Dershowitz - Guilt by Accusation: the Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age Of #MeToo

Also by Alan Dershowitz

Defending Israel: The Story of My Relationship with My Most Challenging Client

The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump

The Mueller Report (with an Introduction by Alan Dershowitz)

The Case Against Impeaching Trump

The Case Against BDS: Why Singling Out Israel for Boycott Is Anti-Semitic and Anti-Peace

Trumped Up: How Criminalization of Political Differences Endangers Democracy

Electile Dysfunction: A Guide for Unaroused Voters

The Case Against the Iran Deal

Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israels Just War Against Hamas

Abraham: The Worlds First (But Certainly Not Last) Jewish Lawyer

Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law

The Trials of Zion

The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza

The Case Against Israels Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand in the Way of Peace

Is There a Right to Remain Silent? Coercive Interrogation and the Fifth Amendment After 9/11

Finding Jefferson: A Lost Letter, a Remarkable Discovery and the First Amendment in the Age of Terrorism

Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence

Pre-emption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways

What Israel Meant to Me: By 80 Prominent Writers, Performers, Scholars, Politicians and Journalists

Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights

America on Trial: Inside the Legal Battles That Transformed Our Nation

The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved

The Case for Israel

America Declares Independence

Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge

Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age

Letters to a Young Lawyer

Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000

Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law

Just Revenge

Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, and the Emerging Constitutional Crisis

The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Jewish Identity for the Next Century

Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case

The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-Outs, Stories and Evasions of Responsibility

The Advocates Devil

Contrary to Popular Opinion

Chutzpah

Taking Liberties: A Decade of Hard Cases, Bad Laws, and Bum Raps

Reversal of Fortune: Inside the Von Blow Case

The Best Defense

Criminal Law: Theory and Process (with Joseph Goldstein and Richard Schwartz)

Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, and Law (with Joseph Goldstein and Jay Katz)

Copyright 2019 by Alan Dershowitz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Hot Books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or .

Hot Books and Skyhorse Publishing are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.hotbookspress.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-5107-5753-0

eBook: 978-1-5107-5756-1

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been published so quickly without the help of my wife, my children, and my friends. Special thanks to Aaron Voloj, Hannah Dodson, Nicholas Maisel, and Maura Kelley, as well as Alan Rothfeld and Ken Sweder.

Dedicated to my loving wife, Carolyn Cohen, who guides me, advises me, and supports me.

A NOTE TO READERS

The #MeToo movement has generally been a force for good, but as with many good movements, it is being exploited by some bad people for personal profit. Supporters of the #MeToo movement must not allow false accusers to hurt real victims by hiding behind its virtuous shield, turning it into an exploitative sword against innocent people.

For more information and updates, please see www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510757530/guilt-by-accusation/

Introduction

I magine how it would feel if youor your husband, father or sonwere falsely accused of a heinous sex crime by a woman you never met.

Imagine further how you would feel if you had conclusive evidencein the accusers own wordsthat she never had sex with you.

Now imagine that you also had recorded evidencefrom her lawyers own mouththat it was impossible for you to have been in the places she claimed to have had sex with you and that she was simply wrong in accusing you.

Imagine even further that you discovered that your false accuser had a sordid history of falsely accusing other prominent men for money, and that she was falsely accusing you because she felt pressured by her lawyers who promised her a big payday.

Finally, imagine that despite this evidence, many people continued to believe the false accusation, just because women who are abused dont lie.

That is the situation I and my family have been facing over the past five years. Although I am the victim herethe victim of a deliberate frame-up motivated by moneyI am being treated as a perpetrator, despite the fact that I have done absolutely nothing wrong. My reputation has been trashed, my family has suffered, my retirement has been ruined, my health has been affectedall because a woman with a long history of lying decided, at the urging of her lawyers, to perjuriously include me without a scintilla of evidence in a list of men to whom she says she was trafficked by the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, whom I had represented a decade earlier.

After reading this book and seeing the indisputable evidence of my innocence and the total lack of evidence that I ever met my false accuser, no reasonable, open-minded reader will be left with any doubt. But at this stage, before seeing the evidence, Im asking readers simply to assume, for purposes of an emotional and intellectual experience, that I am totally innocent, and to imagine how you would feel if you or a loved one were being subjected to what I have been put through over the last half decade. If this can happen to mea man who has the resources to fight backit can happen to anyone.

In order to understandand feelhow this false accusation has upended my life, the reader must be put in my position prior to the accusation being made. I was a 76-year-old retired law professor (Im now 81) with a controversial professional history. I had represented some of the most despised criminal defendants of our time, many of whom were guilty, but some of whom were innocent. Half of my clients were poor and could not afford to pay legal fees, so I represented them pro bono. These included many women, some of whom were victims of sexual, physical and psychological assaults. Some of my female clients are well-known, like Mia Farrow, Patricia Hearst, Leona Helmsley, Sandy Murphy, Sylvia Zalmonson and Maryam Rajavi; some are not, like the woman whose husband locked her up in a mental hospital, the wife who killed her abusive husband, the Harvard student who was sexually harassed by her professor and the mother who was denied custody of her 8-year-old daughter because she had left her husband for another woman. Other clients included death row inmates and victims of human rights abuses. I also represented filmmakers, actors, writers and publishers whose controversial works were censored.