Vivia Chen was there. (Background here.)
If [Judge Loretta] Preska’s deployment of sarcasm is any indication, I’d say that the Dershowitz team should be sweating. The judge asked pointed questions to both sides but I thought she was a lot more skeptical of the arguments that Dershowitz’s legal team was putting forward.
A number of times, Preska said to Dershowitz’s lawyers, Howard Cooper and Imran Ansari, about their arguments, “I don’t get it.” For instance, Preska asked why Dershowitz failed to raise the conflict issue about Boies Schiller’s representation of [Virginia] Giuffre in previous litigations related to the Epstein matter, though the professor made noises about doing so. (Dershowitz claims that Boies Schiller has a conflict because its partner Carlos Sires had offered to represent him after Giuffre accused the professor of sexual abuse, and that he had sent the firm confidential information as a result.)
When Dershowitz’s lawyer Ansari argued that he’s now raising the conflict issue because he’s being directly sued for defamation, Preska was unimpressed and shot back, “What difference should that make?”
Nor was she impressed by Ansari’s suggestion that Boies Schiller used dirty tactics. “Why are you telling me this?” Preska asked. “I don’t care.”
And she seemed even more unconvinced that Dershowitz had established a client/lawyer relationship with Boies Schiller that would merit the firm’s disqualification. She noted that when told by Sires that the firm could not represent him, Dershowitz replied in an email: “Darn. I was really hoping that you could come on board.”
Preska hammered away at that response.
“It’s the subjunctive,” she said. “He’s not writing back and saying, ‘Holy Moly, you said you’d represent me.’ He’s saying, ‘I was hoping you could do it.’”
At that point, Ansari looked stumped. He reminded me of myself as a law student during moot court. Scared.