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The New Yorker profile of Dershowitz is out and I’m not sure it’s going to get him the high quality dinner party invites on the Vineyard that he demands as his constitutional right.

Dershowitz has written frequently that defending the rights of the accused in rape cases is a crucial application of the presumption of innocence. In “Contrary to Popular Opinion,” published in 1992, he included a list of cases in which women acknowledged having made false accusations of rape. He argued, “It is precisely because rape is so serious a crime that falsely accusing someone of rape should be regarded as an extremely serious crime as well. Imagine yourself or a ‘loved one’ being falsely accused of raping a woman!”

Some students thought that he strained logic in order to defend men. “In Dershowitz’s view, men who are accused of rape, there has got to be a defense,” one female student from the 1991 class recalled. “He had convoluted ways of thinking about how men could misinterpret lack of consent. And it wasn’t relegated to when we were speaking about a rape case. Wherever we were on the syllabus, he would bring it up.”

William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of John F. Kennedy, had recently been accused of raping a woman on a Kennedy family estate, and Dershowitz frequently spoke to the media about the case. (Smith argued that the sex was consensual, and he was later acquitted.) In class, according to a second female student, who is now the chief executive of a nonprofit, “he would talk about Smith and the woman frolicking in the waves, ripping off their clothes.” Midway through the semester, “a woman raised her hand and said, essentially, O.K., enough rape examples! There are women in this class who have been raped. Can we move on to something else?”

“His hair just caught on fire,” Murph Willcott, a male student who was in the class during the confrontation, recalled. “He seemed to take that as a challenge to his authority, and he made it clear he was going to teach what he wanted to teach.”

Dershowitz told The New Yorker, “There was a controversy in the class, and a very small number of students objected to the teaching.” His intention, he said, was to play “devil’s advocate” in order to challenge students’ thinking. Dershowitz has not shied away from provocative ideas about sex and the law. In a 1997 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he argued against statutory-rape laws, writing, “There must be criminal sanctions against sex with very young children, but it is doubtful whether such sanctions should apply to teenagers above the age of puberty, since voluntary sex is so common in their age group.” He suggested that fifteen was a reasonable age of consent, no matter how old the partner was. He has also argued against punishing men who hire prostitutes. In a 1985 article, in the Gainesville Sun, Dershowitz proposed that a john “who occasionally seeks to taste the forbidden fruit of sex for hire” should not be arrested. The nonprofit executive recalled his discussing the idea in class: “He said, ‘Prostitutes know what they’re doing—they should be prosecuted. But you shouldn’t ruin the john’s life over that.’ If I had raised my hand to challenge that, I would have been singling myself out as—God forbid—a feminist.”

When people at Harvard objected to Dershowitz’s views, he insisted that civil liberties were more important than political sensitivities. In April, 1991, Mary Joe Frug, a professor at New England Law, was murdered by a knife-wielding assailant near her house, in Cambridge. The following March, the Harvard Law Review published an article that she had been working on when she was killed, “A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto,” which examined how law perpetuated the subjugation of women.

On the anniversary of Frug’s murder, the Harvard Revue, a spoof overseen by editors of the Review, published a parody, “He-Manifesto of Post-Mortem Legal Feminism.” The author, “Mary Doe,” was described as the “Rigor-Mortis Professor of Law.” The commentary, written in the first person, “was pieced together from scraps dictated to Eve XX, a telekinetic feminist, from beyond the grave.” The Review held its gala banquet that night, and left copies of the Revue on guests’ plates.

Liberal professors at the law school were outraged. Laurence Tribe likened the students who had written the spoof to Klansmen. He and David Kennedy signed a letter, along with a dozen other professors, decrying the law school’s atmosphere of “sexism and misogyny.” The students apologized, but the furor did not die down. In a column for the Los Angeles Times, titled “Harvard Witch Hunt Burns the Incorrect at the Stake,” Dershowitz acknowledged that the parody was “somewhat” offensive, but argued that the response indicated a systemic problem. “The overreaction to the spoof is a reflection of the power of women and blacks to define the content of what is politically correct and incorrect on college and law school campuses,” he wrote. “Radical feminists can accuse all men of being rapists, and radical African-Americans can accuse all whites of being racists, without fear of discipline or rebuke.”


The article then goes into very deep detail on Dershowitz and Jeffrey Epstein, the accusations against Dersh for sex with underage girls, and his increasingly unhinged defenses of himself. It closes:

Dershowitz told me, “I have to be able to continue to defend myself in the court of public opinion. I need to be able to defend myself on television, to publicly declare the truth.” But some media outlets no longer welcomed him. On “The View,” the co-host Meghan McCain said, “I also don’t think people like Alan Dershowitz should be on TV right now, while they’re being accused of being involved. A lot of people have a lot to answer for.”

Dershowitz responded with a column on Newsmax: “In 2008, according to the New York Times, Meghan McCain’s own father—the late great Senator John McCain—was accused of sexual misconduct for an alleged relationship with a lobbyist 30 years his junior. I do not recall Meghan McCain calling for her father to be barred from television.” In fact, the Times had reported no accusation of sexual misconduct—just McCain aides’ unconfirmed speculation about an affair. During the spring and summer, as Dershowitz pressed his position, even some old allies were taken aback by his rhetoric. At one point, Epstein reacted to his statements in the news by e-mailing a friend, “Dershowitz is out of his mind.”

It will be a real shame to silence this sage voice in our media.

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