July 30th 2019

By sublr (of the Daily Kos community)

Daily Kos

Dershowitz has the dubious honor of having had both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump as clients. He’s also been accused by at least one of Epstein’s victims of having abused her:

In December, 2014, Giuffre set up a foundation, Victims Refuse Silence, to help survivors of sexual abuse and trafficking. The same month, she filed a motion to join the suit. She claimed that Epstein had abused her, and had trafficked her to powerful friends. She named three: Jean-Luc Brunel, a modelling agent; Prince Andrew; and Alan Dershowitz. She asserted that she’d had sex with Dershowitz at least six times, in Epstein’s various residences, on his island, in a car, and on his plane. When I asked why she had decided to name Dershowitz, she said, “Jeffrey got away with it, basically. And Dershowitz was one of the people who enabled that to happen.” She went on, “Dershowitz thinks he’s a tyrant and can get away with anything. And I wanted to say, I might be as meek as a mouse, but I’m going to hold you accountable.” — www.newyorker.com/...

The New Yorker article provides a lot of background on Dershowitz’s relationship with Epstein and the accusations against him. But what seems to have struck many as a remarkable coincidence is an Op-Ed Dershowitz published in 1997, which seems to have gone largely unnoticed till this week. The New York reports that Dershowitz had met Epstein and begun traveling with him, the year before (1996).

In a 1997 op-ed, Dershowitz argued against statutory-rape laws, writing that “there must be criminal sanctions against sex with very young children, but it is doubtful whether such sanctions should apply to teenagers above the age of puberty, since voluntary sex is so common in their age group.” He suggested that 15 “was a reasonable age of consent, no matter how old the partner was,” according to Bruck. [...]

When he began helping attorneys hired by Jeffrey Epstein, Dershowitz assailed the character of the dozens of young women who accused Epstein of abuse. Bruck reports he “presented a selection of posts from MySpace, in which the girls recounted experiences with alcohol or marijuana … as evidence that the girls were ‘not to be believed.’” He was especially focused on an accuser identified as “A.H.,” who said Epstein had promised to help her get into NYU, and included snapshots from her social media accounts. “She, herself, has chosen to go by the nickname of ‘pimp juice’ and the site goes on to detail, including photos, her apparent fascination with marijuana,” Dershowitz wrote in a letter to detectives, which he claims someone else composed. — www.thecut.com/...

Posted with permission