Introduction

 

Imagine how it would feel if you—or your husband, father or son—were falsely accused of a heinous sex crime by a woman you never met.

Imagine further how you would feel if you had conclusive evidence—in the accuser’s own words—that she never had sex with you.

Now imagine that you also had recorded evidence—from her lawyer’s own mouth—that it was “impossible” for you to have been in the places she claimed to have had sex with you and that she was “simply wrong” in accusing you.

Imagine even further that you discovered that your false accuser had a sordid history of falsely accusing other prominent men for money, and that she was falsely accusing you because she felt “pressured” by her lawyers who promised her a big payday.

Finally, imagine that despite this evidence, many people continued to believe the false accusation, just because “women who are abused don’t lie.”

That is the situation I and my family have been facing over the past five years. Although I am the victim here—the victim of a deliberate frame-up motivated by money—I am being treated as a perpetrator, despite the fact that I have done absolutely nothing wrong. My reputation has been trashed, my family has suffered, my retirement has been ruined, my health has been affected—all because a woman with a long history of lying decided, at the urging of her lawyers, to perjuriously include me without a scintilla of evidence in a list of men to whom she says she was trafficked by the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, whom I had represented a decade earlier.

After reading this book and seeing the indisputable evidence of my innocence and the total lack of evidence that I ever met my false accuser, no reasonable, open-minded reader will be left with any doubt. But at this stage, before seeing the evidence, I’m asking readers simply to assume, for purposes of an emotional and intellectual experience, that I am totally innocent, and to imagine how you would feel if you or a loved one were being subjected to what I have been put through over the last half decade. If this can happen to me—a man who has the resources to fight back—it can happen to anyone.

In order to understand—and feel—how this false accusation has upended my life, the reader must be put in my position prior to the accusation being made. I was a 76-year-old retired law professor (I’m now 81) with a controversial professional history. I had represented some of the most despised criminal defendants of our time, many of whom were guilty, but some of whom were innocent. Half of my clients were poor and could not afford to pay legal fees, so I represented them pro bono. These included many women, some of whom were victims of sexual, physical and psychological assaults. Some of my female clients are well-known, like Mia Farrow, Patricia Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Sandy Murphy, Sylvia Zalmonson and Maryam Rajavi; some are not, like the woman whose husband locked her up in a mental hospital, the wife who killed her abusive husband, the Harvard student who was sexually harassed by her professor and the mother who was denied custody of her 8-year-old daughter because she had left her husband for another woman. Other clients included death row inmates and victims of human rights abuses. I also represented filmmakers, actors, writers and publishers whose controversial works were censored.¹

Although some of my clients had been falsely accused of serious crimes, including murder, they all had preexisting relationships with their alleged victims. Moreover, the evidence was often ambiguous. There were grey areas, and doubts that had to be resolved under the law in their favor. I had never had a black-and-white case in which the accused had not even met the accuser. So despite my long experience in representing both the innocent and the guilty, I had never been involved in a case like this one. In all other #MeToo cases, the accused and the accuser had known each other: they had been intimate or had worked together. The issues were consent or harassment, which are often grey areas. Mine was the first in which there was no evidence that the accused and accuser had even met. It was “a zero-sum game,” but it wasn’t a game. Either I was absolutely guilty of a heinous crime, or my accuser was absolutely guilty of perjury for making up an entirely false story. There was no middle ground.

I had taught about totally false accusations involving crimes ranging from espionage to murder: Alfred Dreyfus; Menachem Mendel Beilis; Leo Frank; the “Scottsboro Boys” and others.² I had felt vicariously what it must be like to be subjected to a Kafkaesque labyrinth of lies. But I had never personally experienced it. Nor did I ever expect to, despite the controversial nature of my public persona and career.

In addition to representing controversial and unpopular clients, I had written hundreds of provocative articles and dozens of controversial books about hot-button issues, such as terrorism, torture, affirmative action, preventive detention, Israel, Iran and sexual assault. Of my forty books, eight had been best sellers, including The New York Times number one best seller, Chutzpah. I had taught thousands of students and lectured and appeared on TV before millions of audience members and viewers. My public image was confrontational and adversarial.

As the Boston Globe once put it: “If Dershowitz isn’t getting in your face about something, it’s as if he’s not doing his job.”³ Very few people were neutral about me: I had fans and detractors. People either loved or hated my provocative views and the ways in which I expressed them. Professionally, I was among the most controversial professors and lawyers in America. And I relished that status. I enjoyed being at the center of controversy for my ideas, principles and legal activities.

I was at the apex of my career, being honored for my life’s work by awards, honorary doctorates and efforts to create a professorial chair in my name at Harvard. Presidents Clinton and Obama wrote letters of praise when I retired from Harvard, and when I turned 75, Obama wished me “Many more years of advocacy, mischief and great fun.” The reference to “mischief” was about my iconoclastic and controversial political views.

There was nothing controversial or mischievous about my private life, and certainly none about my sexual activities. At the time of the accusation against me, I had been married to my wonderful wife Carolyn for nearly 30 years. My first marriage ended in divorce, and I raised my two sons. I met Carolyn seven years after the divorce. We have a great marriage and a wonderful daughter.

I am very different in my personal life than in my professional life. With family and friends, I avoid conflict. Family members consider me a pushover. I rarely argue and when I do, almost never win. I do enough arguing in court and on TV. When I come home, I want peace and quiet rather than conflict. The same is true among my close friends, who don’t recognize what my son Elon calls “the Dersh TV character.” I once complained to the late actor Ron Silver, who played me in the film Reversal of Fortune, that he had done a great job portraying me as a lawyer, but he had not captured the real me as a family man. He replied: “I’m playing the public Alan Dershowitz—the one people see on TV and in the newspapers. I can’t get to know the private Alan Dershowitz well enough to play him, and frankly the public isn’t interested in that side of you.” (I only wish that were still true.)⁴

In my Harvard classroom, I was also tough and confrontational—though with a smile—because my job was to prepare law students for a confrontational career in a highly adversarial legal system. But outside of class, I was supportive and agreeable, as my students and mentees will confirm.

In my fifty-year teaching career at Harvard, I had many female research assistants, secretaries, students and colleagues. My wife and I invited my students to our home every year. Not a single complaint had ever been lodged against me for sexual (or any other) misconduct. My students, assistants and friends all know that I don’t flirt with, hug or touch anyone other than my wife. That’s not who I am. I am also a cautious person in my personal life, and I would never have risked destroying my hard-earned reputation or personal integrity by doing what I was accused of.

So when I was accused at the end of 2014 of having sex on seven occasions with an underage female who I had never met, no one who knew me and Carolyn believed the accusation, even when it was circulated around the world. People who didn’t know me—who knew only the “Dersh TV character”—had no reason to disbelieve the accusation, because they were unaware of the long history of false accusations made by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, of my unblemished history at Harvard, and of the evidence proving my innocence. But that accusation was leveled before the advent of the “#MeToo” movement, and many of those who read about the accusation were then prepared to apply a presumption of innocence or at least of skepticism.

When I categorically denied the accusation in the media and swore in court that I had never even met or heard of my accuser, many in the general public believed me, especially because my accuser refused to repeat her accusation to the media. She made it only behind the so-called “litigation privilege,” which protects false accusations made in court filings from defamation suits.⁵ They also believed me because I produced all my travel and other records during the period Giuffre knew Epstein, which proved I couldn’t have been in the exotic places—including Epstein’s Caribbean island and New Mexico ranch—where she falsely claimed to have had sex with me. Any doubts about the accuracy of these records was resolved when the former Director of the FBI reviewed them and concluded that “the totality of evidence found during the investigation refutes the allegation made against Professor Dershowitz.” Even Giuffre’s own lawyer, after reviewing my documents, concluded that it would have been “impossible” for me to have been on the island and ranch during the relevant time period, and that his client was “wrong . . . simply wrong” in accusing me. She must have confused me with someone else, he surmised.6

Then it turned out that Giuffre had been paid $160,000 by the Daily Mail to accuse several men, including President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and his then-wife Tipper of having been entertained by Epstein on his notorious island. She provided the Mail with detailed accounts of their visits, including a claim that Clinton had been flown to the island with his Secret Service contingent on a helicopter piloted by a woman who had just received her license, and that he had dinner with two underage “very innocent looking” girls. The problem with her story is that Secret Service and other records prove that none of the three had ever been on Epstein’s island. It’s also difficult to imagine a president being allowed to fly with an inexperienced pilot. Giuffre had simply made up the entire story for money, just as she made up the entire story about me.

It also turned out that Giuffre lied about her age and was well above the age of consent when she claims she was trafficked by Epstein. She originally claimed she was 14 when she first met Epstein and she vividly “remembered” celebrating her sweet 16th birthday with Epstein⁷, but her own employment records conclusively proved she was 17 when she first met Epstein and her own statements show that she was close to 19 when she claimed Epstein “started to ask [her] to ‘entertain’ his friends.” She later admitted these facts but said it was an honest mistake rather than a lie⁸, despite her vivid, if demonstrably false, recollection about how she spent her sweet 16th birthday. Nonetheless, the media continues to refer to her as underage and to anyone who she claims had sex with her as a pedophile.

Exposing Giuffre’s lies about her age is not intended to suggest that a 19-year-old cannot be abused by older men. It is intended only to case doubt upon her credibility with regard to her false claims against me. If she was, in fact, abused by others, she would be a victim even if she was above the age of consent. But her own Florida lawyer has cast doubt about whether she was forced to have sex with any prominent people.

The combined evidence of my innocence and her history of lying about her accusations and her age totally discredited her accusation against me.

It was not surprising, therefore, that the federal judge struck the accusation from the record as irrelevant and impertinent, and Giuffre’s lawyers admitted that it had been a “mistake” to file it.

The matter was closed. I was exculpated by the evidence. The media, even the notorious social media, stopped accusing me. Life was back to normal. I was still controversial politically, especially because as a liberal Democrat who had strongly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, I was now defending President Trump’s constitutional rights against those who would impeach or prosecute him. I wrote two controversial books on the subject and regularly appeared on TV. As a result, I became something of a pariah on Martha’s Vineyard, where former friends turned against me for defending the constitutional rights of a president they honestly believed was bad for the country and the world. I was repeatedly asked how I could defend the rights of a president I had voted against. Finally, my wife, who was getting bored with my complicated responses, got me a T-shirt that simply read: “It’s the constitution, stupid.” Wearing it didn’t make me any friends. Nor did my advocacy for Israel make me many friends on the hard left. But even those who shunned and despised me for my defense of Trump’s constitutional rights and my support for Israel did not believe that I had engaged in sexual misconduct.

My public life was more controversial than ever, but my private life returned to what it had been before the accusation against me had been proven totally false.

Then along came the #MeToo movement and everything changed. Although the evidence of my innocence only increased during this period⁹—and the evidence of my accuser’s mendacity also became more evident—the atmosphere changed dramatically. Evidence was no longer important. It was the accusation that mattered, as well as the identities of the accuser and accused. The presumption shifted from innocence to guilt. For a man to call a false accuser a liar became a political sin, even if the accused had hard evidence of the accuser’s lies, as I did. Much of the media, especially but not exclusively the social media, bought into the narrative of guilt by accusation instead of by proof. They refused to report on evidence of innocence that contradicted the narrative of guilt. For some an accusation of sexual guilt is so horrible that it must be true, regardless of the evidence. For others, it is irrelevant whether I did or did not have sex with Giuffre. I’m “guilty” of having defended Jeffrey Epstein, the porn star Harry Reems, the boxer Mike Tyson, and the football player O.J. Simpson, as well as having raised doubts about the credibility of some accusers. For these zealots, my history of defending a small number of accused rapists and wife-killers (even when combined with my history of representing many female victims) is enough to overcome any presumption of innocence or absence of evidence of guilt.

In my case, as we shall see in detail in the pages to come, documents that were unlawfully hidden by my accuser and her lawyers were discovered and unsealed: they left no doubt that I had been framed for money. They proved Giuffre had never even met me in 2011—three years before she falsely claimed that in 2001 and 2002 she had engaged in sex with me on seven occasions. In 2011, she essentially admitted, in an exchange of emails, that she never had sex with me. And in a book manuscript she authored, she said she saw me once when she was nearly 19, “convers[ing] about business” with Epstein, but she did not include me among the men she named as having had sex with.

Giuffre’s Florida lawyer, Bradley Edwards, also provided damning evidence that she lied about having been forced to have sex with many prominent people, including billionaire Leslie Wexner, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Senator George Mitchell, Ambassador Bill Richardson, and others. Edwards told a TV interviewer that based on his 11-year investigation, he does not believe that “any high profile people would be implicated,” and that Wexner wasn’t even aware of any sexual misconduct related to Epstein, and certainly didn’t participate in any. If that is true, then Giuffre committed perjury.

These smoking-gun documents and recorded statements—which will be quoted in full and discussed in subsequent chapters—were barely mentioned by some media and not at all by most. Following the arrest and apparent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the media became even less willing to publish documented information that cast any doubt on the accounts of Epstein victims. In the minds of some, including some in the media, the presumption, indeed the certainty, of guilt that flows from an accusation by a woman cannot be overcome by evidence or the lack thereof. Though there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the accusation against me—no photographs, no witnesses, no documents, no contemporaneous accusation—and though the accuser has a long history of falsely accusing prominent men, and though she communicated to her friends she did not have sex with me, and though her lawyer admitted she was “wrong,” the media persists in portraying me as possibly guilty.

The result of this media portrayal is that I am now presumed guilty—or at least suspect—and at age 81 my life and career are no longer being honored but dishonored. An obituary writer for the Washington Post called to tell me that he was drafting my obituary, which would include references to the accusation.¹⁰ All this because of a demonstrably false accusation by a woman with a long history of lying.

* * *

If my evidence is not enough to overcome the current presumption of guilt by accusation, will any falsely accused person ever be able to prove his innocence?

I decided to write this book to address this question head on. Its title derives from a “demand” made by TV personality Meghan McCain that I not be allowed on TV because I was “accused” of sexual misconduct in the Epstein matter. The fact that I have disproved this false accusation is irrelevant to her. An accusation is enough to establish guilt in her mind and in that of other like-minded members of the media.

The current media cannot be trusted to tell the full story of a well-documented false accusation in this age of #MeToo and Epstein. As I will show, those few journalists who even try to be fair are accused of undermining the #MeToo movement.

So here is my story. I invite the readers to apply their critical skills to my evidence and arguments. I am confident that any fair assessment of the evidence and lack thereof will lead to only one conclusion: my accuser made up the entire false account to frame me for money and I am completely innocent. I know that for some, that will not be enough. I am writing this book despite my realization that it will probably be read largely by those who already know I’m innocent or who have an open mind about the issue. I have no expectation of opening the closed minds of zealots who believe that sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even total innocence should not be accepted as a defense.

I write as well for readers in future generations who may be more interested in the truth than some in the #MeToo generation seem to be. I write for my children, my grandchildren and their children. And I write to establish the historical and evidentiary record of my innocence. Eventually the pendulum will swing back to truth, and when it does, the documentation of my innocence will be available to those who care about what actually happened—and didn’t happen.

Some friends and relatives have urged me not to write this book, because it will only continue the focus on the false accusation against me. They argue, quite persuasively, that the less attention paid to the accusation, the more likely the story will “go away.” But it is not my goal to make the story “go away.” My goal is to disprove it, categorically and definitively, until there is no lingering doubt in the minds of all fair and open-minded people.

They also argue that it is a fool’s errand to try to “prove a negative”—namely, that I did not have sex with my accuser. It is, to be sure, a daunting challenge, but I accept it. If Giuffre had falsely accused me of having sex with her once in New York, it would have been nigh impossible to disprove that conclusively, even though it is untrue. But she foolishly accused me of having sex with her seven times in places her own lawyer admitted it would have been “impossible” for me to have been during the relevant time period. That, combined with her own implicit admissions—in the emails and manuscript—have made it possible for me to prove the negative.

Others have argued that my persistent claims of total innocence make me sound guilty. But if I remained silent—or simply issued a rote denial—some would say that my refusal to defend myself makes me “sound guilty.” It’s a no-win situation in the age of #MeToo. So I will continue to assert and prove my innocence—regardless of what some will say. All victims should speak out. Victims of sexual abuse as well as victims of false accusations of sexual abuse.

Finally, some have criticized me for calling my false accusers liars and perjurers, claiming that I am trying to “silence” victims of abuse. But it is my false accusers and their allies who have been trying to silence me, by calling me a pedophile and then saying that “accused” pedophiles should not have access to the media. They are also trying to silence me by threatening to sue and actually suing me for defamation if I defend myself against their false accusation in the court of public opinion.

To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson: If my accusers stop lying about me, I will stop telling the truth about them.

Hence this book.

 

1 For a description of my cases and career, see The Best Defense (1982), Chutzpah (1991) and Taking the Stand (2013).

2 See, Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank, 1894-1915 (1992). I write about the Leo Frank and Scottsboro trials in “America on Trial” (2004), pp. 218-226; 276-282

3 Alex Beam, Alan Dershowitz Takes the Stand, Boston Globe, Oct. 3, 2013.

4 Alan M. Dershowitz, Reversal of Image: Watching Someone Playing Yourself, New York Times, Oct. 14, 1990.

5 As Judge Jose Cabranes recently put it, “Our legal process is already susceptible to abuse. Unscrupulous litigants can weaponize the discovery process to humiliate and embarrass their adversaries. Shielded by the ‘litigation privilege,’ bad actors can defame opponents in court pleadings or depositions without fear of lawsuit and liability. Unfortunately, the presumption of public access to court documents has the potential to exacerbate these harms to privacy and reputation by ensuring that damaging material irrevocably enters the public record.” Brown v. Maxwell, No. 18-2868 (2d Cir. 2019).

6 These documents are quoted in subsequent chapters and reproduced in the Appendices.

7 On April 7, 2011, Giuffre told a lawyer that she was born on August 9, 1983, and that she first met Epstein “around June of 1998,” which would have put her age at 14 years, 10 months. That was a lie. She didn’t meet him until—at the earliest—mid-summer 2000, when she turned 17. She was also asked during that interview about several people associated with Epstein who might “have relevant information about Jeffrey’s taking advantage of underage girls.” When my name was offered, she said “yes.” Of course, I would have such information, since I was one of Epstein’s lawyers and such information was part of his guilty plea. I did not know of any of Epstein’s unlawful activities before I became his lawyer. In this conversation, she did not accuse me of doing anything improper.

8 In a recent interview with NBC News, Roberts said, “When you are abused, you know your abuser. I might not have my dates right, I might not have my times right… but I know their faces and I know what they’ve done to me.” Dateline NBC, Sept. 20th, 2019.

9 I had been warned that if I didn’t withdraw a bar complaint I had filed against Giuffre’s lawyers, they would get another woman to accuse me. The woman they found—who falsely claimed I had engaged in a threesome with her when she was 22 years old—admitted that she had “invented” false accusations against Epstein associates and others in order to frighten Epstein. She also invented the story about me, which was quickly discredited. More on this in subsequent chapters.

10 As Slate explained the process, “[N]ews organizations prepare so-called “advancers” in one of three situations: The subject is so famous that the paper would be embarrassed not to have an immediate package in the event of an untimely death; the subject is old or sick; or the subject is “at risk”—i.e., he’s a drug addict or a stunt biker.” Christopher Beam, Early Deadlines: How Far in Advance Do Newspapers Write Obituaries?, Slate, August 27, 2009. I hope I belong to the first rather than the second or third category.