Guilt by Accusation

by Alan Dershowitz

  David Boies had threatened to find “another girl” to accuse me, unless I withdrew disciplinary charges I had filed against him with bar associations. As he told my source, “Two are better than one.” That person told me that Boies was “trolling” for another woman to accuse me. I refused to withdraw the charges, and he “found” a thirty-something-year-old woman named Sarah Ransome, who was willing to say that she had participated in a “threesome” with me when she was 22 years old and working with Epstein. As with Giuffre, I had never met or heard of this liar. She, too, had made up the story after meeting with and presumably being pressured by the same lawyer or lawyers who had pressured Giuffre to lie about me. The pattern was beginning to become obvious. But this woman was even a bigger liar—which she eventually admitted—than Giuffre. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Ransome wrote dozens of emails to a reporter for the New York Post claiming that she possessed “sex tapes” of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Richard Branson. (Appendix H)

  She also claimed to have been targeted for assassination by Hillary Clinton and the CIA and that she was working with Russian KGB to prevent the election of the two “pedophiles” who were running for president. The New York Post reporter asked her for proof of what she was saying, but the woman had none. So the reporter told me that she concluded that Ransome was either hallucinating or lying and refused to publish her claims even on the gossipy Page 6. But what wasn’t credible enough for Page 6 was apparently credible enough for David Boies, who vouched for Ransome’s truthfulness by filing her affidavit falsely accusing me.

  It is a sad sign of the times that the New York Post reporter has refused to publish these emails—which she and the Post are free to do. They, like other media, refuse to disclose negative factual information about alleged #MeToo victims, if such information would undercut the politically correct, but often factually incorrect, narrative of victimization.

  In her emails, Ransome, like Giuffre, mentioned me. And like Giuffre, she mentioned me as someone she did not have sex with. She claimed, quite absurdly, that I had been her lawyer and was suing a man who met her on the “sugar daddy” website where young women express a willingness to exchange sex with wealthy men for money. Of course she had no evidence—no retainer agreement, court documents, letters, witnesses or anything else—to support her absurd claim, because I had never met her and was not her lawyer. But that isn’t the important point. What is critical is that the story she made up about me before meeting her lawyers was that I was her lawyer and not her sex partner. She concocted the phony sex story about me only after she met her greedy lawyers, who were aware that she had previously made up false stories about the sex tapes and Clinton assassination plot.47

  When I publicized Ransome’s many lies, she was forced to admit to a journalist that she had “invented” the story and the sex tapes in order to take revenge against Epstein and prevent him from harming her.48 She did not say why she invented the story about me, but the obvious reason is that it was part of a pattern of being pressured by the same lawyer or lawyers who had pressured Giuffre into falsely accusing me.

  Perhaps two nearly identical instances of lying as a result of being pressured by the same lawyers does not constitute a pattern, but three does. And there is indeed a third component of the pattern.

  A woman named Maria Farmer worked for Epstein in his New York home until the early summer of 1996, when she claims he assaulted her on Leslie Wexner’s property in New Albany, Ohio. She then stopped working for Epstein and never again set foot in his house. Boies—who else?—submitted an affidavit from Farmer swearing she had seen me in Epstein’s house when she worked for him. She swore she saw me in the presence of young women, though she said she didn’t witness any wrongdoing on my part.49 The problem with her affidavit is that I didn’t even meet Epstein until well after she stopped working for him, and was never in his house until months after she stopped coming there. The documented chronology makes it impossible for her to have seen me in his house. Yet Boies submitted her perjured affidavit, knowing that I hadn’t even met Epstein, and was certainly never in his house, until after she terminated her relationship with him.

  Thus, the pattern of perjury is clear: three women, all represented by the same lawyers, change their stories in an effort to incriminate me only after meeting these lawyers and apparently being pressured by them.

  I believe this insidious pattern should be investigated by law enforcement. Subornation of perjury is a serious crime,50 especially when committed by lawyers. A pattern of subornation is even more serious. If such a pattern in fact occurred with three perjuring women, and if their perjury was suborned by lawyers, there should be legal consequences.

  In any event, none of these three women should now be believed, based on the indisputable evidence that they are lying. Three false witnesses are not better than one, especially if all three are represented and pressured by the same lawyers. Some may say that where there’s smoke, there must be fire. But is some cases, like this one, the smoke may be a sign of arson—of three fires set by the same team of arsonists.

  45 Kris Maher, Bill Consby Is Found Guilty in Second Trial for Sexual Assault, Wall Street Journal, April. 26, 2018.

  46 Stephen Rex Brown, Second Woman Claims Billionaire Perv Jeffrey Epstein ‘Directed’ Her to Have Sex with Alan Dershowitz, New York Daily News, Dec. 18, 2018; Julie K. Brown, New Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Emerges; Defamation Suit Filed, Miami Herald, April 16, 2019.

  47 The actual emails—dozens of them—remain sealed, but the Post reporter told me their content and I’m free to repeat what she told me and I memorialized in a contemporaneous memorandum. See Appendix H. Eventually, Ransome’s mendacious emails will be unsealed, and I will send them to appropriate bar associations and prosecutors to assess the conduct of lawyers who would submit affidavits from so obviously non-credible an accuser.

  48 As Connie Bruck reported in her long New Yorker profile, “For Ransome, as for the other women, these benefits [from Epstein] depended on her having sex with Epstein and with his friends. In her affidavit, she named Dershowitz as one of those friends. Ransome was another imperfect witness. In the fall of 2016, she had suggested to the New York Post that she had sex tapes of half a dozen prominent people, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump – but couldn’t provide the tapes when asked. (Ransome told me that she invented the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behavior, and to make him believe that she had “evidence that would come out if he harmed me.”)” Connie Bruck, Alan Dershowitz, Devil’s Advocate, The New Yorker, July 29, 2019.

  Bruck was misstating the facts when she “reported” that Ransome had merely “suggested” that she had sex tapes of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. She had categorically stated that she had actual possession of such tapes. Bruck also conveniently left out Hillary Clinton from the list of sex tapes that Ransome claimed to have.

  49 https://www.scribd.com/document/406613394/Affidavit-of-Maria-Farmer.

  50 Title 18 U.S.C. §1622.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Mystery Following Epstein’s Suicide: Why Did David Boies Drop the Ball against Leslie Wexner?

  When I was informed that my former client Jeffrey Epstein may have tried to kill himself in jail, I was not surprised. Based on the evidence in the case, it seems apparent that Epstein was a hedonist who cared about his body, his comforts, his pleasures and his well-being. I never saw him drink or use drugs. He ate very little. He worked out. His pleasures obviously focused on sex.

  I was surprised that Epstein flew into Teterboro airport while an investigation of him was ongoing. He could easily have remained in Paris where he owned an apartment. I had never seen his Paris condo, but I’m told it was quite beautiful. Had he stayed in France, the US would have sought to extradite him, but it is uncertain whether they would have succeeded. Recall that Roman Polanski, whom I had briefly represented, lived openly in France despite American efforts to extradite him when he fled California follo
wing his guilty plea for having sex with an underage girl.

  * * *

  Epstein was probably unaware of the investigation and indictment by the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan. He must have been shocked to be arrested. He must have been even more shocked to see the inside of the federal detention center that would be his new home. I have been in that facility to visit clients, and it is hell on earth even for inmates who are not used to living in the palatial homes that Epstein owned.

  When the government opposed his pretrial release, Epstein probably realized that he might never again experience freedom. Prosecutors win the vast majority of their cases and motions, and if convicted he was facing a sentence that would likely keep him imprisoned for the rest of his life. I suspect that he did not see any light at the end of the tunnel, and did not want to spend the next several decades as a federal prisoner. So suicide was an obvious option.

  Though I was not surprised when Epstein attempted suicide, I was shocked when, a few weeks later, he succeeded. It is nearly impossible for a prisoner on suicide watch to kill himself. Such prisoners are denied access to any material they could use to hang themselves—belts, shoelaces, sheets etc. They are continuously monitored by guards and video cameras. But Epstein was not only taken off suicide watch, his cell mate was moved and he was left alone and unmonitored with his bedsheets. It is almost as if they were inviting him to hang himself, which he did.

  The autopsy confirmed suicide, but there are skeptics, including some of his current lawyers, who were preparing to appeal the denial of bail and to defend him vigorously at trial. There will be investigations, but I doubt there will be hard evidence that he may have been killed by others.

  Epstein’s death caused understandable anger among his victims and alleged victims. The judge who was supposed to preside over his criminal case invited his alleged victims—including my false accusers Giuffre and Ransome—to speak in court. Neither mentioned me. On the courthouse steps, Giuffre demanded that Prince Andrew come clean, yet she didn’t dare accuse me because she knew I would sue her if she repeated out of court the perjurious lies she had told in court papers.

  Epstein’s death left many unsolved mysteries which should be investigated. At the center of these mysteries is Leslie Wexner. Wexner’s business relationships with Epstein have received considerable attention, but there has been little coverage of their long term personal relationships and the accusations made by Giuffre that Wexner had sex with her, and perhaps others.51

  A deep mystery surrounds the decision by attorney David Boies not to pursue Wexner, to whom, according to Giuffre, she was sexually trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein on multiple occasions while she was underage.52 Readers may be unaware of these allegations because Boies deep-sixed them after meeting with Wexner’s lawyer. The question is, why? Did Boies not believe his client’s accusations against Wexner? If he did believe them, did Wexner pay hush money to keep the accusations from becoming public? The answer may lie in the following documented, but suppressed, story that I have asked prosecutors to investigate.

  In mid-2014, Giuffre’s original lawyer, a former Assistant Attorney General named Stanley Pottinger, asked Boies to help represent Giuffre. Boies agreed. According to a sworn affidavit filed by Pottinger:

  In the fall of 2014, I asked Mr. Boies if the firm represented, or if he knew, Mr. Leslie Wexner. I told him that in the course of investigating facts related to Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking, Mr. Wexner had been identified as a close business associate and personal friend of Mr. Epstein. I told Mr. Boies that there were assertions that Mr. Wexner had permitted Mr. Epstein to use, and entertain on, Mr. Wexner’s yacht, and that Mr. Wexner was alleged to have had sex with one or more of Mr. Epstein’s girls, including Ms. Giuffre. (emphasis added)

  The Pottinger affidavit disclosed that in December of 2014—precisely the same time I was being publicly accused in court papers by Giuffre of having had sex with her—Boies’s firm asked to meet with Wexner privately. As previously noted, Boies and his partner then met with Wexner’s lawyer and told him, according to the lawyer, that Giuffre was accusing him of sexual misconduct similar to that of which she was falsely accusing me. As I’ve said, both Wexner’s wife and his lawyer used the word “shakedown” when telling me about Boies’s approach to Wexner. They also said the accusations were untrue. We don’t know precisely what transpired at the secret meeting, but we do know, from the records of the case, that following the meeting, Wexner’s name disappeared from court filings, and no public accusation, of the kind made against me, was ever leveled against Wexner by Boies or his client. In the recently unsealed deposition of Giuffre taken in 2016, she accuses many prominent figures of having sex with her, but not Wexner, though she had earlier accused him in secret.

  Wexner’s disappearance from the Epstein cases is surprising, indeed shocking, in light of Wexner’s wealth and long-term personal and business associations with Epstein. Maria Farmer—whose credibility is questionable—has sworn that she was assaulted by Epstein on Wexner’s property, after Wexner hired her to work with him, and that “Wexner’s security staff refused to let [her] leave the property,” where she was “held against [her] will for 12 hours . . .”

  As I have repeatedly said, the accusations against me, which were deliberately made public, are refuted by the evidence. Yet they were deliberately made in publicly filed court documents and then leaked to the press in order to gain maximum publicity. Just as these accusations became headline news, Wexner was approached privately with similar accusations. The timing does not appear to be coincidental.

  It would be commendable, if Boies had indeed met with Wexner’s lawyers in order to “thoroughly investigate” the accusations, as the Pottinger affidavit claims. If Wexner’s lawyers persuaded Boies that his client was lying about having sex with Wexner, that would be a good explanation for why they would not, thereafter, have publicly accused Wexner. But it doesn’t explain why they continued to publicly accuse me after concluding that the very woman who accused me—the same one who accused Wexner—was a liar, who made up a similar false story about another prominent man.

  If, on the other hand, Boies believed that Giuffre was telling the truth about Wexner, why would he possibly have allowed this prominent multi-billionaire to get away with having repeatedly abused his “underage” client? Boies sued Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein on behalf of his clients and received generous settlements from which he received contingency fees. Now Giuffre is suing me, as I will describe in the Chapter 12. Why did he let the mega-wealthiest person most closely connected to Epstein off the hook? Did money change hands?

  There is no third possibility: Either Boies concluded that Giuffre was lying about Wexner, in which case she should not be believed about me; or he concluded that she was telling the truth about Wexner, in which case, Boies has to explain why he covered up this billionaire’s serious crimes against his client.

  It is, of course, logically possible that Giuffre was lying about Wexner (as well as the Gores, Clinton, her age and other issues) but telling the truth about me. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes wisely observed, “The Life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.”53 And experience teaches that a witness who has falsely accused others and lied about relevant matters should not be believed. Giuffre’s own lawyer, David Boies, acknowledged this when he told me that she was “wrong” about meeting me on the island, ranch and other locations so she could not be believed about meeting me in New York.

  Not only did Leslie Wexner’s name completely disappear from the case after his lawyer met with Boies and McCawley, but Giuffre’s lawyers went out of their way to pronounce him innocent of any wrongdoing. Here is how Bradly Edwards, Giuffre’s Florida lawyer, put it when asked on July 16, 2019 whether Wexner was involved with any of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual misconduct:

  “I believe based on the information that we have accumulated over 11 years that the statements that he gave yesterday in the press that he did not know about t
he sexual proclivities of Mr. Epstein are very likely to be true. We have not seen where he is in the company of Jeffrey Epstein at the time he when was engaging in these things. In fact, it is very seldom that any of the victims ever met him or saw him, I know there are a lot of business ties to him but other than receiving any information about their business connection, I don’t have any information to believe otherwise.”

  This interview is highly significant, because Edwards was speaking as Giuffre’s lawyer and agent. In doing so, he was admitting—much like Boies has previously admitted—that his own client was a liar and a perjurer. Recall that Giuffre had testified under oath that she had sex with Wexner on numerous occasions, under circumstances nearly identical to the false claims she made about having had sex with me. She has also accused Wexner of making her wear Victoria’s Secret-type lingerie while he had sex with her. Giuffre also told another of her lawyers, Pottinger, that Wexner had sex with her and may have had sex with other women associated with Epstein. But that was all before Boies and McCawley met with Wexner’s lawyers. If, in fact, Wexner paid hush money to buy Giuffre’s silence, then it would be understandable why Edwards was prepared to deny that she had sex with Wexner. But this has the effect of throwing his client under the bus by, in effect, calling her a perjurer for swearing that she did have sex with Wexner.

  If Edwards made this dramatic and damming admission because he knows that Giuffre lied about Wexner, then he surely should not have believed her nearly identical false claims about me. This is a deep conundrum for the Giuffre team, and one that may well suggest serious criminal conduct.

  And there is more. In a previous interview Edwards said that based on his own 11 years of investigating Epstein related charges he doesn’t “know of any high profile people who would be implicated” in sexual misconduct. So, again, he is calling his client a perjurer because she testified that among the people she was forced by Epstein to have sex with there were many extremely “high profile people” such as George Mitchell, Bill Richardson, Ehud Barak and others.