Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, after losing a motion to dismiss and winning a motion to disqualify a rival lawyer/law firm, responded to Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit on Thursday. Once again, the legal scholar said that Giuffre — an alleged victim of Dershowitz’s former client Jeffrey Epstein — lied about being forced to have sex with him while she was a minor and working for Epstein.
Dershowitz counterclaims that Giuffre libeled him and intentionally inflicted emotional distress through a “campaign to spread malicious lies accusing Dershowitz of being a sexual predator, pedophile, abuser, child molester and other negative epithets.”
In the filing, Dershowitz said it was the truth that “he was never in Epstein’s residence in the presence of underage females,” and the truth that Giuffre “committed perjury” as part of a scheme with her lawyers to “falsely accuse him of sex trafficking as part of a criminal attempt to extort a settlement from another party.” Dershowitz also reiterated that he “never met or had any contact with Giuffre as she falsely claims; that she has falsely accused him of heinous acts which never happened; and that she never accused Dershowitz until she met her lawyers and was told she could profit from accusing him.”
In a statement, Dershowitz said that he aims to prove that Giuffre’s lawyers pressured her to include him as a participant in Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking scheme along with other the rich and powerful men.
“I await the opportunity to cross examine my false accuser and the lawyers who pressured her to falsely accuse me. I will prove, by overwhelming evidence – from her own words and those of her lawyers – that I never met her and that she made up the entire story for money, just as she made up false stories about Tipper and Al Gore and many other people,” he said. “I will prove that before she was pressured by her lawyers to name me, she told the FBI and her friends the names of the men with whom she claimed to have had sex, and she did not include me. To the contrary, she wrote that had never even met me.”
Dershowitz counterclaims that Giuffre has libeled him. Per the filing:
Giuffre has conspired with her lawyers to publish her false and defamatory claims of and concerning Dershowitz with a knowing or reckless disregard of their falsity. She has done so with the specific intent and design that her statements be a source for the media so that the media will publish her false allegations of and concerning Dershowitz that he had sex with her while she was underage as part of Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking of minors. Giuffre has falsely and with a knowing and reckless disregard of falsity and acting out of ill-will and spite publicly labelled Dershowitz as a child rapist and molester.
Dershowitz on Wednesday responded to this week’s ABC News controversy, saying that — actually — ABC News was right to kill a story documenting Giuffre’s claims more than 3 years ago.
“ABC was correct in not relying on the credibility of Virginia Giuffre, a proven liar who falsely claimed to have met Tipper and Al Gore on Epstein’s island where they never set foot. She also said she was 14 when she met Epstein. Her own employment records prove she was 17,” he said.
Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist largely responsible for bringing the Epstein scandal back into the public eye, disputed Dershowitz’s Wednesday statements.
You can read the filing below. As you’ll see, Dershowitz responds to the allegations in Giuffre’s complaint paragraph by paragraph; in order to understand the full context you’ll need to refer to her complaint as you read his denials. Because of that, we are also embedding the Giuffre complaint below.
Dershowitz’s response also included a number of exhibits.
Complaint by Anonymous QSQ42TAiBF on Scribd
Alan Dershowitz response by Law&Crime on Scribd
[Image via ABC News screengrab]