‘They hate my views on Donald Trump,’ Alan Dershowitz says of the New Yorker. ‘They hate my views on Benjamin Netanyahu, and they hate my views on Israel.’
This week, the New Yorker ran a long-awaited hit piece on Dershowitz by Connie Bruck. Dershowitz wrote an article anticipating the attack here. It’s not clear why Bruck took a year to write her story. Its most damaging claim has circulated for several years: that Dershowitz, the erstwhile friend and lawyer of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had sex with Virginia Roberts, a teenager procured by Epstein. This story failed to get to court, despite Roberts, now known as Virginia Giuffre, engaging David Boies as her lawyer. As for the new material, Dershowitz tells me that the New Yorker might have broken the law by publishing it.
‘The story was fed to them by my false accuser’s lawyers,’ he claims. ‘They tried to get them to spin a case against me and in her favor. The proof that the lawyers fed them the story is that the New Yorker have the sealed emails. It’s illegal for the New Yorker to have the sealed emails.’
These emails are among the sealed papers from Epstein’s 2008 plea deal on charges of sexually abusing dozens of young girls. Dershowitz, then Epstein’s lawyer, negotiated that deal with Alex Acosta, who was then US Attorney for Southern Florida. Epstein’s recent arrest on child prostitution charges has refocussed attention on that deal, and led to Acosta resigning as Donald Trump’s secretary of labor. Dershowitz has petitioned to have the sealed papers opened, in order to clear his name. But, he says, they should be opened lawfully and completely, not unlawfully and with bias.
‘The other side gave them the sealed emails in exchange for a promise by Bruck that she would spin it in their direction. So she only quoted negative excerpts of the sealed emails, but not the positive material,’ he claims, adamant that the New Yorker couldn’t have received the emails from any other source. ‘The only people who have them are my side and their side, and the only way they could have gotten these sealed emails is from the other side.’
Giuffre has a lawsuit against Dershowitz for defamation looming. Dershowitz, her lawyers claim, has made ‘false and malicious statements’ and was ‘a participant in sex trafficking’. The timing of the New Yorker article looks like an attempt to prejudge the case in the court of public opinion. It’s hard to see any other motive for recounting previously disproven allegations from a second woman, Sarah Ransome.
‘It’s not that the evidence is weak. It’s that there is no evidence,’ Dershowitz says. ‘All we have is two accusers, both of whom have admitted inventing stories for profit. In the New Yorker article, it mentions that Ransome admitted that she invented claims against Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Richard Branson. What happened is that this woman Ransome went to the New York Post, and said she had sex tapes of those four people: Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson. Also she said that the CIA was trying to kill her on orders from Hillary Clinton. Then she admitted to Connie Bruck that she invented the whole story in order to get Epstein.’
Virginia Giuffre, Dershowitz notes, also claimed to have met Al and Tipper Gore on Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island.
‘Al Gore and Tipper Gore don’t know Epstein, they’ve never been on the island,’ Dershowitz says. ‘Giuffre also invented a story about Bill Clinton flying on a helicopter piloted by Ghislaine Maxwell and having dinner with two young girls. Total invention: the Secret Service records prove that he was never on the island.’
‘So the evidence against me is less than zero. You have two completely discredited serial liars with no corroborating evidence, and my evidence is overwhelming. They’re trying to undercut my evidence, but it won’t work because in a court of law my evidence will be seen as airtight.’
The New Yorker story portrays Dershowitz as an attorney whose career successes have been based on victim or witness disparagement – what some would term ‘being a lawyer’ – and appears to insinuate that he’s reverting to his old strategy in the Giuffre case. Spectator USA wasn’t able to secure comment from Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies, Connie Bruck, the New Yorker reporter, or her editor David Remnick regarding Dershowitz’s claims about the sealed documents, but we will update this story to include their responses if they arrive.
Knowing what he now knows about Epstein, does he regret the personal association, not the professional, legal association, that they shared?
‘Of course I do. If I had known he had ever had any contact with an underage female I would never have associated with him. Of course I regret the association. But none of us ever knew it. The president of Harvard was associated, the provost of Harvard, Nobel Prize winners, Martin Minsky the inventor of artificial intelligence, George Church who uncoded the genome, all of us knew him as a supporter of science, and I think I can speak for everybody when I say we all regret not knowing about his private life. He kept his private life completely secret.’
Epstein kept parts of his working life secret too. He’s described as a hedge fund manager, but he wasn’t.
‘He was a personal manager,’ Dershowitz explains. ‘He managed money for Les Wexner.’ The businessman and philanthropist, Dershowitz says, is ‘key to this whole story’ — and will be Dershowitz’s star witness if Boies and his team take Giuffre’s defamation case to court.
‘Let me tell you that there is an affidavit by a lawyer named Pottinger — it’s for the other side, in which he admits that Virginia Giuffre, the woman who accused me, also accused Leslie Wexner of having unprotected sex with her on numerous occasions. Her lawyers then went to Wexner in private after accusing me in public, in order — according to a woman named Rebecca Boylin, who was told this by her best friend Virginia Giuffre — to get a billion dollars from Wexner in hush money, to make sure the story didn’t come out. What they essentially said to him was, “If you don’t want to happen to you what happened to Dershowitz, there are ways of resolving this.”’
‘Wexner is going to be the center of the trial, he’s going to be my main witness. His lawyers and his wife both told me that they were subject to a ‘shakedown’ — that was their word for it, a ‘shakedown’ — from the lawyers for the other side.’
In the Wall Street Journal, Dershowitz has called for an FBI investigation into himself, Giuffre, Ransome, and their lawyers: ‘I think that they’ll conclude that it was a total frame-up for money, and part of an extortion plot.’
Dershowitz became famous for standing on legal principles, and even defending the indefensible. Does he feel that the machinery of celebrity culture has turned on him for political reasons?
‘Without a doubt,’ he says. ‘We’re living in an age of sexual McCarthyism where, if a man is accused, it becomes a sin to call his false accuser a liar, to in any way challenge the credibility of a woman. Well, I’m committing that sin, quite willfully and deliberately, because the people who accuse me are false accusers and I’m going to expose their criminality.’
