Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has time and again denied allegations that he knew about and participated in Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s alleged child sex-trafficking operation. While alleged Epstein victim Virginia (Roberts) Giuffre claims that Dershowitz had sex with her while she was a minor and working for Epstein, Dershowitz has repeatedly and emphatically denied this, saying he’s never met Giuffre.
But this hasn’t just been a fight between Dershowitz and Giuffre: Giuffre’s lawyer David Boies and Dershowitz have also been locked in a war of words. That spat escalated on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, hours before a federal judge was set to make a decision about Epstein’s bail.
Dershowitz accused Boies of attempting to “destroy” his reputation, and said that he would put his “sexual probity up against David Boies’s any day of the week.”
“He’s now trying to destroy me and destroy my reputation, destroy my economic situation, destroy everything,” Dershowitz told WSJ.
Boies responded that such claims are “absurd” and that Dershowitz is just trying to “make this between him and me.”
“For some unknown and unknowable reason, I’ve decided to go after him. That’s absurd. It’s disproved,” he said. Boies would add that he was “initially very impressed with the representations [Dershowitz] made” regarding his whereabouts during the time period relevant to the Giuffre allegations. However, Boies claimed that flight logs from Epstein’s plane–dubbed in the media as the “Lolita Express”–contradicted Dershowitz’s details, particularly that he never traveled without his wife.
Sarah Ransome has also claimed that Epstein forced her to have sex with Dershowitz. Dershowitz flatly denied Ransome’s claim and told The New York Post he never met her.
“Of course she didn’t have sex with me. I never had sex with anyone except my wife,” he said. “I’ve never met this woman, I don’t know her, I never heard of her. She just made it up completely.”
Dershowitz has in the past blamed the allegations on Boies, saying Boies was “furious at me because I filed Bar charges, unethical Bar charges against him.”
“[Boies] threatened me, that unless I withdrew the Bar charges he would find somebody else to accuse me,” he claimed.
As WSJ reported, those bar complaints, filed in Florida, D.C. and New York, were dismissed.
Dershowitz, of course, was on the team of all-star lawyers who were able to secure an extraordinary non-prosecution agreement for Esptein in Florida more than a decade ago. That was in 2007. Dershowitz has also admitted to getting a massage at an Epstein residence, but said the woman was an adult and that he kept his underwear on. He also said he did not see young women there.
Dershowitz called Giuffre a “certified, complete, total liar” in a conversation with the Law & Crime Network’s Brian Ross in December 2018. He said her allegations against him were a “complete and total fabrication.”
“I can prove conclusively that she made the whole thing up,” he said, citing travel records that he says prove where he was at the time she claims she had sex with him. “It’s conclusive, conclusive evidence.”
“More importantly, I can prove where I wasn’t,” he said, after stating outright, “Never met her, don’t know who she is, never heard of her.”
Giuffre claimed quite the opposite. One section of her defamation lawsuit against Dershowitz was titled “Dershowitz’s Lies.”
She accused Dershowitz and Epstein of making false statements about her:
Dershowitz and Epstein intended their false statements to be specific statements of fact. Dershowitz’s false statements were, as he and Epstein intended, broadcast around the world and were reasonably understood by those who heard them to be specific factual claims by Dershowitz that he had not had sex with Roberts, that Roberts was intentionally lying about having sex with Dershowitz, that Roberts committed the crime of perjury, that Roberts had committed the crime of extortion, and that Roberts had intentionally fabricated her assertions about Dershowitz to extort money from others.Epstein also worked with other of his attorneys to attack Roberts’ allegations, including in a false statement they made in a letter to the editor to the New York Times asserting: “The number of young women involved in the investigation has been vastly exaggerated, there was no ‘international sex trafficking operation’ and there was never evidence that Mr. Epstein ‘hosted sex parties’ at his home.”
In another passage, Giuffre accused Dershowitz of lying about never seeing “naked pictures of females in Epstein’s Palm Beach home during his many visits.” She said this was contradicted by police footage, which “proves that there were naked pictures of females throughout the home including in the common areas.”
Dershowitz said before that Giuffre’s allegations were part of an extortion plot, and that she “should be seriously punished for submitting false information and a false affidavit.”
He also said she has not been willing to repeat her allegations against him in public, and that she has only accused him in the context of litigation, which affords certain protections.
“She simply hides behind litigation privileges,” he said. “And if she does, I will be in court the next day suing her for defamation and I will win the case ’cause I can prove conclusively that she made up the whole story from top to bottom.”
He further accused Giuffre of committing perjury.
“I will be able to prove conclusively that she committed perjury,” he said. “She made up a story out of whole cloth.”
“She made up the entire story. I never met her. She’s committing perjury. I welcome the opportunity to prove her perjury in court. The end result is that she will be prosecuted for perjury in a federal court,” he said.
Dershowitz was one of the individuals, along with Mike Cernovich and the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown, who moved to unseal the summary judgment record of Giuffre’s lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged madam.
After that development, Dershowitz told Law&Crime that he was “pleased” with the appellate court’s ruling, promising that “smoking gun” emails would prove that he was “framed” over money.
“I’m pleased that the truth will finally come out when these sealed documents are released. These ‘smoking gun’ emails and unpublished book manuscript will prove that I was deliberately framed for financial reasons and that my false accuser effectively admitted in writing that she never had sex with me,” Dershowitz said.
[Image via Fox News screengrab]