Last week, Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, settled her defamation suit against the financier’s one-time friend and lawyer Alan Dershowitz, whom she’d long accused of sexual assault. As part of the deal, Dershowitz dropped his countersuit against her and his countersuit against lawyer David Boies, who had separately sued Dershowitz for defamation.
Moments after the ink was dry, the media published statements from the parties. In her remarks, Giuffre said she “long believed” that Epstein trafficked her to Dershowitz but she “may have made a mistake” in identifying the Harvard professor emeritus as one of her abusers.
Dershowitz wasted no time in taking a victory lap, appearing on Newsmax’s Greg Kelly Reports and Fox 5’s Good Day New York, and writing an op-ed in the New York Post under the headline: “Exonerated: Why I fought to clear my name in Jeffrey Epstein allegation.”
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“People disapproved of me being Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer and Donald Trump’s lawyer, so a decision was made by people to frame me,” Dershowitz told Kelly. “And they used a young woman, and the young woman now acknowledges that she may have made a mistake.”
“My name has now been cleared and I can get back to defending people and being controversial for good reasons,” added Dershowitz, who for years has publicly denied Giuffre’s claims and even accused her and her lawyers of perjury. (Dershowitz walked back that accusation in his settlement statement, in which he said he has “come to believe that at the time she accused me she believed what she said.”)
But in an exclusive statement to The Daily Beast, Giuffre challenges Dershowitz’s suggestions that he’s been “exonerated” of her sexual abuse allegations.
Virginia Giuffre, with a photo of herself as a teen.
Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty“I was shocked to read that Alan Dershowitz is claiming that our mutual dismissal of our lawsuits against each other somehow ‘exonerated’ him,” Giuffre said. “The litigation was very stressful and damaging to my family, and to my health. We have endured years in which Mr. Dershowitz asserted my charges against him were a lie, made up out of whole cloth, perjury, and part of a purported extortion plot. He has now admitted there was no perjury, no extortion plot, and that rather than making up what I said, I honestly believed the charges I made against him.
“Whether or not Mr. Dershowitz’s admissions undermine his previous denials of the charges made against him is for others to say. The settlement agreement limits what I can say and I will abide by it unless and until I am released from it. However, those admissions are not consistent with ‘exoneration.’
“Stopping the false charges against me, and securing Mr. Dershowitz’s public acknowledgement of my good faith was important to me and my family,” Giuffre continued in her statement. “However, I did not, and would never, ‘exonerate’ Mr. Dershowitz in return.”
Reached by phone on Monday and asked about Giuffre’s new comments that her statement fails to “exonerate” him, Dershowitz would only repeat his prior claims that Giuffre’s accusations of abuse were untrue. “I challenge her to repeat her allegation,” Dershowitz told The Daily Beast. “It’s a total complete categorical lie. I never met her, and I proved it conclusively.”
“Ask her to release all the evidence that came out in discovery and you will see a total and complete exoneration,” Dershowitz went on to say. “I have waived every single right of privacy. I waived every right of privacy to every tape recording, every video recording, every photograph. I ask her to do the same.”
A 39-year-old mother of three, Giuffre first accused Dershowitz of sexual abuse in a December 2014 affidavit filed in a federal lawsuit from two other victims who sued the government over Epstein’s lenient non-prosecution agreement in Florida.
In the court filing, Giuffre alleged that Epstein and his ex-girlfriend and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell forced her to become their teenage “sex slave” and sent her to powerful men to be sexually abused—including Dershowitz, French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel (who killed himself in a Paris jail while awaiting trial for rape), and Britain’s Prince Andrew, who settled a lawsuit with Giuffre earlier this year for millions of dollars.
Giuffre’s lawsuit against Dershowitz was filed in April 2019—months before Epstein’s arrest for trafficking minors in New York—and stems from his comments about her in the wake of the Miami Herald’s investigative series on Epstein’s plea deal.
Later that year, Boies, one of Giuffre’s lawyers who had represented her in other matters, filed a defamation suit against Dershowitz for accusing his firm of extortion and suborning perjury in connection to Giuffre’s claims. (For his part, Dershowitz filed a countersuit against Boies for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.)
Before last week’s settlement, Boies had been conducting an ongoing deposition of Dershowitz, who testified that his relationship with Epstein “changed completely” after Epstein’s 2008 jail stint for soliciting minors. “After he served his time my relationship with him changed completely, it was no longer academic or social, but I did meet with him on a number of occasions—largely around the legal issues that were still remaining,” Dershowitz testified, according to a transcript reviewed by The Daily Beast (As The New York Times reported, Dershowitz abruptly stopped the questioning in late September because of concerns about his health.)
Dershowitz testified that he also had discussions with Epstein about the Middle East after his Florida conviction: “He was friendly with a number of prominent Israelis. And—and so we had conversations about the Middle East and the matters—legal matters.”
Of his relationship with Epstein, Dershowitz added that “knowing that he was guilty of these crimes—that he had pleaded guilty of these crimes, my relationship with him was completely different than it was before I learned about the accusations.”
Emails cited in the deposition transcripts, however, seem to paint a picture of a particularly chummy relationship between Epstein and Dershowitz even after the creepy money manager's incarceration.
In November 2012, the deposition testimony reveals, Epstein wrote Dershowitz, “I love that I get a Christmas card and present from [former assistant U.S. attorney] Matt Menschel [sic], the guy that put me in jail.”
Dershowitz replied, “Appropriate. Christmas celebrates the birth of another innocent Jewish guy who was crucified.”
“Obviously my answer was hyperbole, and it was paraphrasing Epstein’s own stated views that he, himself, received an inappropriately harsh sentence,” Dershowitz testified when asked about the message. He added that it “bears not at all on the nature of the relationship between Epstein and myself during this period of time.”
In May 2013, Epstein wrote to Dershowitz, “Where are you for summer?” Dershowitz replied that he’d be on Martha’s Vineyard before adding, “Where are you. I called you a couple of times when I was in NYC. Miss you.”
Dershowitz was also questioned about a 2014 email with a friend, Thomas Ashe, who wanted to visit Epstein’s New Mexico land with his son to collect petroglyphs.
“Jeffrey Epstein said ‘of course,'” Dershowitz’s email to the friend reads, to which the pal responds, “How do we do it? Do we just show up there or do we need to call someone?”
“Don’t know. Try calling if you can’t reach anyone I will call JE,” Dershowitz replied.
“Thanks. Maybe a young girl will answer,” the friend wrote.
When asked about the email, Dershowitz testified, “It’s a joke.” He later clarified, “So obviously Ashe was trying to make a bad joke, and it was a silly joke, he shouldn’t have said it, but he said it, he doesn’t mean it seriously.”
In Giuffre’s exclusive statement to The Daily Beast, she also refers to the litigation between Boies and Dershowitz, who released their own statements as part of the settlement. Both Giuffre’s and Boies’ lawsuits, court records show, were settled without costs or monetary award.
“I also note that my statement needs to be considered in the context of the statements issued by Mr. Dershowitz and David Boies,” Giuffre continued in her statement. “Mr. Boies sued Mr. Dershowitz for charging Mr. Boies with suborning perjury and extortion. Mr. Dershowitz flatly retracted those charges and Mr. Boies dismissed his lawsuit.
“Mr. Dershowitz sued Mr. Boies for charging Mr. Dershowitz with participating in Epstein’s sex trafficking and other misconduct,” Giuffre continued. “Mr. Boies did not retract any of those charges, but Mr. Dershowitz nevertheless dismissed his claims against Mr. Boies. That too, hardly seems like ‘exoneration.’
“I have long believed Mr. Dershowitz participated in my sex trafficking. I have not, and would not, retract what I have said. However, under all the circumstances I was prepared to acknowledge the possibility that I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz as part of a resolution of all pending litigation.
“I was, and am, prepared to leave to the judgment of the public, and of history, whether to accept that my belief (which Mr. Dershowitz acknowledges was honest) or to accept Mr. Dershowitz’s assertion that I was mistaken,” Giuffre concluded.
For over a decade, Giuffre was among the Epstein case’s most high-profile victims, one who gave international media interviews about surviving Epstein’s sex ring—and about her accusations against Prince Andrew—and created a nonprofit for sex-trafficking victims called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR). Her civil litigation against Maxwell, settled before trial, excavated much of what the public knows about Epstein’s trafficking scheme and the British socialite’s role in his world.
And while Giuffre wasn’t called as a witness at Maxwell’s criminal trial, her name permeated the testimony. Manhattan Federal Judge Alison Nathan, at Maxwell’s sentencing in June, ruled that Giuffre was a victim in the conspiracy and allowed her lawyer to read aloud a victim impact statement from her in court.
Karen Bitar, a partner at Seyfarth Shaw LLP who represented Boies in Dershowitz’s countersuit, pushed back on Dershowitz’s claims that Giuffre’s remarks have “exonerated” him. “All that she said is, ‘I may be wrong.’ She never said she was wrong. She said she believes and continues to believe what she says. For him to twist that and claim he was exonerated is incorrect and it really couldn’t be further from the truth,” Bitar said.
Bitar also said Dershowitz’s media appearances likely “violated” the terms of the settlement agreement.
“The agreement was that, under these circumstances, the parties would be limited to the contents of the statement that had been mutually agreed upon. But he [Dershowitz] immediately went well beyond the parameters of that statement, sought out the press, and violated the terms and intent of the agreement. For one to immediately disregard what they just agreed to is certainly atypical, but unfortunately, based on how Dershowitz conducted himself in our case, not surprising.”
Imran Ansari, a lawyer for Dershowitz, told The Daily Beast that his client’s recent media comments “are consistent with the contents of the agreed statement.”
“He has in essence repeated his denial as to Ms. Giuffre’s allegation of sexual abuse, ‘an allegation that he has consistently, and vehemently, denied,’ as contained in the statement; while reiterating Ms. Giuffre’s statement that she ‘may have made a mistake in identifying’ him, as contained in the statement; and that there was no ‘payment of any money by anyone or anything else,’ as contained in the statement. As such, we disagree with the claim that Mr. Dershowitz is in violation of an agreement.”
