Sajdah Golde

I've spent my life making the case — first for myself, then for other people.

I was seventeen when I traveled to Howard University for the inaugural National High School Forensics Academy and Tournament, an intensive debate program that brought together about fifty urban high-school students. I won the competition and received a $5,000 scholarship to attend Howard, where I later enrolled and graduated. That week in Washington taught me that a well-built argument could open doors most people assumed were closed.

By 2008, I'd carried that lesson into politics. I volunteered — never staff, always a volunteer — for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, knocking on doors across Virginia. I traveled to Denver for the Democratic National Convention and stood in the crowd in Washington for the inauguration. My fifth-grade teacher had cast her first-ever presidential vote for George McGovern; years later, she was the one who encouraged me to get involved in the Obama campaign. In Denver, I met McGovern himself — a strange, improbable full circle folded inside a much larger piece of history.

A few years later the argument became personal. I worked as an organizer with Vote for Equality at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, recruiting and training volunteers to canvass voters — including plenty who weren't natural allies — about marriage equality. As a Black queer woman, I wasn't arguing an abstraction. I was asking strangers to reconsider whether people like me were entitled to equal recognition under the law. The work demanded conviction, but it demanded listening even more: finding the human concern underneath someone's politics without minimizing what was actually at stake.

In 2011, part of that chapter played out on television. I appeared during the second season of Showtime's The Real L Word, which captured a real but limited slice of my life — newly out, falling in love, building community, and still organizing for marriage equality. Reality television taught me something I didn't expect: that editing and framing shape who an audience believes a person to be, sometimes as much as the events themselves do. That lesson stayed with me long after the cameras left, and it's part of why I've since wanted more authorship over how my own stories, and other people's, get told.

Law school is where the earlier chapters started to cohere into a discipline. At the University of La Verne College of Law, I served as Student Bar Association president in my final year, interned in the San Bernardino Superior Court under Judge Katrina West, and spent a summer as an associate at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith. I also represented La Verne, alongside my teammate Earl Robertson III, in the National Black Law Students Association's Frederick Douglass Moot Court Competition. We won Best Team and Best Brief at the 2015 Western Region competition — Earl also took home Best Oralist — and our brief won again at nationals. Somewhere in there I also received the Joseph & Doleen Borba Endowed Scholarship and a scholarship from the Richard T. Fields Bar Association, and spent time guiding high schoolers into law through the Hispanic National Bar Association's Legal Education Action Program.

I went to law school assuming I'd end up in entertainment law. A federal income tax course changed my mind. Tax turned out to be its own language of power — part policy, part business, part law — and I chased it into a Tax LL.M. at Loyola Law School, where I received First Honors in Accounting for Lawyers and was later featured in the school's own materials about the program. After I passed the California bar, I began my professional tax career as an Associate in PwC's financial-services practice, then continued that work as a Senior Associate at KPMG. The technical foundation eventually brought me back to the industry I had imagined from the beginning.

That foundation carried me inside entertainment itself. At Netflix, I worked as a Senior Tax Analyst from November 2019 to October 2021, during a period when streaming was reshaping how entertainment was financed, distributed and consumed. I later joined Warner Bros. Discovery as a Tax Manager, from March 2023 to January 2025. Years earlier, I had experienced entertainment from in front of the camera. Inside these institutions, I came to understand the business operating behind it — not just content or culture, but corporate structure, financial decisions, intellectual property and calculated risk.

Eventually the work came back to people. After years spent inside tax, finance and entertainment institutions, I moved into civil litigation, representing people facing injury, loss, and systems built to resist accountability. It wasn't a departure from everything before it. It was the same set of skills — research, argument, financial analysis, storytelling, and the willingness to stand next to someone when the stakes are personal — applied to a new room.

Today I'm building Sajdah D. Golde Law Corporation, and serving clients through The Golde Firm, on a simple principle that's followed me since I was seventeen: advocacy first. I'm also returning to entertainment with greater authorship, through original media and projects like The Cue and GoldeLaw.tv — stories rooted in law, Los Angeles, and the people institutions tend to overlook. Earlier records of my education and organizing were published under my former name, Sajdah Bryant — different name, same throughline. I began as someone being documented. I learned the business behind the screen. Now I'm holding the camera myself. I've spent my life making the case. Now I'm building the platform.