Guilt by Accusation

by Alan Dershowitz

  Her “reporting” on the Epstein case was hand-fed to her by Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawyers. They provided her this one-sided information, apparently, in exchange for an understanding that Brown would “report” only Giuffre’s side of the story, which turns out to be highly questionable in general, and completely made up with regard to her accusation against me.

  Brown interviewed Giuffre for a Miami Herald video, but refused to ask her on camera to repeat her accusation against me. She knew that Giuffre would not do so. Instead, Brown allowed her to say she had sex with unnamed politicians, businessmen and academics. When Giuffre said the word academics—without specifying me—Brown flashed my photograph on the video screen. She did not report that Giuffre had refused to go on the record and name me, or that Brown had a deal with Giuffre’s lawyers not to ask her specifically to name me. Rarely have I seen more irresponsible and unprofessional “journalism.”

  I provided Brown with documented evidence of Giuffre’s long history of lying—about the Gores, Clinton, her age and other issues. I also provided her with detailed evidence of Ransome’s lies about Hillary Clinton and others. Not only did Brown refuse to include these histories in her reporting, she lied about what I provided her. Here is what she wrote: “Dershowitz has attacked both women’s credibility, in particular pointing to falsehoods in some of Ransome’s past statements. He says he has proof that both are lying but has never presented it publicly.”62 This is categorically false. In Appendix N, I provide one of several emails I sent Brown documenting their history of lying, as well as documented facts that she refused to include in her biased reporting.

  Among the information I provided her, which she did not publish, was the following: “overwhelming evidence of Robert’s [Giuffre’s] long history or perjury and lying, including her false claims of meeting Al and Tipper Gore and Bill Clinton on Epstein’s island,” “her own lawyer’s statement that she did not tell the truth about having sex on multiple occasions with Leslie Wexner,” “Roberts deliberately lied about her age to falsely claim that she was underage,” Giuffre’s claim to have had “sex with George Mitchell, Bill Richardson, Ehud Barak,” Rebecca Boylan’s statement that Giuffre was “pressured” into naming me, Boies’s admission that Giuffre was “simply wrong,” and the emails and book manuscript that proved Giuffre had never even met me. When I pressed Brown about these omissions, she responded, “This was not the story.”

  I invited Brown to review my travel records for as long as she wished. She spent several hours poring over them and then said she had to leave because her “parking meter had run out.” I urged her to return to complete her review, but she insisted that she must take my records with her. I believe that the only reason she wanted to take the records with her was to give them to Giuffre’s lawyers, so that they could try to find dates when we were both in New York. I repeated my offer to review the records for as much time as she needed and to take as many notes as she wanted. She declined my offer and then falsely reported that I refused to allow her to inspect the records.

  Brown also asked me to break the law. Here is our exchange regarding the sealed emails that Sarah Ransome had sent to the New York Post claiming she had sex tapes of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Richard Branson:

  Dershowitz: I’m not permitted to send them. I am subject to a sealing order. She [Ransome] is not subject to that order and she can show them to you. If she refuses, it’s because she is hiding something. I would love to send them to you. Ask her and her lawyers whether they consent to have me send them. If they refuse, you should report that.

  Brown: Alan, you can send them. There are many documents floating around in this case, so I’m sure no one will go after you. (Emphasis added)

  I believe that her reference to “many documents floating around” is an admission that Giuffre’s lawyers had already shared sealed documents with her, as I know they have with other journalists with whom they have collaborated. My lawyers cautioned me that the reason she told me I “can send” the sealed documents to her was not because she was interested in reporting their content, which would undercut her narrative, but because she wanted to tell Giuffre’s lawyers that I had broken the law by sending her the sealed material. I did not fall for this ploy. I responded to her request to break the law by emailing: “I will comply with the law even if you are asking me to break it.”

  Brown’s one-sided “reporting” earned her great praise, especially from those who were unaware of what she deliberately omitted from her reports.63 She was proposed for many journalistic awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. I felt an obligation to inform the Pulitzer Committee of her failings as an objective reporter. I wrote an open letter documenting the information I had provided Brown and then wrote the following:

  So how did Pulitzer candidate Brown deal with all this evidence discrediting her primary source? She simply omitted any mention of it and presented Giuffre as an entirely credible witness with no doubts about her truthfulness.

  . . .

  Brown deliberately mendaciously misled her readers—and the Pulitzer Committee—by choosing to omit from her narrative every single document, sworn testimony and other proof that would raise questions about the credibility of her primary source. She admitted to me in a consensually recorded conversation that there is absolutely no evidence corroborating or supporting Giuffre’s accusation against me, but she did not publish that important fact. Nor did she publish the fact that Giuffre refused to accuse me on the record.

  This is not journalism. It is advocacy, and it is advocacy that would get a lawyer disciplined for willfully withholding exculpatory evidence. It is also advocacy that hurts the #MeToo movement by encouraging false reports that damage the credibility of an important movement.

  Brown did not win the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Before she is considered for any future prizes, her unprofessional tactics should be thoroughly and fairly investigated—which is more than she has done with regard to Giuffre.

  Brown is all too typical of reporting about #MeToo accusations. For her everything is black and white: women accusers never lie about anything. Men who deny accusations do lie. There is no nuance or attempt at balance in her reporting. If there is evidence that a victim is lying, she will simply not report that evidence, regardless of how strong, because it will undercut her simple-minded and one-sided narrative.

  Other journalists as well don’t dare to report facts that undercut the narrative that women tell the truth and men lie. If they do, or if they decline to publish false accusations by alleged victims, they are criticized by other media. National Public Radio, for example, recently did a segment on ABC TV’s decision several years earlier not to run an interview they had conducted with Giuffre. The reporter, David Folkenflik, wrote me the following email:

  I cover media for NPR and wanted to ask—I’ve been told that you felt you were successful in persuading ABC NEWS’s legal team in not running an interview with Virginia Roberts Giuffre in 2015 because you convinced them she was untruthful.

  I assumed, therefore, that he was interested in the evidence I provided ABC that “convinced them she was untruthful.” But as we shall see, that was the last thing he was interested in reporting. This is what I told Folkenflik about my interaction with ABC.

  In mid-2015, I was sent an email that one of Giuffre’s lawyers had circulated, announcing that an interview with Giuffre would be run on Good Morning America, the ABC evening news and Nightline. I immediately called ABC to inquire whether my name was being mentioned. They said it was not. (To this day, she has not publicly and directly accused me out of court, in order to avoid being held accountable for her defamation.) I asked about Leslie Wexner and was told that his name was also not mentioned. (Perhaps because her silence about him was being negotiated.) I told the producer that Giuffre had a long history of lying about prominent individuals, including the Gores and Clinton, as well as about other matters. I also told them about my conversation with Giuffre’s friend Reb
ecca Boylan, in which she told me about the plan to obtain a billion dollars from Wexner. I told them that these interviews with Giuffre were part of the shakedown plan—that Boylan had told me that Giuffre went on TV in order to send Wexner the following message: See, I have access to the media; this time I didn’t mention you; but next time . . .

  The people at ABC said they would look into the matter and I sent them the evidence. I made it clear that I was calling only on my own behalf and not on behalf of Epstein. I told the same thing to Folkenflik when he interviewed me about this episode. But Folkenflik had an agenda and a story line, and reporting accurately what I told him would undercut his pre-determined narrative. So this is what he falsely reported in a piece entitled “How media fell short on Epstein.”64 Folkenflik described me as Epstein’s lawyer, without disclosing that I explicitly told him that I had called ABC only on my own behalf as someone who had been falsely accused by Giuffre. Notwithstanding his expressed interest in how I “convinced” ABC not to run the interview, he never mentioned the evidence I provided to ABC and to him proving that Giuffre had a long record of lying. Instead he quoted Julie Brown recently telling him, “I [Brown] found [Giuffre] to be very truthful and credible.” But Brown had never told that to ABC, back when they were making their decision. She only told it to Folkenflik when he was doing his report years later. So her biased and self-serving after-the-fact assessment of Giuffre’s alleged credibility was completely irrelevant to ABC’s decision, while my evidence—which I sent to ABC at the time—was highly relevant. Yet Folkenflik deliberately omitted my evidence from his reporting.

  Accordingly, he made it sound as if ABC had succumbed to pressure from Epstein and his powerful friends rather than making a decision, based on hard evidence they received from me, that Giuffre’s lack of credibility did not satisfy ABC’s journalistic standards. This is yet another example of biased and unprofessional journalism—this time by NPR—promoting the credibility of false accusers even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are lying, and attacking a responsible network for making the right decision based on the evidence they had at the time. This story, too, was fed to NPR by Giuffre’s lawyers—an important fact they failed to disclose.

  The fear of being criticized for not believing an alleged victim—even one who is a proven liar—resulted in an article being spiked by the Daily Beast. I received a call from Lachlan Cartwright of the Beast. He had just read the unsealed emails between Giuffre and the journalist Sharon Churcher in which Giuffre essentially admitted that she didn’t have sex with me. He expressed outrage at the obvious fact that I was being framed by Giuffre, who had been encouraged by Churcher to include me in her manuscript even though she had never met me. Here is what he messaged me: “Churcher crossed a massive lien [sic, line]. Sharon Churcher inserts your name into Virginia’s story . . . and people wonder why [journalism] gets a bad rap.” “Churcher stitched you up.” “I want to blow this up. I suggest we set the record straight. No one has picked up on these Churcher emails. Have you been contacted by my competitors?” “Churcher and the mos [sic] basically over egged what Virginia Roberts told them, and she was being paid for her story.”

  I told Cartwright that I blamed Giuffre rather than Churcher and that I had drafted an op-ed making this point. He pleaded with me to let him have the scoop: “No I want to write it,” he insisted. “This isn’t a column/op-ed. It’s a news story.” “It’s very shoddy journalism . . . its egregious.” He told me “It will be much more powerful coming from me and The Beast than coming from you.” I agreed to withhold my op-ed pending his article. He asked me to send him relevant material, including the draft of my article and the documentary and recorded evidence, which I did. He told me he would get on it immediately and blow the lid off this frame up, as soon as he received approval from his editor.

  That was the last I heard from him. Obviously the editor of the Daily Beast—a website that made its reputation by uncritically supporting the narratives of #MeToo victims—did not want to publish a truthful article that undercut the #MeToo narrative by exposing an instance of lying by an alleged victim. To report honestly on Giuffre’s false accusation of me was to risk being deemed by some to be disloyal to the movement and to its mantra that women must be believed even in the face of documented evidence that a particular woman made up a false accusation for money. Cartwright has refused to respond to numerous emails and messages. He’s obviously ashamed of not publishing an important story he knows is true. The Beast should also be ashamed for refusing to report the truth about what they know is a false accusation. To quote Cartwright, “It’s very shoddy journalism,” and “people wonder why [journalism] gets a bad rap.”

  Another story fed to the media by Giuffre’s lawyers was a “profile” of me in The New Yorker65 that was anything but a profile of my 55-year career and 81-year life. It was a hatchet job calculated to destroy my reputation and silence me.

  In March of 2019, my publisher received an email from Connie Bruck, a journalist who writes for The New Yorker. She told my publisher that she was “trying to contact” me about a profile, “much of it drawn from [my] books.” My publisher gave me her number to call if I wanted to respond. The nature of her email made it clear to me that this was a “cover your ass communication.” She said she was “trying” to reach me. She could easily have emailed me directly, since my email is on my website, as is my office phone number. Nearly every criminal in the world has managed to reach me, but Connie Bruck had to go through my publisher. When I called, it became obvious that she had no interest in speaking to me. She said she had completed the profile and would I mind speaking to her fact checkers. I said I never heard of a profile being completed without a face-to-face interview with the subject. She told me she had done several profiles without interviewing the subject. I challenged her: “Isn’t it true that in all of those profiles the subjects refused to speak with you?” Sheepishly, she acknowledged that that was the case. Well, I wanted to be interviewed in person.

  I offered to fly to California to meet with her or have her come East. She refused, but agreed to ask me some questions over the phone. Her questions were all accusatory. It was more like an adversarial deposition than a journalistic interview. It was certainly not a search for truth or balance. She was not interested in my life, my aspirations, my family or my values. She was only interested in confirming her pre-existing negative attitude toward me by asking “gotcha” questions.

  I later learned (and wrote) that the negative profile was proposed by Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawyers in order to promote their case, and that it was approved by The New Yorker editor, David Remnick, as a way of silencing me. Both Remnick and Bruck have relationships with Boies, and both despise President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. Destroying me suited all their agendas, so the project was launched.

  Bruck was so determined to dig up dirt on me that one of the first sources she Googled to was Rense.com, a neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denial website which both the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center have declared to be anti-Semitic. Several years earlier, this site accused me of beating and murdering my first wife. (She died 10 years after we separated and divorced.) It showed “pictures” of her and my children, which were not them, but stereotypical Jews with long noses.

  No one would believe anything on this hate site—no one, that is, except a journalist prepared to use any dirt, regardless of its source and absurdity, against her target. Bruck has admitted using this discredited site as the original source for claiming in her article draft that I abused my first wife and “stripped” her of custody of my two sons. She even used the same words she found on the Holocaust Denial site. The truth is that my first wife and I, who were married when I was 20 and she 19, grew apart. There was no abuse, and the court granted me custody based on the report of the social worker, and on his explicit finding that I committed “no misconduct.” But that boring story would not achieve The New Yorker’s goal of destroying
me. So they went into the gutter and followed the lead of an anti-Semitic website.

  When Bruck’s article was published, it contained tell-tale evidence of her reliance on this disreputable source. It reported that my first wife “walked to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and leapt to her death.” Police and medical records prove that that is entirely untrue. It was an invention of Rense.com. After the article appeared online, Bruck was confronted with the evidence and The New Yorker agreed to remove her false claim from the online version, though not from the hard copy. She now has to explain why she relied on Rense, without any other evidence or source, to include this false statement in her reporting. The fact checkers never asked about it, even though they asked about many other aspects of my first marriage. This reportorial bias alone is enough to discredit the article, but there were many more egregious errors in her article.

  I wrote a letter to The New Yorker correcting its errors, but they refused to publish it. They denied that they relied on Rense.com. But there is no other source for the fictional Brooklyn Bridge account (which had appeared subsequent to its original article claiming I had murdered my first wife.).

  Finally, the editor agreed to publish the following general letter:

  If anyone doubts the political bias of The New Yorker, I urge them to compare Jane Mayer’s defense of Al Franken with Connie Bruck’s screed against me (“Devil’s Advocate,” August 5th & 12th). Mayer resolves doubts in favor of Franken and against his accusers, whose motives she challenges. Bruck resolves doubts in favor of my false accusers, whose motives she does not doubt, and against me. The difference is that there is evidence that Franken did the things he was accused of, though there are doubts about whether what he did was sufficiently serious to warrant his resignation from the Senate. In my case, there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the false allegations against me by two women who Bruck concedes are “imperfect witnesses,” one of whom admits that she invented false accusations against other prominent people.