Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz defended Ghislaine Maxwell’s right to the presumption of innocence following her arrest for alleged crimes committed in connection with the late Jeffrey Epstein.
Dershowitz, 81, who worked on Epstein’s legal team that helped arrange his 2008 plea deal, published an opinion column about Maxwell in the Spectator USA on Friday.
The celebrity attorney said he and his wife were introduced to Maxwell by Sir Evelyn and Lady Lynn de Rothschild, and they subsequently got together on numerous occasions. He noted that they “never saw her do anything inappropriate,” adding, “We knew her only as Jeffrey Epstein’s thirty-something girlfriend.”
Dershowitz, who was accused of raping one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said that her allegations, which he has repeatedly denied, should serve as a warning for those who have already assumed Maxwell’s guilt.
He also took shots at the new Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which he claims didn’t make good on a promise to show potentially exonerating “documentation” regarding the allegations levied against him.
“Like every other arrested person, she must be presumed innocent. Many in the public however, will presume her guilty because of the portrayal of her in the Netflix series about Jeffrey Epstein,” he wrote, before attacking Giuffre and another alleged Epstein victim, Sarah Ransome, who claims she had sexual relations with Dershowitz.
“Netflix failed to disclose that in the run-up to the 2016 election Ransome wrote dozens of emails to the New York Post claiming to have sex tapes of the two ‘pedophiles’ who were running for president, namely Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as sex tapes of Richard Branson and others. She also claimed that Hillary Clinton ordered the CIA to kill her and to destroy her tapes. The Post of course did not run that story. She subsequently admitted she had ‘invented’ that story; there were no sex tapes,” Dershowitz said.
The Washington Examiner could not independently verify the claims Dershowitz made about Ransome.
Maxwell, a 58-year-old British socialite, was arrested by the FBI in New Hampshire on Thursday on charges of conspiracy to entice minors, enticement of a minor, conspiracy to transport minors, transportation of a minor, and perjury.
She is accused of not only facilitating Epstein’s alleged sexual assault and trafficking but also of grooming underage girls for him and partaking in the sexual acts.
Up until her arrest, Maxwell’s whereabouts following Epstein’s death had been largely a mystery.
Epstein, a registered sex offender and wealthy financier, was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges for allegedly abusing girls as young as 14. The 66-year-old was found dead in his Manhattan prison cell in August, which the New York City medical examiner determined to be a suicide, raising questions due to his connections with important world figures.
