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Copyright 2019 by Alan Dershowitz
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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.
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