Presumed guilty

One aspect of the Dershowitz-Epstein affair that hasn’t gotten enough attention is the fact that Alan Dershowitz chose to represent Jeffrey Epstein in the original criminal prosecution that got Epstein a slap on the wrist, and immunized potential co-conspirators, such as, to pull a name out at random, Alan Dershowitz, from prosecution.

That Dershowitz was representing Epstein in this proceeding was wildly improper on multiple levels.

First, Dershowitz and Epstein had been close friends for many years:

Dershowitz met Epstein in 1996, and apparently became part of his “collection” of famous and well-connected friends. According to Bruck, the two flew together that year to a party at the Ohio estate of billionaire Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s only publicly-known client. “I was Jeffrey Epstein’s intellectual gift to Leslie Wexner,” Dershowitz said.

Dershowitz later told the Harvard Crimson that Epstein was “brilliant,” and that the money manager was the only person outside his family he trusted to read drafts of his books. Epstein also helped Dershowitz invest some money in a hedge fund, and when the fund lost money, he pressured the fund’s founder to recoup Dershowitz’s losses, according to Bruck.

We know that this friendship included such perks as being given a (?) “massage” by one of the girls/women — Dershowitz claims it was an old woman — at the mansion where Epstein committed uncounted numbers of rapes of underage girls, while in all likelihood running some sort of shakedown racket of his many rich and influential friends (this is the most probable explanation for Epstein’s otherwise inexplicable wealth).

Now let’s assume for the purposes of argument that Dershowitz didn’t actually rape any of Epstein’s victims himself. Why in the world would he agree to represent Epstein? His explanation is that Epstein was only an “acquaintance” (obviously false, given Dershowitz’s own previous statements, see above), and that, even more outrageously, Epstein had “misled” him because Epstein had claimed to Dershowitz that “there were only half a dozen accusers who were under the age” and that “they slipped through the cracks—they presented fake I.D.”

“When I later learned the extent of this, I was shocked,” he told the New Yorker last year. Apparently being accused of sexual assault by “only a half dozen” underage girls isn’t a big deal.

On Dershowitz’s own account, what Epstein told him should have had Dershowitz running for the hills, for both purely prudential reasons, and as a matter of legal ethics.

Your good friend has been accused of sexually assaulting a whole bunch of underage girls, at a venue where you yourself have hung out with him on numerous occasions. That is a textbook example of a situation in which you should not offer up your supposed professional expertise, because you are quite literally too close to the situation in all sorts of ways.

Now the “innocent” explanation for Dershowitz’s actions is that he’s such a hopeless publicity whore that he took the case anyway, because it would get his name in the newspapers and his face on TV again (The joke at the Harvard Law School used to be that the most dangerous place to be standing in America was between Dershowitz and a TV camera).

The other explanation is that, by representing Epstein, Dershowitz could figure out a way to get the prosecutor — future Trump cabinet member Alex Acosta — to immunize Dershowitz himself from prosecution. And/or maybe your good pal had some interesting information/videos/whatever about you that he could have shared with prosecutors if you decided not to help him out in his time of need? (Just asking questions here!)

People love to talk about the presumption of innocence, but that presumption is something that is supposed to operate in favor of a defendant in a criminal prosecution.

In the court of public opinion, when the topic is the apparently bottomless depravity of so many of our elites and their hangers-on, the more appropriate assumption is that these scum are guilty of everything they’re accused of, and a lot more (How many of Epstein & Friends’ victims are keeping silent, because of what generally happens to young girls who speak up after they’re raped by rich and influential men?).

They should be treated accordingly.