The Left vs. Alan Dershowitz

Alan Dershowitz is a lifelong liberal, but in recent years he has diverged from the left-wing line on a few issues, including Israel and, to a degree, the Trump administration. That has brought the knives out. Liberal anti-Semites, in particular, are out to get him. The New Yorker, a disgusting rag, has been “researching” a hit piece on Dershowitz for some time. Apparently the magazine has dredged up two “accusers” who had something to do with Jeffrey Epstein, and claim that Dershowitz had sexual relations with them. The allegations appear to be entirely false, and may have been cooked up by the partisan lawyer David Boies, who somehow has gotten into the act.

Dershowitz has written an open letter to the New Yorker, defending himself against the smears that apparently are in progress. His defense is exhaustive and eloquent. This is how it starts:

Having been contacted by your “fact” checkers, I now understand the thrust of Connie Bruck’s hit piece: You must know there is no actual evidence that I engaged in sexual misconduct or even met my false accusers — because I did not. So, you appear determined to concoct a false narrative of my life, going back more than 40 years to my first marriage, that falsely suggests that I am the kind of person who “could” or “might” have engaged in such misconduct. To support your false narrative, you began your negative “research” – as you acknowledged to my son — by sourcing a Holocaust denial site that circulates false stories about prominent Jews, including me. You then interviewed my enemies, my critics, dissenting students and especially anti-Israel and, in some cases anti-Semitic, zealots. The original reporting, which took place over many months, did not include interviews with longtime friends and associates who know me well and can present a more balanced perspective. …

You have even refused to interview me face-to-face. When your negative sources are dead or unwilling to be interviewed, you have quoted decades old adversarial court documents that contain false information that you believe is protected by the litigation privilege. You report old, negative articles about me even though they are based on false information. You don’t seem to care whether the information is provably false, as long as you are protected from a lawsuit. Most importantly you are apparently refusing to include in your one-sided screed information that undercuts your false narrative that I and others have provided you.

Based on the claims of your fact checker, your reporter originally wrote an entirely false account regarding a confrontation between me and a summons server that was fed to you—-as many false stories about me have been fed to you. Your writer reported that a summons server tried to serve me in my apartment and that I told him to go “f.. himself.”

The problem is that he tried to serve someone else three times in an apartment that I haven’t lived in for seven (7) years. Finally, that person told him what he could do. But that person wasn’t me. I don’t use that kind of language. Your reporter believed your “source” and was prepared to attribute the episode to me without any proof that it was me. I wonder how many other stories in the article are also the product of such shoddy reporting.

Here is a list of just some of the information and documents that you and your fact checkers have been given. I urge readers of the published article to compare this list with what appears in your article and more importantly what has deliberately been excluded.

There is much more. Among other things, Dershowitz points out the obvious difference between the hostile attitude toward him that results in printing provably false assertions with Jane Mayer’s recent sympathetic defense of Al Franken. The difference? Politics. The New Yorker has no integrity, and no one should take anything it publishes seriously.