… is already notorious for his … unsavory legal and writing career… and, most recently, for his full-throated defense of female genital mutilation. He spends much of his distinguished-retirement time denying having taken part in an underage sex slave ring — indeed denying having had sex with one or more of said underage sex slaves. And here’s an updated snapshot from a life well-lived:
In 2015, the ABC News team of Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with [alleged sex slave Virginia] Giuffre. In a sequence of events confirmed by the network, producers paid for Giuffre and her family to fly from Colorado, where they lived, to New York City and put them up at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Central Park South. Robach and her news crew interviewed Giuffre on tape for more than an hour about Epstein and his entourage.
“At the time, in 2015, Epstein was walking around a free man, comparing his criminal behavior to stealing a bagel,” Giuffre writes in an email to NPR. “I really wanted a spotlight shone on him and the others who acted with him and enabled his vile and shameless conduct against young girls and young women.”
“I viewed the ABC interview as a potential game-changer,” she writes. “Appearing on ABC with its wide viewership would have been the first time for me to speak out against the government for basically looking the other way and to describe the anger and betrayal victims felt.“
The story never aired. And Giuffre has said she was never directly told why.
ABC News would not detail its editorial choices.
One ABC News staffer with knowledge of events says the network received a call from one of Epstein’s top lawyers: Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. And Giuffre and her lawyers placed great significance on that call.
Dershowitz had been part of the powerhouse legal team that earlier kept Epstein from facing serious federal charges in Florida, which also included former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr and renowned Miami defense attorney Roy Black.
Dershowitz tells NPR he intervened after learning ABC was on the brink of broadcasting its interview with Giuffre. He says he believes he spoke with two producers and a lawyer within the same 24-hour period.
“I did not want to see [Giuffre’s] credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz says.
In a December 2014 court filing in another accuser’s lawsuit, Giuffre had alleged Dershowitz was among the prominent men Epstein had instructed her to have sex with when she was a teenager. In early 2015, Dershowitz had rejected her account out of hand in his own court filings. (The nature of his denials were such that Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation earlier this year. Dershowitz has asked the court to dismiss that lawsuit.)
I think we can all understand Dershowitz’s frantic desire to shut Giuffre up. He continues to try intimidation and lawsuits and all and he’s obviously had some success. Wonder for how much longer.
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UPDATE: Mulling over Alan Dershowitz’s life, UD thinks he can continue to make a contribution to Harvard University by appearing… not as a guest lecturer, but as … a kind of exemplar… in Michael Sandel’s famous discussion of Kantian ethics. Students may gaze upon and ask questions of a human being who has, apparently all his life and quite consistently, used people as means rather than ends. If reports are to be believed, he has done this in a myriad of ways for sixty years to achieve the classic payoffs: money, sex, power.
Could Sandel coax him to speak honestly? I think yes. After all, he will die pretty soon (he’s eighty) and he’s basically gotten away with it, so you have to figure he’s proud. It can be done – a life of cruel self-seeking – and this is the moment, if there’s going to be a moment, when he takes a public victory lap.
It’s tempting to forget him. But a man who successfully defends female genital mutilators, and who calls critics of circumcision Nazis is just asking for it. Here’s hoping he gets it, via his beloved friend Jeffrey Epstein.
Michelle Goldberg calls it “plutocratic rot,” yet another instance (didn’t we just finish washing the taste of Paul Manafort out of our mouths?) of “a deep corruption among mostly male elites across parties, and the way the very rich can often purchase impunity for even the most loathsome of crimes.” (Cue The Great Gatsby.) Speaking of which, we “can expect the feds to add child-pornography charges” to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking indictment. Great.
As longtime readers know, UD‘s go-to international source of truly madly deeply necrotically fulminating all-male plutocratic putrescence is FIFA, world’s most gangrenous gang; but there’s so much more (can you imagine what underage orgies are like in female-slave-state Saudi Arabia)? “Epstein successfully wielded his nearly incomprehensible money and power to influence the decision at the highest levels,” and the Saudis and the soccer boys are similarly financially incomprehensible.
So now all the bad boys go crying to the wings, Acosta, Dershowitz, Mountbatten-Windsor, Clinton (the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Clinton – No One Left to Lie To – turns out to have been premature. Plentymore people to lie to!), etc., etc.
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Keep your mind in hell and do not despair, says St. Silouan, and these are fuckin wise words, okay? OKAY????
… b – b – b – but… how do we live them, UD?
Oh, stop blubbering. It’s different for everyone. I can tell you what works for me, but it might not work for you.
Fifty minutes of brisk aqua jogging per day, immediately followed by v. hot whirlpool and then sauna; obsessively listening to Pavarotti singing A Te, O Cara; careful perusal of The Onion; daily readings from the Gospel of Cioran.
Yesterday the highest ranking priest in Australia; today the highest ranking in France. Whether sexually attacking children or protecting the sexual attackers of children, the Catholic church, at its highest levels, looks debauched – like something out of de Sade.
As I mentioned, I’m giving the Committee today copies of a letter I sent at Mr. Trump’s direction threatening these schools with civil and criminal actions if Mr. Trump’s grades or SAT scores were ever disclosed without his permission.
The irony wasn’t lost on me at the time that Mr. Trump in 2011 had strongly criticized President Obama for not releasing his grades. As you can see in Exhibit 7, Mr. Trump declared “Let him show his records” after calling President Obama “a terrible student.”
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It’s fine to be embarrassed or just want to be private about your grades; other presidents have refused to release theirs. Our current president has threatened legal action.
.. and you can go to school there! The last time this blog glanced at the University of Louisiana Monroe, in 2010, it quoted a member of the campus community complaining that “We spend a disproportionate amount of money on academics.” At the expense of…? Hey whaddaya think… Athletics adds so much to the… ambiance… of Monroe:
[ULM football player] Kerry Starks, 21, grabbed Abriona Kirt, 26, by the throat with both hands and attempted to drag her out of Hammers nightclub in Monroe by the hair. He also allegedly caused an estimated $400 in property damage by punching out the rear windshield of Kirt’s vehicle with both hands.
Kirt was also placed into custody by Monroe Police after police say she pepper sprayed Starks in the back of the head while he was in handcuffs. Both subjects appeared to be intoxicated …
Corey O’Hern, director of Undergraduate Programs for the Sackler Institute and a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, emphasized the importance of the Institute in fostering collaboration between departments at Yale. According to O’Hern, there is a lack of grants supporting such research on the national level. “The funding, independent where it’s from, has been crucial to developing this interdisciplinary research and training,” said O’Hern. “The thought of it going away is scary, stressful and sad.”
Corey? Do you know what Yale’s currently hoarding in its endowment? Do you know that your university sits on thirty billion dollars? If you don’t realize that Yale doesn’t need Sackler money, I find that scary, stressful and sad. Just ask Andrew Kolodny:
Despite benefits from the Sackler Institute, Kolodny maintained that Yale has a moral impetus to rename the program. “Yale University, if they are taking money from the Sacklers, they are taking blood money,” Kolodny argued. “That money came from the marketing of the Sackler family’s activities which led to millions of people becoming addicted and thousands of people dying.”
“I think Yale University can afford to give the Sacklers back their money,” he added.
‘… David Blight, a history professor and a member of the committee … said the Sackler program is just one of many potentially unsavory names at Yale. The renaming of Yale Commons as the Schwarzman Center following a donation from Stephen Schwarzman ’69, a private equity manager who served briefly on one of President Donald Trump’s business advisory councils, also spurred contention on campus this year. [UD wouldn’t take his name off a building for that reason; but surely Yale could find gross shit out about Schwarzman unrelated to Trump…]
“The reality is, as you know, this is how major universities function. Almost everything here has someone’s name on it,” said Blight. “My first reaction, I’m afraid, is skepticism, because behind great wealth there is always going to be an awkward story. Behind great wealth there will be a crooked path of some type, whether that wealth was made in fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, real estate or finance.”’
Yes, it’s icing on the cake that the guy’s name is Blight.
He doth speak the truth. Almost all the major moneybags – David Rockefeller comes to mind as one of the highest-profile, at Harvard – are unsavory, and plenty of them go beyond that, well in the direction of Sackler criminality. I mean, Steven Cohen? Pretty much anyone at Yeshiva University? Don’t get me started. Blight’s right that going down that road means noisy incessant sandblasting.
When it’s a way of life in two communities, you get these amusing outcomes.
Controversy swirling around the [amnesty] program [offered to the welfare-fraud-ridden Orthodox Lakewood New Jersey community] has not waned in the last year.
In October, the Asbury Park Press revealed that despite [New Jersey Comptroller Philip J.] Degnan’s public statements that the program would recover all benefits wrongly paid to residents, it recouped less than half and left $2.6 million on the table.
Degnan said he did not know until the final days of the amnesty offer that a rogue employee was offering discounted repayment terms to residents.
But confidential documents obtained by the Press say at least four employees and top-level managers in the office knew and signed off on the negotiated settlements.
The employee who led the amnesty program, Andrew Poulos Jr., claims in an ongoing lawsuit he was fired last year and made a scapegoat for the program while his superiors, who also knew about the deal making, were allowed to continue working. The superiors denied knowing about the discounts, the comptroller’s office has said.
