood. Although he graduated from the University of Missouri in St. Louis, it was while attending law school at Washington University that he experienced the fallout of his mother’s untimely death.
While working as a stripper to pay for law school, Henreid improperly filmed his sex partners and plead guilty in 1999 to invasion of privacy. He completed 250 hours of community service, 30 days in jail, and underwent counseling. He was 23 years old.
“This was my only run-in with the law when I was in my 20s, and now I'm 50 years old,” Henreid told the St. Louis Record. “I had a probation officer writing me up for a violation to the court that I didn't serve the 30-day jail term when I had.”
After paying his debt to society, Henreid went on to become a licensed attorney in California where he still lives and practices law. However, he blames St. Louis attorney Albert Watkins for his inability to represent clients in a court of law.
Five years ago, Henreid hired Watkins to expunge the 20-year-old felony conviction from his record, but Watkins reportedly discussed Henreid’s case in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch instead of ‘flying under the radar’ as Henreid alleges he had asked.
“At the time of this guy's media blitz, I was living a private life for 12 years,” he said. “I had it pretty much nipped in the bud and Watkins ruined it with his attention-seeking. He was hired to do an expungement, but he did the exact opposite. He put it all back out there.”
Henreid sued Watkins, Michael Schwade, and the Kodner Watkins law firm earlier this month in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri alleging breach of fiduciary duty, constructive fraud, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
"Defendants did all these malicious and oppressive acts to their own client who paid them $5,000 for a two-page court-approved form petition that plaintiff completed just to enhance their vanity and narcissism by getting their names in newspapers," Henreid wrote in the March 1 complaint. "There is nothing more outrageous that an attorney could do to a client; exemplary damages are essential to punish this unprovoked backstabbing of their own client."
As previously reported in Legal Newsline, Watkins represented the highest profile January 6th defendant, Jacob ‘QAnon Shaman’ Chansley, who was convicted and sentenced to four years of incarceration for his role in the Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which Democrats have characterized as an insurrection.
When asked about Henreid’s lawsuit, Watkins said there is a significant backstory at play.
“It’s been looked at and probed years and years ago by the Office of the Chief Disciplinary Council for the State of Missouri, and there was absolutely no misconduct found at all and it was all based on the exact same allegations that are being made now, five years later, by Mr. Henreid,” Watkins told the St. Louis Record.
While waiting for the day when the Right to Be Forgotten becomes law in the United States., Henreid takes care of rescue animals, engages in volunteer work as a landscaper, and picks up trash on the roads and near creeks.
"I have a water well and a couple of parcels of land in California and I'm trying to build the first small off-grid community," he said. "I'm also renovating an old historic home in St. Louis that I own just north of the central West End."
Currently, only the European Union and other countries have codified the Right to Be Forgotten into law, which allows citizens to demand that search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing remove items from the web after a certain time period.
“If there was an organization in our country working toward that, I would volunteer my time,” Henreid added. “The biggest problem is trying to convince people to have a temporal understanding. They don't have a temporal understanding that this happened more than 20 years ago. They're reading about it right now and they think it happened last week.”