On this morning’s episode of The Today Show, Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor and attorney to the ultra-rich, continued to deny allegations that he had sex with an underage girl at the home of New York financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Documents filed in Florida yesterday by the then-underage victim paint quite a different picture, though. In them, Prince Andrew and Dershowitz are accused of having sexual relations with the victim in 2001 when she was 17 and working as a “sex slave” for Epstein.
Details include claims that Prince Andrew had a sexual interest in feet, and that Dershowitz talked with Epstein while she performed a sex act on the lawyer.
During the interview on Today, Dershowitz, in addition to saying that he did not have sex with the underage girl, said that he had “never seen her … never met her. She is categorically lying and making the whole thing up.”
The court documents, however, include a statement from the victim in which she said that Dershowitz “is lying by denying that he had sex with her.”
Dershowitz continued to defend himself, saying that he is “afraid of nothing.”
“I am hiding nothing. She is afraid of revealing this in public. She is afraid of giving dates or specifics. I have been absolutely upfront in answering every question and the lawyers are lying through their teeth when they say I refused to be deposed. They’re hiding her. We sought to depose her.”
Saying that he knew he was going to be looked at as a “relevant witness” in the case, Dershowitz said that the sexual allegations involving him and the underage victim did not surface until last month. “This is Pinocchio’s nose growing longer and longer and longer.”
The documents filed are part of a civil suit brought against the US government by four of Epstein’s victims for violations of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. They say that Epstein was given a secret plea deal in 2008 without their being informed.
Dershowitz, of course, played a huge role in negotiating that plea agreement. Epstein served just 13 months of an 18-month prison sentence for solicitation of prostitution from minors, despite the Palm Beach Police Department (PBPD) identifying “17 local girls who had contact with Epstein before the age of consent,” The Daily Beast reported.
There were also accusations that Epstein had girls as young as 12 flown in from across the world. He would molest them and then put them on a plane back to wherever they had come from.
The agreement between Epstein and the Department of Justice states that Epstein and four members of his staff were investigated for “knowingly, in affecting interstate and foreign commerce, recruiting enticing and obtaining by any means a person, knowing that person has not yet obtained the age of 18 years and would be caused to engage in a commercial sex act.”
In other words, they were under investigation for child sex trafficking. And yet, somehow, Epstein managed to escape a lengthy prison sentence and get “blanket immunity for him and his co-conspirators from other federal charges,” Electronic Intifada reported. Basically, Dershowitz negotiated a plea deal that protects himself in addition to Epstein and others involved.
Many have accused Dershowitz of bullying the underage rape victims, their families, and even those officers on the PBPD who were investigating the case since the allegations first surfaced in 2005.
Once the PBPD started identifying victims, “Dershowitz began sending the detective Facebook and MySpace posts to demonstrate that some of these girls were no angels.”
Questioning the character of victims by going through their personal lives is almost tactic number one in the rape case playbook, but this was an especially dirty move in this scenario since the girls were all underage.
The two officers handling the investigation told The Daily Beast that they “were under surveillance for several months, without knowing who ordered it.” Victims in Florida also said that they and their families were being “followed and intimidated by private investigators who were then linked to” Epstein’s legal team.
Member’s of Epstein’s staff have testified that “Dershowitz stayed at Epsteins house during the years when Epstein was assaulting minor females on a daily basis,” and that “Dershowitz was at Epstein’s house at times when underage females where there being molested by Epstein.”
Click here to watch Dershowitz’s full interview on The Today Show.
