Alan Dershowitz Is Absolutely, Positively Not An Intellectual Who 'Had Lost His Mind'

And if you so much as think it, he'll sue you for $300 million. So there!

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Alan Dershowitz is suing CNN for $300 million because the network defamatorily failed to quote a full paragraph of his arglebargling about Donald Trump’s impeachment, giving viewers the entirely false impression that the famed lawyer has lost his damn mind.

Yes, for real.

Were you under the impression that Dersh might have ruined his own reputation by going on Laura Ingraham’s show to shout about his “perfect, perfect sex life” in a bizarre attempt to slag his arch-nemesis David Boies, after accusing Boies-Schiller of being “a RICO?”

Or maybe your esteem started flagging at the quixotic attempt to quiet doubters by proving that he never not ever had sex with underage girls when he was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, an effort Dersh has bolstered by protracted litigation and public efforts to Zapruder the flight logs to show that he only went to Epstein’s sex island in the company of his wife. Most people might deny it and then shut the hell up, but not Professor Dershowitz!

Perhaps if the retired Harvard professor hadn’t sued Epstein’s alleged victim while simultaneously thrusting himself into the middle of the impeachment hearings, reporters wouldn’t have bothered to dig up his insistence on playing pornography in the common areas at Harvard — for the First Amendment, obviously! — and his 1970s musings on lowering the age of consent.

Might Americans have decided the famed constitutional scholar had lost a step when he took to the airways to assure Americans that he only got one massage at Jeffrey Epstein’s house, from an “old Russian woman,” and he kept his underwear on the whole time? Or when he threatened to sue CBS because a fictional character made a joke about it?

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No! Obviously the damage occurred in January of 2020 when CNN failed to quote the entirety of Alan Dershowitz’s speech on the House floor saying that it was fine for the president to wield the apparatus of the American government to aid his own electoral prospects.

See, Dersh said:

The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were somehow illegal. Now we talk about motive. There are three possible motives that a political figure could have. One, a motive in the public interest and the Israel argument would be in the public interest. The second is in his own political interest and the third, which hasn’t been mentioned, would be his own financial interest, his own pure financial interest, just putting money in the bank. I want to focus on the second one for just one moment. Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and, mostly you are right, your election is in the public interest, and if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.

And while he admits that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer played the whole clip, other CNN commentators just talked about the last couple of sentences, leaving viewers with the possibly mistaken impression that Professor Dershowitz was endorsing a theory that presidents could commit crimes with impunity if they believed the result to be “in the public interest.” (Leave aside that the Government Accountability Office found that withholding congressionally allocated funds from Ukraine was, in fact, illegal.)

The very notion of that was preposterous and foolish on its face, and that was the point: to falsely paint Professor Dershowitz as a constitutional scholar and intellectual who had lost his mind. With that branding, Professor Dershowitz’s sound and meritorious arguments would then be drowned under a sea of repeated lies.

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And they did it, on purpose, to punish him for supporting president Trump.

However, Professor Dershowitz appears to have made one mistake. He chose to defend the President of the United States and defend the U.S. Constitution at a moment in time where CNN has decided that doing so is not permitted. For this, CNN set out to punish him and destroy his credibility and reputation, and unfortunately, succeeded.

Darn you, CNN, making the heretofore well-respected lion of American intellectualism look like a crazy person!

Characterizing the refusal to air the whole quote as part of a “deliberate scheme to defraud its own audience… at the expense of another’s reputation,” the First Amendment warrior accuses the network of “intentionally misleading its viewers and hiding the truth from their eyes and ears.” Touting himself as “one of the most revered and celebrated legal minds of the past century” (and so modest!), Dershowitz points to a news cycle where people quit mocking Dershowitz for yammering about his panties for a couple hours and instead mocked him for his defense of the president’s conduct. And for his pains, this great legal mind demands $50 million in compensatory damages, and $250 million in punitive damages.

Hey, quit laughing! It’s not an ignominious end to a glorious legal career. Dersh is on top of his game, ready to take on the world, primed to hit the nude beaches for an impromptu lecture on presidential prerogatives. Look out, Martha’s Vineyard, here he comes!

Alan Dershowitz Files $300 Million Lawsuit Against CNN for Portraying Him as an ‘Intellectual Who Had Lost His Mind’ [Law & Crime]


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.