A victim of multimillionaire sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein says she was coerced into a threesome with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, according to her newly unsealed testimony—and was subjected to gruesome questions about the famed Harvard lawyer’s private parts.
The release of Sarah Ransome’s 2017 deposition—taken as part of a lawsuit that victim Virginia Giuffre filed against Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell—reveals more details about the men in Epstein’s world and a disturbing claim of sexual misconduct against Dershowitz.
Ransome was recruited into Epstein’s trafficking scheme in 2006, after moving to New York with dreams of attending the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
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Instead, she says, she was forced to service Epstein sexually and perform sex acts with other young women in his orbit. And she claims she was forced to perform oral sex on Dershowitz and an unidentified woman, whose name is redacted in the documents.
During her deposition, Ransome was asked whether she saw any evidence of a surgical procedure, including “bandages,” on Dershowitz’s body. Ransome answered that she couldn’t remember. “Did you see him bleed through his penis?” Maxwell’s lawyer asked, to which Ransome replied, “Not that I recall.”
The transcript does not provide any further details about what Dershowitz’s surgery was for.
For his part, Dershowitz has adamantly denied Ransome’s allegations.
“She has no idea what my genitals look like,” Dershowitz told The Daily Beast from a restaurant in Israel, where he was sitting down to dinner. “She made it all up.”
Dershowitz, who said on Tuesday he had not yet reviewed the newly unsealed batch of filings but knows what’s in them, has “been asking that everything be revealed.”
“I want every single thing revealed because it would obviously prove I never met her,” Dershowitz insisted, adding that he has only once been to Epstein’s private island, Little St. James, with his wife and daughter, and that it was “years before [Ransome] met Jeffrey Epstein.” (Ransome claimed the threesome took place at Epstein’s mansion in New York.)
“Let me be very clear—I have had sex with one woman since the day I met my wife,” he said. “And during the entire relevant period of time, I never had any contact with Ransome. I’ve never had any contact with anyone else. And the stories are all made up.”
As supposed proof that Ransome is untrustworthy, Dershowitz pointed to a 2019 New Yorker article in which she admitted to fabricating claims of having sex tapes featuring boldface names such as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
“I challenge her to describe my private parts,” he said. “I challenge her to do it,” calling for a Bar Association investigation “of the bleeding penis question.”
“I can tell you, I’ve never had one,” Dershowitz continued, describing Ransome as “a sick, disturbed perjurer” before taking aim at Maxwell’s attorneys for broaching the topic with Ransome in the first place.
“Any lawyer who asks her a question about a bleeding penis is engaged in unethical conduct, because there would be no basis for that,” Dershowitz argued. “... I challenge the lawyers to come up with any basis to ask her about a bleeding penis. They just made it up out of whole cloth.”
“I want to see a criminal investigation done of any lawyer and any person who made up stories [about my penis] and was part of the conspiracy to make up stories. I just want to see a criminal investigation, I will cooperate, I promise now I will not claim any privileges, not lawyer-client, not 5th Amendment, not 4th Amendment, not privacy. People should go to prison for this."
Dershowitz, who said he will cooperate with any criminal perjury investigation and will not claim privilege of any kind, also denied accusations of sexual abuse leveled by Giuffre, who recently settled a lawsuit with the famed lawyer.
“Now Virginia Giuffre has admitted that she may have misidentified me, confused me with someone else,” he said on Tuesday. “So there’s no credibility to any of that at all. And I’m glad everything is out there, because everything out there really proves how much lying has happened in this case.”
In a statement last month, Giuffre said she “may have made a mistake in identifying” Dershowitz as her abuser. But after Dershowitz suggested he was now absolved of any wrongdoing, Giuffre told The Daily Beast he was far from “exonerated.”
Ransome says that Epstein introduced her to Dershowitz at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and that the lawyer planned to represent her for a legal matter.
While Ransome testified that she couldn’t recall the specific date when she first met Dershowitz, it was within a few months after she’d moved to New York—and after she’d been flown to Epstein’s private isle in the U.S. Virgin Islands to perform “massages” on Epstein.
“He was going to be assigned to be my lawyer,” Ransome testified, though she was instructed not to detail the legal matter for which she needed Dershowitz’s assistance. (Elsewhere, in newly unsealed emails to a U.S. journalist, Ransome claimed, “I personally met Alan numerous times as Jeffrey had sent him to my legal aid, to deal with a case I was going to open against [name redacted] whom I met through the website SugarDaddie.com (he went under the name [redacted] on the site). [Redacted] also tried to rape me with his friend when we were at anchor on his boat in Miami.”)
Epstein was in the room for her first legal meeting with the Harvard lawyer, who represented Epstein years before when he was facing federal charges for molesting minors in Florida.
“Jeffrey was there to support me and Jeffrey was looking after me,” Ransome said, when asked why Epstein was there for the rendezvous with Dershowitz.
It’s unclear what work Dershowitz did for Ransome, if any, but Ransome testified that the Harvard professor emeritus had agreed to become her attorney. However, Dershowitz on Tuesday vehemently denied ever meeting Ransome or discussing any legal matters with her.
“That’s just totally, totally made up,” he told The Daily Beast. “I’m not admitted to the Bar in New York. If I represent somebody, I have a retainer agreement. I don’t do that kind of work, she just made up the whole story.”
Asked to describe Dershowitz in her deposition, Ransome said he was of “old age; white, pasty skin; not very attractive. Wears glasses. Bit of an ugly man, really.”
Ransome testified that she had sex with Dershowitz in Epstein’s New York residence in the bathroom sometime after this apparent legal consultation and after a second meeting at a “nice restaurant” in New York. According to the deposition transcript, Maxwell’s lawyer asked Ransome, “Did you consider him to be your lawyer at that dinner?” Ransome replied in the affirmative.
On the day she was allegedly forced into sex with Dershowitz, Ransome said she walked into Epstein’s New York townhouse and encountered Epstein, Dershowitz, and the other woman.
“I—it was really strange, because [the third person] didn't like me,” Ransome testified. “And so when I arrived, we had—I think—I can't remember if I had, like, water or whatever.”
The unnamed woman then led Ransome upstairs. “I remember there was a room,” Ransome added. “I didn't quite understand what was going on at the time. I knew obviously something was going on, because I never met [the third person] socially.”
The woman began to undress and turned to undress Ransome. According to Ransome, Epstein then walked into the room and began masturbating under his clothes.
“A few minutes later Alan walked in the room. He started undressing, he got on the bed with [the other woman] and myself, and we basically had a three-way sexual interaction,” Ransome testified, adding that “it wasn't a pleasant experience.”
“I just tried to just get it done as soon as possible to get out of there,” Ransome later added. “I couldn't wait to get out of there quick enough, to be honest.”
Ransome described the encounter as “a coerced event.”
“I was extremely upset,” Ransome said. “I did not want to have sexual intercourse with Alan.” She added that she tried “paying particular attention” to the other woman “because I didn't want Alan touching me, so it was—as I said, it was a traumatic experience.”
Ransome testified that she had oral sex with Dershowitz and masturbated him, and that Dershowitz performed oral sex on her and the other woman.
Maxwell’s lawyer then asked Ransome about the state of Dershowitz’s penis and whether it was scarred.
Ransome replied, in part, “I wasn’t ravishing Alan's body. I was trying to close my eyes and just get it done so I could go home and watch TV, really. So I wasn't really aware.”
Elsewhere, Ransome was asked if she witnessed Dershowitz’s privates as bandaged or bleeding.
Ransome said that Dershowitz was the only other man connected to Epstein with whom she was coerced into sexual relations.
Ransome was later asked to share more about how Epstein “lent out” women and girls in his circle. “It’s almost like Jeffrey’s quite possessive of his girls. He’s—you know, he lends them out,” Ransome testified. “He samples the girls, he has friends come over to New York or the island and they—they get to see who all the girls are around Jeffrey, and they get to pick one which they want to be with.”
Ransome then described how an unnamed man visited Epstein’s private island with his fiancée. The deposition appears to indicate the man owns a company or organization, but the name is redacted: “I don't know his surname, but he owns [redacted] or whatever, and he came with his fiancée.”
“So, you know, you got a table with Jeffrey Epstein of lots of women—girls, women, whatever— beautiful girls, and you've got friends joining him,” Ransome continued. “And friends popped over all the time. So I had other—there were other males that visited Jeffrey on the island. I don't know who they are. I can't remember their names.”
“But, yeah. I mean, he didn't—he didn't line them up and go, hey, boys, pick which vagina you want. He didn't do it that blatantly,” Ransome added. “But they had spent time with the girls during a lunch on the island—yeah, I mean, they—his friends would spend time with us.”
Ransome said she classified her encounter with Dershowitz “as being lent out.”
“I didn't willingly go, hey, Alan, let's have some fun, because no one on the planet would say that to Alan,” Ransome testified.
Ransome was asked again how Dershowitz looked. She testified that he was “quite an elderly man, wore glasses, quite pasty, pasty-skinned.”
“Not well, I assumed, not at all well,” she said. “He wasn’t well, W-E-L-L. Like, he wasn't a—he wasn't—he wasn't a healthy person.”
“Pasty skin, wrinkly. I didn’t—I tried to pay as little attention to him as possible,” Ransome continued in the court filing. “During that session, I was completely overwhelmed.
“I—it completely took me by surprise, that incident, and I was exceptionally upset by what was going on because I felt that I had been coerced beforehand, that it had been prior arranged to me arriving there.”
Dershowitz, however, continues to claim he’s being framed by a stranger.
“I’m one of the few people who can fight back, because I have nothing to hide,” he told The Daily Beast. “But the consequence has to be a criminal trial, and there have to be criminal indictments here for perjury. You just can’t let people make up stories like this and get away with it. Even after they admit making up stories, they get away with it.”
