Editor's note: On August 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein died in an apparent jailhouse suicide. For more information, see The Daily Beast's reporting here.
Lawyer Alan Dershowitz claims an email buried in a mountain of just-unsealed court documents proves that one of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers lied when she said she was farmed out for sex with him as a teenager.
“I’ve been waiting for these emails to come out for months and they conclusively prove my innocence,” Dershowitz told The Daily Beast on Friday, adding that he is now asking federal prosecutors to investigate the accuser’s high-profile legal team.
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Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who claims Epstein made her a sex slave when she was just 16 years old, has also alleged that she was loaned out for sex with Dershowitz—saying in a 2016 deposition that she had once performed oral sex on the Harvard Law professor in a limo in Massachusetts, alongside Epstein and a young girl.
“The first time I recall having sex with Professor Dershowitz was in New York,” she testified at one point in that deposition. “The last time I remember having sex with him… I believe it was on an airplane.”
Dershowitz—who helped broker Epstein’s 2007 sweetheart plea deal—has vehemently denied sexual contact with Giuffre, waged a public war with her attorney David Boies, and insisted that he would be cleared when the court documents were unsealed.
That unsealing happened Friday morning when a tranche of filings from a defamation lawsuit Giuffre had filed against Epstein crony Ghislaine Maxwell was made public.
The pile of paperwork contained bad news for a raft of high-profile men, from former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to New York billionaire Glenn Dubin, who were named by Giuffre as being involved in Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking ring; they deny it.
But Dershowitz claims one document in particular also poses a problem for Giuffre: a 2011 email exchange between her and a British tabloid reporter who had interviewed her about her years under Epstein’s sway.
In the email, Giuffre told the Mail on Sunday reporter, Sharon Churcher, she was racing to meet a deadline for a draft of what she would later describe as a “fictionalized account” of what happened to her.
“Just wondering if you have any information on you from when you and I were doing interviews about the J.E. story,” Giuffre wrote Churcher.
“I wanted to put the names of some of the assholes, oops, I meant to say, pedo’s, that J.E. sent me to. With everything going on, my brain feels like mush and it would be a great deal of help!” Giuffre added.
The emails in the court file shows Churcher responded: “Don’t forget Alan Dershowitz… J.E.’s buddy and lawyer...good name for your pitch as he repped Claus von Bulow and a movie was made about that case… title was Reversal of Fortune. We all suspect Alan is a pedo and tho no proof of that, you probably met him when he was hanging out with JE.”
Giuffre’s reply contained no reference to Dershowitz, just a simple, “Thanks again Shazza, I’m bringing down the house with this book!!”
Churcher, who no longer works at the Mail on Sunday, declined to comment.
Dershowitz noted that when Giuffre finished her manuscript, there was no mention of sex with him—although Giuffre did write that Dershowitz had a taste for young, beautiful women and that he once walked into a room where Epstein had just molested her.
Court papers filed by Giuffre’s legal team say she began writing the manuscript on the advice of her mental-health counselor as a way to work through her trauma. She explored the idea of selling it but ultimately decided not to publish it, they said.
To Dershowitz, desperately trying to rescue his reputation as the Epstein scandal continues to intensify, the absence of allegations even in what Giuffre has described as fiction amounts to a smoking gun.
“If she had sex with me, I’d be highlighted,” he said.
“This is completely exculpatory and completely consistent with what I’ve been saying,” Dershowitz said. “She made it up when she met her lawyers and heard there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
Asked about Dershowitz’s claim that the email shows Giuffre had failed to accuse him of sexual misconduct before she filed her lawsuit, Boies’ firm sent a statement from his co-counsel, Sigrid McCawley, that did not directly address the issue.
“The denials of those accused of participating in Jeffrey Epstein's horrific sex trafficking operation are predictable and have long been anticipated,” McCawley said. “The truth will have the final word.”
It continued: “The body of evidence amassed in the case against Ghislaine Maxwell—Jeffrey Epstein's recruiter-in-chief, trainer, and sometimes, co-abuser—is powerful. Some of it was unsealed by the Second Circuit; we are hopeful more will come out.
“The documents and exhibits should be carefully examined for the vivid, detailed and tragic story they tell in the face of cursory, bumper-sticker like statements by those accused. Virginia Roberts Giuffre is a survivor and a woman to be believed. She believes a reckoning of inevitable accountability has begun.”
Dershowitz—who is being sued by Giuffre for defamation—said that when he was first accused he went to federal prosecutors and complained but could not provide them with the Churcher email chain because it had already been sealed by the court.
Now that the document is public, he said, his attorneys plan to speak with prosecutors on Monday and ask them to investigate Giuffre’s lawyers for “pressuring her into falsely accusing me.”
Dershowitz also said he has no idea if Giuffre was telling the truth when she claimed his former client recruited underage girls for sex with his famous friends, like Prince Andrew and modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel.
“I just know she made up stories about me,” he said.
