The Martha’s Vineyard library wars rage on. My headline is from 2022; this year, the female genital mutilator’s best friend has again been dissed by his bookish neighbors and is again screaming about how he doesn’t care that he’s been frozen out of the island’s book fair because he’s so great and but but but he’s going to sue the library for a quadrillion dollars anyway and shut it down forever so the elderly matrons of the Vineyard will have to find someplace else to volunteer haha.
He says the maltreatment’s cuz he’s all in with Trump and all; but really if you’re looking for reasons to dissociate from an unacceptably malsain person, Dershowitz offers so much more than that, from his way-close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein to his eager legal defense of some of the scuzziest humanoids on the planet. This is a man who calls Germans who oppose male circumcision Nazis. He has weathered years of being accused of plagiarism. He has just been sanctioned. Etc. When it comes to reasons to cancel Dershowitz, take your pick.
Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey E. Epstein who for years maintained that the law professor Alan Dershowitz sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, settled a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Dershowitz on Tuesday, and said that she may have made a mistake in accusing him…
The joint statement also included comments from Mr. Dershowitz, who commended Ms. Giuffre for her courage in saying she may have been mistaken.
You remember Shleifer.
Some U.S. neoliberal advisers to Russia in [the Yeltsin] era even served as role models for [oligarchic] corruption. A personal adviser to [Anatoly] Chubais was Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and tenured Harvard professor, who ran the Moscow office of the Harvard Institute for International Development, which had the main Russia contract from USAID. Shleifer was prosecuted in 1997, after it was revealed his wife operated a hedge fund that speculated in privileged information based on Shleifer’s official work. Harvard paid fines totaling $26.5 million to settle the case, and Shleifer paid $2 million.
Shleifer must be buddies with a lot of the guys now being blacklisted all over the world. Is there a story there?
You got our traveling band of secret clit slashers out of trouble once; but now the feds are after us again with a whole new set of charges! Alan, as pious as we, understands that God wants – demands! – circumcision as much for our girl babies as for our boy babies, and he put his whole heart and soul into our first trial. Our worry is that Alan’s personal struggle against sex trafficking charges will make him less available than he was before. But our hope is based upon the fervency of his defense of child circumcision.
Renowned for his successful defense of a career genital mutilator in Michigan, Dershowitz should have no trouble successfully defending an Israeli burial society that barred a family from their father’s/husband’s funeral because some of the people who wanted to bury him were women.
Talia, Omer, and Stav’s father passed away four months ago. When they arrived at the cemetery to say their final goodbyes to their father, they were barred from participating equally in the funeral. The local hevra kadisha – burial society – wouldn’t let the family eulogize their father. When a representative of the hevra kadisha tore their brother’s shirt as a sign of mourning, the daughters were told to do it later, at home. And when it came time for the funeral procession, Talia, Omer, Stav, and their mother were warned to remain behind and not follow their father’s body to the graveside. They ignored the warning and were met with yelling: “Women move aside!”, “Don’t mix women and men!”, and “Women shouldn’t be here!”
The sisters felt that their chance to say goodbye to their father was ruined. They turned to us, and last week we filed a lawsuit against the town in which the funeral was held demanding 268,496 NIS (approx. $76,000) in damages for preventing Talia, Omer, Stav, and their mother from participating in their father’s funeral.
... It is illegal to force gender segregation or exclude women from … funeral procession[s] … [B]urial societies must not impose segregation unless the family requests it.
… which is so unDershlike; but maybe he – in the face of newly-released documents accusing him of sex with an underage trafficked girl – has decided to take Elizabeth Dye’s advice and shut up.
A strange man, Harvard’s Dersh. No one in public life brings more passion to the defense of genital mutilation (male and female); and few in public life stand so starkly accused of repeated sex with a minor on a privately owned island reportedly given over to orgies. A strange melange of real and alleged enthusiasms. A strange person to represent more prominently than anyone else Harvard Law School.
I’ve disproved it more than anyone’s ever disproved an allegation… Nobody in history has ever disproved a case as convincingly as I have.
But hyuk I mean if you’re gonna go down that road re Jeffrey Epstein’s BFF…!
Hell hath no fury like Harvard’s most famous professor scorned. Judge Preska has rejected Dershowitz’s hilarious claims about his right to savage to his heart’s content one of his buddy Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slaves; in response, this hero of the pro-female genital mutilation movement is reportedly calling on his grateful clients to have a go at Preska.
*******************
Jonathan Turley:
Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz once dared his accusers to sue him in the ongoing controversy over his role in the alleged abuse of underaged girls in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. One did just that. Virginia Giuffre has claimed that she was forced to have sex as an underaged girl with friends and acquaintances of Epstein, including Dershowitz. Dershowitz called her a liar on multiple occasions. She sued him for defamation and U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in New York has rejected Dershowitz’s motion to dismiss and held that Dershowitz will have to face a trial on her claims. Former judge Paul Cassell has also leveled charges against Dershowitz as one of the abusers.
… Dershowitz will now face a full trial that will focus on whether the allegations of his abuse of the underaged girl was clearly a lie. Truth is a defense to defamation, but that will require a full airing of the underlying allegations. It is the trial that Dershowitz had publicly called for but later sought to avoid through a motion to dismiss.
The 81-year-old Harvard Law School professor angrily poked the defense table — where he sat alongside his pack of five lawyers — passed notes to his attorneys and seemed to argue with them every time one of them jumped up to address the judge.
He’s in a courtroom, and very angry, because he’s being sued for libel by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slaves. The brilliant jurist’s defense against claims that he has called the former sex slave – who says she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz – a serial liar, a prostitute, an extortionist, and a lot of other not very nice things is that sure he said all that shit but it was a long time ago and the statute of limitations yadda yadda. But what about the fact that he said the same shit and worse about her very recently? Well, see, precisely cuz he said the same shit before, the same statue of limitations applies. So he can, in the judge’s words, “repeat potentially libelous statements for eternity”? Oh yes your honor, respond his attorneys; absolutely. For eternity…
Er, but this interpretation of the law gives people “license to be serial defamers,” the other side points out to the judge, who seems to agree. Hence Dersh’s angry table poking…
******************
‘Course he wouldn’t be in this tight spot were it not for his much earlier alleged poking…
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.
… but you’re not focusing on what really excites me. Not so much How soon can we legally fuck them? But How soon can we cut off their clits?
Too bad, by the way, the burqa is legal here. I’d love for my legal career to go out in a blaze of glory (I’m eighty!) by defending parents who have not only genitally eviscerated their eight year old daughters but forced them to wear face and body shrouds!
What else can we do to little girls? Down, wanton, down!
*********************
By the way — Elie Honig thinks just because he’s handsome and decades younger and all over tv he can write HAVE YOU LOST YOUR DAMN MIND? to me and I’ll just sit there and take it. That’s what he thinks.
**********************
Oh, and I also have a boner to pick with Joe Patrice at Above the Law:
The problem [with Dershowitz] isn’t a warped view of how the law should treat girls, but a warped view of the law and women writ large.
Listen. I’ll put my perfect, perfect sex life up against his any day.
Harvard’s highest-profile professor – seen here in New York City – has titled his latest opinion piece J’ACCUSE, aligning himself with an earlier martyred victim of antisemitism. The difference is that when Émile Zola wrote his J’Accuse, Alfred Dreyfus had been condemned to lifelong penal servitude, whereas Dershowitz is accused of penile pervitude.
And the New Yorker article he’s attacking hasn’t come out yet; Dershowitz bases his J’Accuse on rumors he’s heard about it.
The pride of Harvard is a serial j’accuser, having used the same headline in a 2012 piece j’accusing all Germans who have a problem with male circumcision of being Nazis. He likes to talk about his underwear and his many enemies, most prominently the fourteen year old prostitutes out to get him and I dunno if I were Harvard University I’d really be asking myself at this point if I want the institution mentioned up front in every article about a mad filer of lawsuits who harbors a seriously misplaced martyr complex.
*************
UD thanks Andrew.
**************
And now Scathing Online Schoolmarm will take a closer look at Dershowitz’s latest J’Accuse.
Before she analyzes particular sentences, SOS would like to make a general statement about this curious little essay which attacks a non-existent article.
It doesn’t read as though a human being wrote it. It reads like something issued by the government of Oceania, a flaming piece of hackwork, and SOS wonders why this is. For all its nutty attacks on Nazi, Jew-hating Norway, Dershowitz’s J’Accuse #1 kind of read like him; you heard his authentic madhatterdom in every phrase. But listen to J’Accuse #2:
[E]very American should be outraged at this partisan effort by a giant of the media to stifle the marketplace of ideas by exploiting the past credibility of The New Yorker to try destroy the reputation of a public intellectual with whom they disagree... This is the latest weapon in the partisan warfare that divides our nation.
Doesn’t the traffic pile-up of cliches and the general odor of forced emotion suggest that Dershowitz palmed that day’s effort at self-defense off on an atelier of assistants? Tell ’em I’m gonna sue!! shouts Dershowitz into the phone, and the assistants oblige:
… The New Yorker picked on the wrong innocent victim, because I have the will and resources to fight back against the falsehoods [it] is directing at me and those who want hear my voice… The truth is my weapon in this war of words, and the truth is unequivocally on my side.
The problem with defense attorneys who’ve gotten rich defending really scummy people is that high-minded rhetoric isn’t a good look for them. (From comments on an article about Dershowitz’s latest yowl: “When the lawyer for Claus Von Bulow, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump says that he’s on the level, what choice do we have but to believe him?”) The truth is my weapon! says Joan of Arc and… Alan Dershowitz? It’s why a lot of what he writes sounds more like The Onion than Zola. The man doth protest too much, and protesting too much leads to suspicions that a person has something to hide.
So when, at the end of the piece, Dershowitz cites an anonymous source assuring him that for a still-non-existent New Yorker piece about him, the author did research, some of which landed her on disreputable websites, one is simply gobsmacked.
[She] trolled the internet and came across a neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial website called Rense.com, which both the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center have declared to be anti-Semitic. This site accused me of beating and murdering my first wife.
Why would you write this? Why would you bring it up? You are asking SOS to regard you as Joan of Arc/Alfred Dreyfus because someone you won’t identify told you the writer of an attack on you that doesn’t exist looked at a disreputable website while researching you?
It is UD/SOS‘s humble opinion that the wear and tear of a long and kinda icky public life has caught up with this guy. He’s not as agile as he once was. Harvard can expect a lot more embarrassment.
So that’s from a 2018 article in the Harvard Crimson – a fascinating article about Jeffrey Epstein’s and Harvard University’s long hard passionate fuck.
Still-highly-esteemed emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz (horny Jorge was eventually de-emeritized) seems to have been the, er, let’s use the polite term enabler, between money-hungry Harvard (when you only have forty billion dollars to your name, you’ll take your money from any scumbag) and sugar-daddy-in-search-of-reputation-laundering Epstein. The captain of the Lolita Express paid for at least one of Harvard’s larger erections (at Hillel! but then Epstein’s BFF Dershowitz is passionate about religious tradition), and gave all sorts of money to Harvard professors studying human evolution (also makes sense: a seemingly highly civilized man might want someone to explain his compulsion to sexually enslave 13 year olds).
Trump retains Acosta and Harvard retains Epstein’s money and Dershowitz retains his emeritus status. Love makes the world go ’round.
*******************
[C]ould Attorney General Bill Barr run interference on this case? Yes. He is the head of the whole Justice Department, even the “Sovereign” district as SDNY is sometimes playfully called. And while it pains me to say this, given Barr’s conduct in the past acting more as a defense attorney for Trump than an overseer of justice, I am concerned that Barr might interfere if he thought that Epstein might implicate Trump, who was friends with Epstein. Barr did say in his confirmation hearings that he might recuse himself on overseeing matters with respect to Epstein because of his (Barr’s) affiliation with a law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, which was part of the Florida plea debacle. Now would be a good time to know if Barr followed through on that.
*******************
“Harvard should be ashamed of [Dershowitz’s] association with it.”
Switzerland has put in jail a woman who had the genitals of both of her very young children slashed.
The judgement was based on a relatively new article in Swiss law which aims to prevent Swiss-based families from having their daughters circumcised, whether in Switzerland or abroad.
Al’s enthusiasm for the practice makes him a perfect hire for this mass-mutilator.