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Alan Dershowitz, Virginia Giuffre, and David Boies all reached a settlement. I'll let David Lat summarize this mess:
What struck me about the statements the parties issued is their congeniality. Giuffre admits that maybe she was mistaken about Dershowitz since the trafficking happened so long ago. When Dershowitz paraphrases her statement, he doesn't try to drop the "may" and leaves it in. Boies meanwhile acknowledges how damaging the allegations were to Dershowitz.
Obviously this is an exceptional case, and the statements the parties issued are quite possibly the most expensive words ever written in the history of the English language given the total legal bills involved. Still, it's an interesting case of how highly opinionated and stubborn characters can still come to an agreement where each side saves a little face.
Do you have any insights as to whether the parties actually believe what they're publicly stating?
Judging purely on priors:
You'd think a Harvard Law Professor would be smart enough to draw the line at sex trafficking. Sure, have an affair or two, but avoid stuff that actually gets you into prison. Plenty of powerful people make contemptible mistakes, but they tend to stick to affairs with consenting adults for a reason.
Without knowing anything about Giuffre, my guess is that anyone who's willing to go public accusing powerful people of child sex trafficking probably is brave/stubborn enough to go to till the end if they're sure of the crime. The settlement makes me think she's truly in doubt when it comes to AD. The use of the word "maybe" is perhaps more a consideration for both her credibility and the metoo movement--if she recanted fully, perhaps the public will think she's a liar, whereas the ambiguity confers onto her a slight degree of, uh, graciousness/magnanimity. On the flip side, it is a bit surprising AD is ok with the ambiguity, but at some point I think you take the settlement with zero money changing hands as a decent enough win to put a PR nightmare behind you, especially when you're 84.
Wasn’t Epstein’s whole shtick ‘come party with well connected/notable/wealthy people on my island, and there happen to be some pretty girls hanging around that like rich and well connected men’(itself a plausible seeming scenario) where the reveal that the girl was actually neither consenting nor of legal age came later?
I mean, I’m not sure why most of these guys didn’t just bite the bullet because from my perspective it seems like sleeping with a 17 year old just isn’t a big enough deal to be blackmailed over(except possibly from your wife). But I will accept that elite circles think differently about age of consent type stuff.
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Did Epstein's targets all initially know that his victims weren't consenting adults? I thought the scam was that there were "hostesses/masseuses/etc" around with a mix of ages so it would appear plausible they were all of age, but if an underage girl had sex with a target in one of the rooms wired for video then the pictures+video end up in Epstein's safe labeled "Young [name] + [name]" and that target ends up owned. From a consequentialist standpoint, a target keeping silent about someone pimping out children for blackmail material is enabling future rapes, doing something even more contemptible than a single deliberate statutory rape ... but if the alternative to deliberate statutory rape is "just don't fucking do that" whereas the alternative to giving in to blackmail is "get outed as a rapist but whine about how it wasn't so bad because she looked 18 and you thought she was asking for it" then I'd bet there are a lot of people who wouldn't be evil in the former case but would make a deal with the devil in the latter case.
I might naively suspect that even evil people would rush to be the first to squeal, lest someone else get that whistleblower credit while federal agents discover the non-whistleblowers in Epstein's sex-recordings safe anyway ... but since the exact titles in that safe still haven't been unredacted, perhaps the evil people understand feds better than I do.
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It's possible the only reason this happened is because some high-billing lawyers managed to wrestle enough client control to force everyone to face the music. That said, everyone's statement comes across as perfectly reasonable, so it would be surprising if they believed none of what they said.
Epstein's scheme of doling out unprotected sex with barely legal teenagers on his private island was calculated to ensnare rich and powerful people, so it doesn't seem surprising if Dershowitz fell into that. I also think that Epstein's harem of girls would at least appear to be consenting.
For Giuffre, it depends. In rape cases, the identity of the perpetrator is rarely ever in question in my experience. Either the guy is a stranger and is nabbed because of forensic evidence, or the two knew each other, definitely had sex, but one disputes whether it was consensual. Memory is fallible, and I can't imagine what kind of hell these girls were subjected to to keep them compliant in Epstein's harem. This happened so long ago that it was inevitable for the accusation to carry some doubt, and it would not have been honest for Giuffre to ever claim otherwise. Just the same if she said it was definitely not Dershowitz. The only honest answer here is maybe.
Ah, I never followed this saga closely so missed out on the detail that it was a deliberate honeytrap. I thought it's just a service Epstein provided to gain favors and network, like how McKinsey's Rajat Gupta passed around insider trading tips for social creds rather than out of financial gain. Suppose that's not surprising because people tend not to build tremendous wealth (referring to Epstein) without being schemers who are willing to think far outside of the box.
Under that framework, perhaps I got it upside down on thinking a Harvard Law Professor would know better--they're presumably so risk-averse throughout their lives that they wouldn't even think of a host trying to blackmail them with an underaged sex slave, typical mind fallacy and all.
Wonder what the proper playbook is for a billionaire. Step one, get an amicable divorce? Step two, start funding and frequenting high-status places like art galleries and nonprofits where young attractive women gravitate to? Step three, take them out on above-board dates and hope some will sleep with you voluntarily, and make sure to go to a bar where her ID will be checked by the bartender?
If I were hired as a consultant to strategize this, I'd probably also suggest multiple billionaires group together and roam each other's nonprofits and art galleries so it's harder to accuse them of abusing direct-report relationships. Nothing wrong with dating someone who works for your friend, right?
When I said "calculated to ensnare", I meant it more as "marketed towards". I think that Epstein was using his harem to gain favors and network, I'm not sure if it was indeed a deliberate honeytrap although that's plausible given the age of the people involved.
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Tons of smart people ran with Epstein. It wound up costing Gates multiples of AD's net worth, but he did it anyway.
As for Virginia's actions, we should keep in mind that Prince Andrew recently settled his suit with her for some amount of money. It's likely that Virginia has something to lose now, where before any suit by Dershowitz would have resulted in an uncollectible verdict. Defamation suits don't work when you have something to lose.
Also keep in mind Boies started representing her in 2014 when he was the liberal white knight, the blue tribe legal warrior who took Bush v Gore and gay marriage to SCOTUS, widely considered the nation's greatest litigator. In 2022, he's avoided the worst of it somehow, but he's also known as the guy who hired Israeli spies to help Harvey Weinstein spy on Ronan farrow. This was in part a grudge match between two old and eminent lawyers; but midway through Dershowitz got some ammunition too. So Boies was at least a little motivated to get Virginia to drop the case to avoid getting deposed on his shady shit.
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I truly cannot stand Alan Dershowitz. His encounters with Noam Chomsky, Norman Finklestein, and Bandy Lee make my blood boil.
Can you briefly expand upon why? I only vaguely know who he is. I've seen him in TV a few times as a talking head but that's it.
If you want the self-serving Hollywood version of Dershowitz, there's a pretty good movie of one of his books, Reversal of Fortune, in which Dershowitz (played very well by Ron Silver) defends Claus Von Bulow (Jeremy Irons, who won an Oscar for it), an aristocrat charged with attempted murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_of_Fortune
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He's an American lawyer and a longtime Harvard Law school professor who's represented a series of high-profile clients (O.J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Julian Assange, Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Jeffery Epstein). He's an ardent Zionist and Israeli apologist. He's written a few books in defense of Israel.
Norman Finklestein, a former professor at DePaul University, cataloged/criticized Israel's human rights abuses/violations and structured that criticism around one of Dershowitz's books. Dershowitz then led a campaign to prevent Finklestein from receiving tenure. He was successful.
He's had a debate with Noam Chomsky. Dershowitz came off as a hothead and a shameless apologist in my opinion.
I might be wrong about the Bandy X. Lee situation actually. She got canned from Yale for criticizing Trump and Dershowitz excessively on Twitter (I think?). Who's right? and who's wrong? Dunno.
And then his representation of Epstein and then connections to Epstein. Not saying he's guilty of any crimes, but it's a weird situation.
I just don't like him. Feel free to look into him and form your own opinion.
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