He is a black man born just two years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, outlawing racial discrimination against people who had been at risk of enslavement barely a century before. He is an alumnus of the same prestigious, historically black college from which Martin Luther King Jr. graduated, and he was hand-picked by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to join the faculty of the Harvard Law School. He is the epitome of the American dream, the promise that pure grit, self-determination, and hard work will pay off in the present of American exceptionalism.

And now, Ronald Sullivan Jr. has become the focal point of left-wing ire. As a result, Harvard has fired one of the nation’s top criminal defense attorneys from his post as faculty dean of the college’s Winthrop House. The reason? Sullivan has agreed to defend alleged serial rapist and former Hollywood kingmaker Harvey Weinstein. Previously, he had represented the late monster and football player Aaron Hernandez, as well as the family of Michael Brown, who was killed in the act of assaulting a police officer.