Alan Dershowitz, in Guilt by Accusation, writes, referring to accusations concerning his alleged sexual misconduct,
“Evidence was no longer important. It was the accusation that mattered, as well as the identities of the accuser and accused. The presumption shifted from innocence to guilt. For a man to call a false accuser a liar became a political sin, even if the accused had hard evidence of the accuser’s lies, as I did.”
The main purpose of his short book is to dent the credibility of Virginia Roberts Giuffre who, as well as being a leading witness against Dershowitz’s friend and former client Jeffrey Epstein, has claimed that the latter trafficked her for sex with Mr Dershowitz.
Now that Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested and charged we can only hope that the courts get to the bottom of the matter and find out what actually did or did not happen.
However, Mr Dershowitz, as well as writing his case-for-the-defence in relation to Virginia Giuffre, has also expended effort to discredit another person who has made accusations damaging to him. That person is Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein and whose allegations against him and others are recounted in the Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.
Although Farmer does not claim to have been abused by Dershowitz, she does state in an affidavit that she saw Dershowitz on a number of occasions at Epstein’s New York mansion where she worked, “going upstairs at the same time there were young girls under the age of 18 who were present upstairs in the house.” Dershowitz vigorously denies that this was even possible, saying that he only met Epstein “well after she [Farmer] stopped working for him”. According to Dershowitz, Farmer stopped working for Epstein in the “early summer of 1996” with Dershowitz only meeting Epstein for the first time, via Lynn Forester (Lady d’Rothschild), in the summer of 1996. However, Farmer claims in an interview with the journalist Whitney Webb that Dershowitz met Epstein years before he claims, via Bert Fields, the husband of Barbara Guggenheim.
Curiously Dershowitz, in his recent article aiming to discredit Farmer, does not mention the one time he is referred to by name in Webb’s lengthy phone interview. Instead, he sets out to depict Farmer as someone who may have“been motivated by the anti-Semitic attitudes she has long harboured, to falsely accuse prominent Jews of sexual misconduct.”
It is this suggestion and others made in the article that I want to examine here. Note that Farmer’s claims about Dershowitz are in fact relatively mild and hardly the high-coloured stuff we might expect of an anti-Semitic liar; indeed, Dershowitz’s reference to “prominent Jews” in the plural may suggest that he is attempting to undermine Farmer’s claims about Epstein, Maxwell and perhaps others, rather than just himself.
The claims that Dershowitz makes about Farmer’s alleged anti-Semitism are a large part of the ‘evidence’ he brings forward to undermine the testimonial authority that Farmer claims to have as an alleged victim of Epstein. If Farmer can be shown to be a raving anti-Semite with a vicious attitude towards Jewish people, then her testimony becomes more questionable both in the eyes of the public and in the eyes of judges.
Dershowitz, referring to Farmer’s interview with Webb (which is available on Youtube in two parts here and here makes the following claims in his NewsMax article entitled Key Witness in Epstein Case Made Anti-Semitic Claims
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