Well, the hit piece is out, and though my threats seem to have watered it down a bit (no reference to my penchant for nude beaches), it’s still plenty nasty, painting me as a legal whore/publicity hound/status obsessive who might be guilty of sex trafficking.
Dershowitz, according to longtime friends, has an enduring fascination with fame, society, and wealth. Charles Fried, a distinguished jurist who taught with Dershowitz at Harvard Law School, told me, “If you get a chance to go to fancy places with lots of rich people and fly around on private planes – I think he probably finds that hard to resist.”
That makes me sound superficial. Do you know what Jeffrey Epstein read in prison?
While he was in jail, a friend asked what he was reading. ‘De Profundis,’ he replied, referring to the letter Oscar Wilde wrote from prison to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas.
From the depths! From the depths! I’m attracted to wealth, sure; but my wealthy friends are deep.
Okay. So this from Lawrence Tribe.
“He revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible.”
What? Like female genital mutilation? Someone has to defend the cutters – if we let the feds come after infant clits, the next thing you know they’ll be coming after infant foreskins.
Nancy Gertner:
“He has squandered his position as a Harvard law professor and a civil libertarian – for the sole purpose of being on TV.”
See the Fried comment above. I’m certainly not squandering it solely to be on tv. There’s money and status at stake.
A New York magazine article about Alan Dershowitz features this photograph [scroll down] of then-Harvard prez Lawrence Summers, Jeffrey Epstein, and Dershowitz at a “dinner Epstein hosted in 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” Look at the setting. Look at the restaurant. Any fellow Cambridge denizens recognize it?
Let me help you. Look at this photograph.
Note the same purple couch. The place is the (now defunct) Upstairs on the Square, where you “feel like you’re walking into Alice In Wonderland,” and where very young girls being taken out to tea are everywhere.
Nice, huh? I mean, where else would Jeffrey Epstein go out to dinner with Summers and Dershowitz?
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.
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UD thanks Andrew.
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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.
In those days I followed around pretty close to Epstein, yeah… Just watching! Totally keeping my underpants on, but always in a corner somewhere observing like Boswell to his uh Johnson and look don’t tell me Life of Samuel Johnson wouldn’t have been a shitload more readable if he’d had the kind of access I had to Jeffrey.
So just to get this series started: The Italian. THE ITALIAN. Since she’s already spilled the beans, I can add what I saw.
She was 21 then – way too old for Epstein, but maybe it was a slow day for him because just as she describes it her modeling agent sent her there she thought for work (not sex work) and she comes into the room – I’m in the corner reading Baby’s Bris and first it looks like he’s interviewing her and then he takes all his clothes off! He lies down on the massage table and hands her a vibrator! I’m being very quiet and wondering does he want to watch her use it on herself or is she supposed to… I don’t know… vibrate him? But these idle thoughts were suddenly interrupted when she takes the thing, looks kind of confused, and throws it at him!
In her account, she then blacks out for awhile and when she comes to she runs out of the room and out of the mansion… So what happened while she was blacked out was Epstein sighs, lowers the vibrator to the floor, grabs his cell phone and calls LARRY SUMMERS to make final arrangements about a Harvard science conference he was sponsoring on Pedophile Island! I had to admire the guy. From one to the other like that.
The Italian chick is gone, he’s finished the call, and here’s Epstein still buck naked but with an ex-erection. “Larry wants me to put my name on another institute at Harvard,” he said, “but I hesitate.”
“Why, Jeffrey?”
One of his fingers moved along his chiseled cheekbone.
Whether it’s high-profile Harvard University donor Jeffrey Epstein, repeatedly harassed by the courts simply for being a success, or vice chair of the Columbia University board of trustees Noam Gottesman, pilloried in the press simply for trying to get around in the big city, hedge fund managers are notoriously dissed — and not merely in this country.
an investigation into whether Gottesman built a helipad on his property without permission. The probe began after several locals complained about [celebrity] flights into and out of the estate, which they say often occur early in the morning or late at night.
The authority is also looking into whether part of Gottesman’s estate has been turned into residential space without approval.
“No planning permission has been granted for a permanent helipad on the land,” a spokesman for the Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council said. “We have visited the site and met with the owners’ representatives and the enforcement case remains open.”
You can see why Columbia University found the civic values of Gottesman so compelling that they promoted him to vice chair of their board of trustees.
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.
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[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.
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“Harvard should be ashamed of [Dershowitz’s] association with it.”
