Dersh Deposed: Alan Dershowitz Accuses Former Federal Judge Of Billion-Dollar Extortion Scheme
Columnist Tamara Tabo reports on the latest developments in the ongoing legal battle between two legal luminaries, Alan Dershowitz and Paul Cassell.
Last week, Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz spoke under oath about his simmering legal battle with Utah law professor and former federal judge Paul Cassell and Florida attorney Brad Edwards. Jack Scarola, counsel for both Cassell and Edwards, deposed Dershowitz on Thursday and Friday in Broward County, Florida, where the embroiled lawyers are duking it out in a defamation suit and counter-suit.
Dershowitz reportedly told Scarola, “There was a criminal extortion plot . . . and your clients were involved.”
The Backstory
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Some context is in order.
The immediate defamation dispute arises from a suit filed under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act by Cassell and Edwards, on behalf of women challenging the government’s handling of the prosecution of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was accused of sexually abusing dozens of underaged girls. Thanks to a plea deal brokered by an all-star defense team that included Dershowitz, Epstein pleaded guilty to only a handful of relatively minor state charges. He served 13 months of an 18-month sentence.
At the beginning of this year, Cassell and Edwards sought to join a woman named Virginia Roberts in the ongoing CVRA case. (Her joinder motion was later denied.) In her motion and subsequent affidavit, Roberts claims not only to have been Epstein’s “sex slave” while she was still a minor, but also to have been shopped out for sexual service to some of Epstein’s friends. She specifically named Alan Dershowitz.
Professor Dershowitz was not amused.
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Dershowitz vigorously denied Roberts’s accusations, telling the Today Show that Cassell and Edwards “deliberately and willfully filed this pleading which they knew I had no opportunity to respond to in court, without doing any investigation.” Dershowitz vowed that he would ultimately be vindicated, and he threatened to seek the disbarment of Cassell and Edwards.
Cassell and Edwards, apparently also not amused, filed suit against Dershowitz for defamation.
Dersh, ne’er the shrinking violet, countersued.
Pretrial discovery in the defamation case proceeded apace, though both sides (predictably) complained that their opponent was stalling or failing to produce evidence.
The parties have traded settlement offers, though the proposals were probably no more than procedural kabuki. Under Florida law, similar to Rule 68 in federal court, parties use settlement offers, even ones they know the other side will reject, to preserve their ability to later collect costs and attorney’s fees.
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Dershowitz kept things interesting by implicating yet another legal luminary, David Boies and his firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner, and subpoenaing some of the firm’s correspondence. On November 2, the court will hold a hearing on whether to allow subpoenas of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Jane Doe #3 (aka Virginia Roberts).
Jack Scarola and his clients Cassell and Edwards, not to be outdone, apparently decided to test the limits of transient jurisdiction: When Jeffrey Epstein appeared in person for proceedings in another suit between Epstein and Edwards, they had Epstein served with a subpoena to be deposed in the Dershowitz defamation suit. Burnham v. Superior Court, anyone? A hearing on Epstein’s motion to quash is scheduled for October 22.
Now, About That Criminal Extortion Plot . . . .
Reporter Noreen Marcus attended the deposition proceedings last week. You can read her coverage for the Daily Business Review. According to Marcus, Dershowitz alleged under oath that he was the victim of a billion-dollar extortion scheme perpetrated by Virginia Roberts, Paul Cassell, and Brad Edwards.
He claims that Roberts, aided by her lawyers, falsely accused Dershowitz in order to make an example of him. Dershowitz alleges that they intended to use his example to induce Les Wexner, billionaire business mogul and Epstein associate, to pay out a $1 billion settlement rather than defend himself against similar accusations of sexual impropriety.
According to Marcus’s report of the deposition, Dershowitz says that he was tipped off about the ploy eight months ago by a Florida couple Dershowitz only would identify by first names.
“Rebecca” and “Michael” spontaneously reached out Dershowitz, he says. They supposedly told Dershowitz that Cassell and Edwards pressured Virginia Roberts to mention Alan Dershowitz by name in her statements to the court.
Why hasn’t Dershowitz brought up these informants before? He says that he meant to protect them from media scrutiny.
The Way-Back Backstory
Tales of shadowy informants and greedy schemes may sound somewhat far-fetched. But in this case, no narrative should shock.
Acrimony and allegations among the various players here predate the current defamation suit by many years. In fact, Dershowitz’s name has appeared in court documents related to the Epstein story for many years before Virginia Roberts’s joinder motion earlier this year.
Brad Edwards has represented alleged victims of Jeffrey Epstein in numerous civil suits, dating back to the early days of Epstein’s child sex abuse scandal. Even the CVRA suit with Cassell has been around for more than six years.
Jeffrey Epstein and Brad Edwards have also been suing and counter-suing each other individually for years. In 2009, Epstein accused Edwards of improperly pursuing evidence in the victims’ civil cases, like flight manifests from Epstein’s private jet. Epstein claimed that the information was irrelevant to the cases themselves, but that Edwards was actually after the names of Epstein’s celebrity pals. Epstein named Alan Dershowitz as one of those pals.
Epstein even claimed that Edwards might have been collecting evidence of celebrities’ involvement with Epstein as part of the Ponzi scheme run by Florida attorney Scott Rothstein. Rothstein himself and the U.S. Attorney’s Office cleared Edwards’s name, the court dismissed two of Epstein’s suits against Edwards, and Epstein eventually dropped his third suit.
Throughout the litigation, Edwards maintained that he, indeed, gave notice that he intended to depose Dershowitz, with a legitimate basis for doing so. Whether rightly or wrongly, Edwards cited the testimony of Virginia Roberts (in this 2011 document and earlier known as “Jane Doe No. 102,” known in the CVRA suit as “Jane Doe #3”) in connection with Dershowitz.
No Angels, No Monsters, Only Men
None of this history means that Alan Dershowitz committed or witnessed any crimes, of course. And none of it means that Brad Edwards, Paul Cassell, or Virginia Roberts did not.
But this history does mean that this latest back-and-forth has been brewing for a very long time and it’s not likely to stop any time soon.
Noreen Marcus reported that Dershowitz may have backed down during the last part of his deposition on Friday. Jack Scarola said in an email that things went “very poorly” for Dershowitz and “extremely well” for his client Paul Cassell, whose own deposition began on Friday afternoon.
Dershowitz didn’t respond to my requests for comment, but he told the Boston Globe back in January, “In the end, someone will be disbarred. Either it will be me or the two lawyers. In the end, someone’s reputation is going to be destroyed: either mine or theirs.”
Cassell, Edwards, and Dershowitz all appear to be in good standing with their bar associations. So, this must not yet be the end.
Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She currently heads the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.
