Amid fight over Jeffrey Epstein’s dark secrets, Dershowitz seeks access to sealed documents
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz is fighting to obtain secret court documents involving Jeffrey Epstein to use in a civil defamation lawsuit he has filed against a woman who claims she was forced to have sex with the flamboyant Harvard professor when she was a teen.
Lawyers for Virginia Giuffre, however, asked a federal judge on Tuesday to keep the documents out of Dershowitz’s hands, at least for now, because they fear he may incorporate the information into his defamation case out of context and possibly distort the information.
Judge Loretta Preska held a telephonic conference call to hear arguments for and against Dershowitz’s effort to obtain evidence that was collected in 2016 as part of an unrelated defamation suit that Giuffre brought against Epstein’s alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Tuesday’s hearing came against the backdrop of an ongoing Miami Herald lawsuit seeking to make all the records public in the Maxwell lawsuit. How Preska rules could have a bearing on whether the public learns more about Epstein’s circle of powerful, wealthy friends and whether they were either complicit in, had knowledge of or participated in his alleged sex trafficking operation.
Epstein was arrested almost a year ago, charged with sex trafficking by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. He was found dead in his federal prison cell last Aug. 10, and the New York medical examiner ruled his death was a suicide by hanging. He was 66.
A multimillionaire whose friends included former presidents, royalty and some of the world’s wealthiest men, Epstein was investigated in 2006 for allegedly molesting countless underage girls at his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. He hired a legal dream team that included a number of high-profile attorneys, including Dershowitz. He managed to receive an extraordinarily lenient plea deal in which he escaped a federal prison sentence, and received immunity from federal prosecution, along with a number of his alleged co-conspirators.
Giuffre, now 36, married and living in Australia, sued Dershowitz last year for defamation, and Dershowitz has countersued. The 81-year-old lawyer claims that he has never met Giuffre and has insisted that her allegations against him are part of an elaborate conspiracy involving one of her lawyers, famed New York lawyer David Boies. Among other things, Dershowitz theorizes that Boies and Giuffre cooked up the accusation against Dershowitz as a means to extort billionaire Les Wexner, one of Epstein’s clients.
The Herald was successful in obtaining some — but not all — of the documents in the Giuffre-Maxwell suit last year. Among the evidence still not released are the full transcripts of Giuffre’s depositions, in which she alleges she was sexually trafficked to several prominent men, including England’s Prince Andrew and Dershowitz.
Dershowitz’s lawyer, Howard Cooper, however, admitted in court Tuesday that they have obtained some of those sealed depositions, and Dershowitz, in court filings connected to the case, identified former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Wexner, owner of L Brands and Victoria’s Secret, as two of the people whom Giuffre has alleged she was trafficked to and named in her depositions.
Cooper tried to convince the court that he was seeking efficiency in asking for sealed documents from the Maxwell suit. But in a rare confluence of interests, multiple lawyers who would otherwise oppose each other were united in asking Preska, a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, to deny the celebrity lawyer access.
Maxwell’s attorney, Laura A. Menninger, took issue with Cooper’s suggestions that there was substantial overlap between Giuffre’s defamation case involving Maxwell and Dershowitz’s defamation action against Giuffre, labeling that “speculative.” It assumes, she said, that each witness [in the Maxwell case] was asked about Dershowitz and “I can represent that that is far from the case.”
Arguing on behalf of a mysterious John Doe, lawyer Nicholas J. Lewin was the most vocal, citing the need to protect the privacy of people who have not been publicly accused of wrongdoing. Dershowitz’s request was neither efficient nor proportional, he argued.
“It is frankly hard to imagine that the overlap is so significant that every single piece of paper … every significant page of discovery is relevant in one case because it exists in another case,” Lewin argued. He joined the Maxwell defamation suit in March 2019, offering a friend-of-the-court brief that supported efforts to keep those named by Giuffre in her deposition under seal and private. John Doe claims to be someone not publicly identified and insists that he had not had a sexual encounter with Giuffre.
Dershowitz has called Giuffre a serial liar, and has gone on a Twitter spree this week, angry about how he was portrayed in a Netflix show about the Epstein scandal.
Frequent television appearances and involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial have made Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard, a household name. He was also part of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense team.
One of Giuffre’s new attorneys for the Dershowitz case, Nicole J. Moss, also opposed sharing depositions that were taken in one case and using them for another. She did confirm, however, that she herself has had access to these depositions via Giuffre’s attorneys in the Maxwell case. This drew criticism from lawyers for Maxwell, Dershowitz and John Doe.
Judge Preska did not signal how she might rule, ending the roughly 45-minute hearing with a promise to get back to all parties in short order.
This story was originally published June 23, 2020 at 6:17 PM.
