Alan Dershowitz, the attorney who secured the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein‘s so-called 2008 “sweetheart” non-prosecution deal when the financier was first charged with sex crimes, took to his YouTube and Rumble channels on Wednesday ahead of the release of court documents expected to link more individuals to Epstein. He titled this livestream “The Epstein list and guilt by association,” but it wasn’t long before he went on a tangential tirade about Israel and Hamas.
Dershowitz’s association with Epstein is well-established, and he acknowledged again in this online monologue that he had known Epstein in a personal capacity before representing him. “Of course I’m on the list,” Dershowitz said. “I was his lawyer. I flew on his plane with other lawyers several times for legal meetings in Florida and other proceedings.” He also reiterated that, along with his wife and daughter, he’d visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean shortly after Epstein had purchased it, but had seen nothing that led him to suspect his acquaintance of criminal activity.
The two men became necessarily closer, Dershowitz explained, when Epstein required his legal services to contend with charges of soliciting prostitution, including from someone under the age of 18. With Dershowitz’s counsel, Epstein was able to cut a plea deal that saved him from federal prosecution and allowed him daytime work release as he served a short jail sentence, though Dershowitz said Epstein “hated” the favorable arrangement. “In fact, he wouldn’t pay me my fee because he thought I had done a terrible, terrible job in getting him a plea bargain that required him to serve some time in jail, and also to register as a sex offender,” the attorney said in his livestream.
Dershowitz also repeated his wish to see all court documents pertaining to Epstein — those set to be unsealed come from a settled 2015 defamation suit brought against convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre — released for public review. Then he attempted to draw a bizarre analogy between the “list” of Epstein associates and a hypothetical list of feminist activists he excoriated for failing to condemn the militant group Hamas, which orchestrated a deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
“I want to list produce of radical feminists, people from the #MeToo movement, people who accuse others, people who believe that you should believe any woman,” Dershowitz said.
“Where is #MeToo?” Dershowitz continued. “#MeToo, but not if you’re a Jew? Is that what #MeToo is about?” he asked. The tirade continued: “Where are radical feminists? Where are those who think that the worst thing in the world is to be on an Epstein list, but it’s okay to rape and mutilate and behead and kidnap and murder innocent Israelis? “
Dershowitz went on to lament “that people can make false accusations with impunity without fear of being of being sued.” Earlier in the livestream, he had referenced how Giuffre had previously accused him of sexually abusing her when she was being trafficked by Epstein. She dropped a defamation case against him for accusing her of extortion and perjury last year, when she admitted she may have been mistaken in identifying him as one of her abusers. On that occasion, Dershowitz also took to his livestream to denounce the #MeToo movement. (Among the Maxwell documents being unsealed this week is an older statement from Dershowitz dismissing Giuffre’s original claims against him as pure fiction.)
“I have a rule,” he continued. “If you’re a radical feminist, and you haven’t in any way protested the rapes and murders and the beheadings and the sexual assaults […] then you have no credibility. Nobody should believe a word you say.”
All in all, Dershowitz needn’t have bothered with these strained and confusing parallels to the Epstein case or his involvement in it, except in the interest of discussing anything else. As he himself observed, the mere fact of being named in court documents related to an infamous criminal does not implicate someone in a crime. Of course, he’s always been one to talk in circles around the actual topic at hand.
