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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   31959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Alan Dershowitz, Virginia Giuffre, and David Boies all reached a settlement. I'll let David Lat summarize this mess:

In 2014, Giuffre accused Dershowitz, who had represented the late Jeffrey Epstein as a client, of having sex with her when she was underage. Specifically, she claimed that Epstein had sexually trafficked her to Dershowitz between 2000 and 2002. Dershowitz vehemently denied her claims, which lacked the extensive corroboration of her claims against Epstein. At the same time, it was challenging for Dershowitz to conclusively disprove Giuffre’s allegations, in part because of how much time he had spent in Epstein’s company or at one of his homes.

Giuffre’s accusations against Dershowitz spawned a series of defamation lawsuits. First, after Dershowitz denied her claims by calling her a “total liar” and an extortionist, Giuffre sued him for defamation, in April 2019. Dershowitz countersued Giuffre for defamation, in November 2019. Boies then sued Dershowitz, based on Dershowitz’s claims that Boies, who represented Giuffre, pressured her to lie as part of an extortion plot. Finally, Dershowitz sued Boies, also for defamation. Got all that?

Actually, the good news is you don’t need to keep track of any of these lawsuits, since they’re all going away. The three parties just reached a global settlement that resolves all of their pending litigation. All the cases will be dismissed and no money is changing hands, with all parties bearing their own costs and legal fees.

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.

Plenty of powerful people make contemptible mistakes, they tend to stick to affairs with consenting adults for a reason.

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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