Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz derailed a Fox News segment on Monday evening when he claimed The New Yorker’s editor relies on “neo-Nazi sources” and “makes up facts.”
Dershowitz, who has become one of President Donald Trump’s fiercest media defenders, was initially brought on Fox News’ Hannity to discuss the latest developments in the president’s impeachment. The famed attorney, however, quickly became distracted when guest host Dan Bongino played a clip of New Yorker editor David Remnick.
“You showed David Remnick before saying, ‘The world is coming to an end,’” Dershowitz said. “I have to comment about that because David Remnick is the problem today. He is the poster child for what is wrong with the media. He makes up facts.”
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Dershowitz went on to claim that Remnick made up a story about Dershowitz’s family that he got from a “neo-Nazi Holocaust denial website” and that Remnick “never sent it to a fact-checker to check and published it as fact.”
The New Yorker article the one-time Jeffrey Epstein lawyer is referring to is a lengthy and unflattering profile, posted online in late July, that revealed Dershowitz has argued the age of consent should be 15 and that he’s obsessed with men “wrongfully accused” of rape.
“The New Yorker has the lowest ratio of credibility to apparent credibility of any media in the country,” Dershowitz added. “Nobody should take anything that The New Yorker says under David Remnick’s leadership seriously. He just makes up facts and uses neo-Nazi sources to source his facts.”
This isn’t the first time Dershowitz has made such an accusation about the magazine. Twelve days before The New Yorker published its profile of him, he wrote an op-ed for far-right website Newsmax complaining that The New Yorker was about to publish a “hit piece” against him and that the writer admitted to using an anti-Semitic site “as the original source for claiming in her article that I abused my first wife and ‘stripped’ her of custody of my two sons.” (A spokesperson for The New Yorker previously denied to Vox that the website Dershowitz cited played any part in its story’s sourcing.)
The article in question highlights Dershowitz’s acrimonious divorce proceedings, which includes initial findings from the judge that Dershowitz “negatively affected the plaintiff’s health to the extent that she required medical treatment and briefly some psychiatric therapy.” Eventually, after reviewing tape recordings of the separated couple’s phone conversations that featured Dershowitz’s first wife speaking to him in “the most disparaging terms,” the judge awarded Dershowitz custody of the children.
At the end of the Fox News segment, fellow guest Joe Concha quipped that he would like to see Dershowitz and Remnick “in an alleyway somewhere,” prompting Dershowitz to say he’d love to debate the editor on TV to “expose him as the fraud he is and the careless fact-checker that he is.”
