Dershowitz Accuser Retracts: ‘I May Have Made a Mistake’

Alan Dershowitz has won a years-long battle to clear his name, after a woman who claimed that she was coerced into having sex with him by the late billionaire Jeffrey Epstein retracted her accusation, telling a court and the media she may have been mistaken.

Breitbart News has covered the story for years, noting that Dershowitz was one of the few men accused of sexual misconduct during the “#metoo” era who defended himself vigorously, both in court and in the media, claiming Giuffre and her lawyers were wrong.

Dershowitz wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2015 in which he recounted the “nightmare” of false accusation, which he said left targets of such claims unable to defend themselves. “I now stand accused of crimes I did not commit, by an unnamed woman who I don’t know and never met. … I may never have the opportunity to prove my innocence, or to have my accusers prove the false charges, in any court of law. … Imagine the same thing happening to a person who did not have the resources to fight back.”

He also wrote a book about his experience: Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo. And finally, the New York Times reported Tuesday, Giuffre agreed to withdraw her accusations.

The New York Times reported Tuesday:

In a joint statement announcing the settlement, Ms. Giuffre said, “I have long believed that I was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Alan Dershowitz. However, I was very young at the time, it was a very stressful and traumatic environment, and Mr. Dershowitz has from the beginning consistently denied these allegations.

“I now recognize I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz,” her statement said.

…

“She has suffered much at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, and I commend her work combating the evil of sex trafficking,” Mr. Dershowitz said of Ms. Giuffre in his own statement.

The statement, and a filing in federal court in Manhattan, ends litigation between Dershowitz and Giuffre’s attorneys as well.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.