How Alan Dershowitz bullied rape victims to protect a serial child molester
Source: electronicintifada.net
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz always felt children were fair game for Israeli missiles. Now the question is whether he thinks they are fair game for the sexual exploits of his powerful associates and himself.Dershowitz and the UK’s Prince Andrew were accused in a recent court filing of raping a teenage girl who was forced into sexual slavery by Dershowitz’s close friend and client, billionaire hedge fund financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The court filing is part of an ongoing civil lawsuit by four of Epstein’s victims accusing the federal government of violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA) when it made a secret 2008 plea deal with Epstein without informing them.
Dershowitz played a key role in negotiating a secret provision in Epstein’s plea deal that immunized “any potential co-conspirators” from federal prosecution. In other words, Dershowitz negotiated an agreement that (if the allegations against him are true) shields him from prosecution for participating in a child sex-trafficking ring.
Since there has been no trial to determine whether Dershowitz and Prince Andrew are liable for the allegations against them, which they categorically deny, they should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise.
That said, while the mainstream press revives its interest in Epstein and reproduces strongly worded denials from Dershowitz and representatives of Prince Andrew, it has overlooked the role of Epstein’s social network in building up his influence and shielding him from accountability. Media coverage of Epstein has been particularly derelict in failing to note the pivotal role of Alan Dershowitz, Israel’s most aggressive defender, in securing near impunity for a sexual predator and his accomplices by bullying, harassing, intimidating and smearing child victims of rape.
Unprecedented Impunity
At first glance, Epstein’s story reads like a typical case of two-tiered justice in America, where the wealthy and powerful are rarely held accountable for their crimes. In many ways it was.
A deeper examination of the case suggests a cadre of sleazy operatives led by Alan Dershowitz deployed gangster-style intimidation tactics that averted a deeper probe that might have implicated enormously powerful individuals, including Dershowitz.
The federal government had mountains of evidence to put Epstein behind bars for decades for child sex-trafficking and serial molestation.
Epstein procured and molested no fewer than forty underage girls, some from other continents and as young as twelve, in a trafficking ring that involved some of the most powerful people in America and around the world, including “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders,” according to the court filing.
While none of the power players are named, Epstein’s private plane pilot, Larry Visoski, identified former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former Colombian President Andrés Pastrana Arango and former US President Bill Clinton as regular passengers who likely witnessed Epstein with underage girls on his private planes.
In the end Epstein landed an unprecedented sweetheart deal that saw him plead guilty to solicitation of prostitution from minors while receiving blanket immunity for him and his co-conspirators from other federal charges. When all was said and done, Epstein served just thirteen of his eighteen-month prison sentence in the private wing of a Palm Beach Jail, where he was given a pass that allowed him to leave the prison grounds for up to sixteen hours per day for work.
Bullying rape victims
With the police investigation heating up in 2006, Epstein’s team went on the offensive, bullying and harassing witnesses, victims and their families into silence.
Going far beyond the typical role of a lawyer, Dershowitz mobilized a pre-emptive smear campaign against the victims, mining their pages on the social network MySpace for comments relating to marijuana and alcohol use, which he printed out and compiled into dossiers for the police and state attorney’s office in a salacious attempt to tarnish the credibility of Epstein’s accusers.
Dershowitz hired private investigators to track and dig up dirt on at least one of the underage girls who accused Epstein of raping her. The girl, a high school student, reported that one of the private investigators had impersonated a police officer while asking her questions. In a letter from Dershowitz to the Palm Beach police chief, obtained by The Guardian, Dershowitz attached a copy of the girl’s MySpace page, noting “her apparent fascination with marijuana,” and expressed fears “that she, an accomplished drama student, might try to mislead [the private investigators] as successfully as she had misled others.”
While Dershowitz schemed against Epstein’s victims, witnesses and the victims’ families complained of being followed, photographed, harassed, threatened and offered money in exchange for their refusal to cooperate with the police investigation.
Former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, who grew increasingly frustrated with the escalating campaign of intimidation by Epstein’s lawyers, went on to testify that he was told by private investigators that Dershowitz ordered background checks on him and Detective Joe Recarey. Reiter added that he later discovered he and Recarey had been placed under surveillance but he was unable to determine who was behind it.
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