Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz says he can disprove claims that he had sex with two women who are accusing him of misconduct, but said his opponents are bent on destroying his reputation.
“‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ became the mantra. A better metaphor is that a gang of arsonists are torching my reputation,” he wrote in an op-ed published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal.
Dershowitz went as far as calling for the FBI to investigate the claims of his two accusers.
“It’s no fun to be investigated for a felony by the FBI, but the current state of the law and public opinion gives me no alternative if I want to be vindicated,” he added.
Virginia Roberts claimed four years ago that accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a New York hedge fund manager, forced her to have sex with his lawyer, Dershowitz, when she was 16. Roberts is now in her mid-30s.
Dershowitz insists he has never met the woman and said he produced travel and phone records that showed he was not in any of the four places Roberts claimed the sexual encounters happened. He said there are emails and a book manuscript under court seal in which the woman admits they never had sex, as well as a recording of the woman telling a friend her lawyers pressured her to make the accusation to get a big payday.
Dershowitz said his second accuser, who has not been named, was “was even less credible than the first.” The woman, also in her 30s, claimed he had sex with her when she was a 22-year-old trafficking victim.
“It is hard to imagine #MeToo accusations with more-compelling evidence of innocence than mine,” Dershowitz wrote. “If my evidence is ‘inconclusive,’ then no falsely accused person can ever clear his name.”
[Also read: Alan Dershowitz: Devin Nunes has ‘no case at all’ in Twitter lawsuit]
